López Obrador’s cordial relationship with Trump, meanwhile, was often seen as unusual for a left-leaning politician, but it had a workmanlike basis.
 
In part, that is political realism: In 2019, Trump threatened to apply crippling tariffs on Mexican products unless López Obrador cracked down on Central American migrants crossing Mexico to reach the U.S. border. Mexico complied, rounding up migrants and busing them back to their home countries.
 
But there were also moments of seeming real friendship between the two. On Saturday, López Obrador was one of the few world leaders still willing to heap praise on Trump.
 
“President Trump has been very respectful of us, and we have reached very good agreements, and we thank him because he has not interfered and has respected us,” López Obrador said.
 
And López Obrador angered many at home and in the U.S. Democratic Party when he made his first — and so far only — trip abroad as president over the summer to meet with Trump to celebrate the enactment of the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, which both leaders viewed as fixing problems with the old North American Free Trade Agreement of the 1990s.
 
López Obrador didn’t meet with Biden or his campaign team during that trip, and the wounds are still apparently there, even though the Mexican president said he knows Biden and had “very good relations” with him.
 
Rep. Joaquin Castro, the Democratic congressman for Texas’ 20th District, wrote in Spanish in his Twitter account that the unwillingness to congratulate Biden “represents a true diplomatic failure on the part of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, at a moment in which the incoming Biden administration is seeking to start a new era of friendship and cooperation with Mexico.”
 
Mexico was able to easily crack down on migrant caravans in 2019 and 2020 because appeasing open U.S. pressure is fairly understandable if distasteful at home; but asking Mexico to do so without open threats would be more politically costly for López Obrador.
 
The Mexican president might fear reprisals in the short time Trump has left in office, but his failure to patch up any hurt feelings with the Biden team is already exposing López Obrador to criticism at home.
 
“To quote (Mexican singer) Juan Gabriel, ‘What do you gain?’” the newspaper El Universal said in an editorial Sunday. “Donald Trump will be president for two more months, but Joe Biden will be president for four more years! And we have already started off this relationship on the wrong foot.”

‘We will not allow anyone to stop us’: Day and night, under historic scrutiny, the nation’s vote counters carried on

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, officials posted signs in English and Spanish with QR codes of their live stream to make it easy for protesters to watch the count in real time on their mobile phones.

The intensity of the hostility over the past week was nonetheless startling.

One of the more vivid examples came in video footage from the TCF Center in downtown Detroit, where a surge of angry Trump supporters hoping to serve as election observers tried to pile into the facility.

Egged on by Trump’s false claims of fraud on Twitter as Democratic nominee Joe Biden overtook him in state totals, the crowd materialized after a Facebook post from Stand Up Michigan, a conservative group opposed to coronavirus restrictions, urged supporters to show up at the counting facility “to help with challenging results.”

Participants yelled, sang and banged on windows demanding they be let into the room. But with more than 200 challengers from each party already in the room, officials imposed a one-in, one-out policy amid concerns about the upswing in coronavirus cases across Michigan.

When a building manager attempted to explain the limit, the crowd shouted him down with chants of “Let us in!” and “Stop the vote!” Several dozen police officers were brought in and stationed throughout the building, guarding the windowed entrance to the counting room.

It was no calmer for election workers inside the room. Julie Moroney, a third-year law student at the University of Michigan and a nonpartisan poll challenger on hand on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said she saw a man urging a Republican poll watcher to “challenge every vote.” When a Democratic poll watcher stepped in to tell the Republican, “You don’t have to do that, sir. If you don’t believe in that, stand up,” the first man replied, “If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, we can substitute you out with someone else,” according to Moroney.

Moroney said she saw Republican observers break the rules regularly, including speaking directly to poll workers when they were supposed to take challenges to supervisors. At one point, the Republican at her table started saying, over and over, “I challenge this ballot, I challenge this ballot, I challenge this ballot” — clearly trying, she said, to obstruct the count. Others demanded to know workers’ partisan affiliation, falsely asserting that it would be a crime if they were all Democrats.

GOP officials in Michigan did not respond to requests for comment. The state GOP falsely asserted in a news release Wednesday that Detroit election officials had “shut out” Republican poll watchers.