Is there a “Trump Bump” in Latin American politics?

And will it continue?

Today’s World Politics Review column (gift link) comments on the “Trump Corollary” and his policies toward the Western Hemisphere.

As I consider the trends to watch in 2026, one question is how the Trump administration will involve itself in elections across Latin America and what impact its involvement will have on the region’s politics.

The examples from 2025 are notable:

• US President Donald Trump appeared with Daniel Noboa two weeks before the second round of Ecuador’s election. Noboa was reelected by a double digit margin of victory.

• Trump provided a $20 billion bailout to Argentina contingent on Milei doing well in the midterms in October. Milei’s LLA party overperformed in those elections.

• The week before Honduras’s election in late November, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura. The National Party candidate then did well and has a slim lead in the vote count as of the writing of this column.

• An Atlas poll suggested that many citizens in Latin America are far more supportive of a US-led regime change in Venezuela than US voters are.

• Several recently elected/reelected Caribbean leaders have embraced Trump’s naval deployment to the region.

• Last week, the LA Times published an article suggesting that a significant portion of Mexico’s population would support US military strikes against the cartels in that country.

Two contrary datapoints might be seen in Mexico and Brazil, where both leftwing presidents appeared to get approval ratings boosts when they were attacked by Trump and managed those disputes with some level of finesse. And yet, the responses from Sheinbaum and Lula to manage Trump and de-escalate rather than publicly oppose him could also indicate an acknowledgement that publicly confronting the US president is detrimental to domestic politics.

The conventional wisdom in Latin America is that anti-imperialist rhetoric and policies generally do well among voters. The typical Latin American politics analyst who leans against Trump’s policies wants to find the blowback to those policies in the hemisphere.

The points above suggest the opposite. Country by country, issue by issue, Trump has ended up on the winning side of many of the Latin American domestic political fights over the past year. And where Trump has lost policy battles (coffee tariffs!!!), those failures have come due to his mismanaging the US domestic political side of the equation, where his approval rating is well underwater, not because of anger from Latin American voters or elites.

Trump’s political victories have come despite being relatively unpopular in most polls in Latin America. When asked about their views on Trump, respondents in most Latin American countries disapprove of him and of his performance as US president, sometimes at very high levels.

So why did Trump keep ending up on the winning side of Latin American political disputes in 2025? Here are five potential explanations and an updated map: