El Salvador’s new president, Nayib Bukele, has only been in office since June, but already he has the world’s attention. Deemed a “millennial president” in the international press for his social media savvy and aversion to neckties, Bukele’s term kicked off a dizzying parade of scandal and spectacle that is already drawing Trump comparisons.

A 38-year-old millionaire of Palestinian descent with a background in advertising, Bukele’s election unseated the party of the former leftist guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), who fought the US-backed military dictatorship to a draw during a twelve-year civil war (1980–1992). The FMLN governed El Salvador from 2009–2019, ousting the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, which had ruled the country for twenty years. While the FMLN oversaw major gains in social investment and inclusion, it failed to restructure the country’s highly dependent, unequal, dollarized economy, and was successively weakened over its two terms by pragmatism and compromise amid escalating right-wing destabilization and a deteriorating geopolitical climate.

Bukele, a former FMLN mayor, was expelled from the party in 2017 for ethics violations. He ran an insurgent presidential campaign with the conservative GANA party — which splintered from ARENA in 2010 — framing himself, savior-like, against a corrupt political class. In his inauguration speech, Bukele claimed to have “turned the page” on El Salvador’s postwar period. Unfortunately, his personal brand of post-ideological populism has revealed an all too familiar reactionary agenda.