The Bukele Playbook Trump Is FollowingThe career of the Salvadoran populist dictator helps explain why Trump adores him.
In some ways, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally-dressed foreign leaders. The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept his country free from total Russian domination. The second was with Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America. So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it? They humiliated Zelensky while lavishing Bukele with encomiums for his collaboration in providing an extra-territorial, extra-judicial, concentration camp for whomever in America Trump wants to grab off the street, bundle into an airplane, and get Stephen Miller to call a terrorist. What’s not to like? But the intense bromance between Trump and this populist dictator is rooted in more than the convenience of cheap gulags. The more you examine Bukele’s rise, tactics, and politics, the more you see that it offers not just an insight into what Trump has already done, but is a playbook for what Trump wants to do in the future. The life parallels between the two men are uncanny. Nayib Bukele is the son of a mega-rich businessman who dropped out of law school to work for his daddy’s PR firm, mastered social media, leveraged popular discontent with a corrupt establishment, and created a cult of personality to become what is now effectively an elected dictator-for-life. As early as his first post — mayor of a small town — he branded himself as brilliantly as Trump has with MAGA and red ballcaps by replacing the old coat of arms with a “large white N” — for Nayib — “enclosed in a circle with a dazzling and eccentric cyan blue background.” He came up through a political party, FLMN, and then forced its leaders to expel him so he could transcend it. He used Twitter like MAGA. When an opposition hashtag, #BukeleDictador (“Bukele dictator”) gained ground online, he got an army of trolls to generate a rival hashtag #QueBonitaDictadura (“What a beautiful dictatorship”). You could see the same vibe yesterday, when Bukele openly mocked a US Senator and a mistakenly renditioned illegal immigrant: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” That’s the kind of lulz sadism MAGA lives for. As president, Bukele bars journalists he dislikes from press conferences and directly communicates via social media. He has a domination complex: according to one of his former aides, Bukele “is explosive. He doesn’t listen, nor is he tolerant. If he meets with you, he’s not asking for your opinion. He just wants you to do what he says.” He even staged his own January 6, a year before Trump’s. When the legislature in February 2020 balked at a further request for money to fight crime, Bukele assembled a mob of supporters outside the parliament building, rallied cops and military officers, and denounced legislators for any delay: “Let’s see if the Assembly is on the side of the people, or if they just talk nonsense on TV.” Then he did what Trump didn’t have the nerve for. The mob yelling outside, Bukele led the armed soldiers into the legislature, sat in the equivalent of the Speaker’s chair, and proclaimed: “I think it’s very clear who is in control of the situation.” A year later, a tamed legislature removed the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and the attorney general, so that Bukele could find a way to get a second consecutive term — explicitly barred by the constitution. The Steve Bannon Project avant la lettre. What about Bukele’s vaunted reduction of crime — which Trump never fails to mention? The problem with this narrative is that gang-driven murders were collapsing long before Bukele took office in 2019. The peak year was 2015 — when there were 103 homicides for every 100,000 Salvadorans. The year before he came to power, 2018, the number had already plunged to 51. The Salvadoran authorities had done a quiet deal with MS-13, and in exchange for less police enforcement, the gang agreed to temper the bloodshed. Nonetheless, Bukele subsequently reduced the rate of 17.6 in 2021 to 1.9 in 2024 — an impressive drop. How did he do that? Well, there was a sudden mini-spike in murders in March 2022, as a gang truce seemed to have briefly broken down, and Bukele seized the chance to declare a “state of exception.” That allowed police to arrest anyone they merely deemed suspicious, deny them redress, bar them from legal counsel, and throw them in a gulag — precisely what Trump wants with illegal immigrants. The state of exception was initially for 30 days. It has now been extended, as they all are, 37 times. There is nothing an authoritarian likes more than states of exception:
(That Trump pillar of “emergencies” is after a mere three months! Just a taste.) More than 83,000 Salvadorans, including 3,000 children, were thrown into jails without due process. And these are not jails as such. They are cruel and unusual forms of punishment, with hundreds of deaths from “malnutrition, blunt force trauma, strangulation and lack of lifesaving medical treatment.” Torture is routine. No daylight is allowed. Bodies are buried in mass graves with no notice to families. In the Oval Office, Trump excitedly told Bukele he wants him to expand his concentration camps so he can send some “homegrowns” — i.e. American citizens — to them. This is how Trump described US citizens as compared with illegal immigrants:
This is the jail that the HHS secretary, Kristi Noem, posed jubilantly in front of wearing a tight outfit with a gold Rolex. A conservative Catholic GOP congressman just did the same with two thumbs up — in Holy Week. It’s a vibe the White House has openly celebrated on X. They are merely following Bukele’s example, of course, when he tweeted pictures of the prisoners stripped to their undies, calling them “little angels,” or when he noted some were obviously bloodied from beatings: “He must have been eating fries with ketchup.” This is now one of America’s closest allies. Even the authoritarian sophistry is identical. Here is Bukele on Tucker Carlson’s show mocking due process: “What about the human right of a woman not to be raped?” Here is Tom Homan: “Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?” This week, the GOP has decided to go all-in demonizing Abrego Garcia, while accusing defenders of habeas corpus of being “traitorous” backers of terrorists. Here’s a statement from Trump’s “Counter-terrorism” tsar, Sebastian Gorka:
Go to any dictatorship and you will find identical rhetoric. For his part, Yale law grad Vance has argued that providing due process for illegal immigrants means, in his words, “the ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.” Due process is governed by “the public interest” and “a function of our resources.” So habeas corpus only applies if it doesn’t contradict an election promise, and if we can afford it (of course we can afford it, if it’s a priority). Sure, you could legally expand the numbers of immigration judges and courts, you could legally expedite removals, and you could pass a mandatory e-Verify law to ensure that no illegals could find work. But why bother with the hard work of democracy and legislation when you can just seize extra-constitutional powers? The Bukele method. And Bukele’s amazing record on homicides is only impressive if you ignore the fact that of course police states can reduce crime dramatically, if you don’t care about distinguishing the innocent from the guilty. There is not much crime in North Korea last time I checked (another dictatorship Trump adores). Currently, El Salvador has an incarceration rate of 1,659 per 100,000 of the total population — #1 in the entire world. Second is Cuba, with less than half that: 794 per 100,000. That’s the kind of country Trump loves. European democracies? Nothing but sneering contempt. My view is that this week was a turning point. We have seen the true nature of this presidency and its enablers. As they welcomed Bukele into a tarted-up Oval Office, they also scoffed alongside him at the Supreme Court’s order that Trump facilitate the return of a man sent to a torture gulag by an “administrative error.” They laughed and then openly lied, with Bukele saying he had no power to return a “terrorist,” with Trump agreeing, even as just one simple request from Trump would resolve the stand-off. The preposterous Stephen Miller then called Abrego Garcia a terrorist, denied any administrative error, associated him with child rapists, and said the Supreme Court backed his illegal rendition to a foreign death and torture camp, 9-0. (Of course, they voted 9-0 that the administration had clearly violated the Constitution and should try to correct their error, while acknowledging the executive’s prerogatives.) Trump’s enablers have therefore told us quite clearly who they are. And they are not that worried about public opinion, because, as Steve Bannon just told us, they intend to stay in power indefinitely like Bukele; and there are many more “emergency powers” on the books that Trump can easily deploy if he needs to. We are already fighting an “armed invasion from Venezuela,” for Pete’s sake, and a mere trade deficit like one we have had for decades suddenly now means a five-star “emergency” that bypasses the Senate’s constitutional role. We are already in the twilight zone of Trump’s alternative reality, just as El Salvador remains in the grip of Bukele’s massive lies and state terror. This is what is in front of our nose. The extinction-level event I foretold has happened in the last three months. There is only raw power now. And it’s coming for anyone who stands in its way. As Trump’s OMB director, Russell Vought, asks: “Do you know what time it is?” For him and core MAGA, what he means by that — and has always meant by that — is that we are now in a post-liberal order, and the Constitution is no longer in effect. Only Trump. Now and always. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my debate with Francis Collins on the origins of Covid; dissent over recent pod episodes; 10 notable quotes from the week in news, including more Yglesias Awards; 12 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break lampooning Lex Fridman; a sunny window in Hiroshima; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) From a new subscriber:
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