The “World’s Coolest Dictator” Visited the White House
In Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, Donald Trump sees a far-right authoritarian who has something he doesn’t: an actual popular mandate.
President Donald Trump welcomes President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to the White House on April 14, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
On Monday morning, El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, visited Donald Trump in the White House in a symbolic show of strengthening the link between the two countries. Bukele is the first Latin American president to receive such an invitation since Trump’s election.
The visit comes as the two leaders have identified how they can be useful to each other. Trump needs Bukele to skirt US laws and enact a cornerstone of his agenda, mass deportation. Bukele needs Trump to sustain El Salvador’s massive, unsustainable prison population.
On March 16, 2025, El Salvador received a US deportation flight of 238 Venezuelans along with Salvadorans of various documentation statuses. They were incarcerated in El Salvador’s megaprison, the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), placing them in legal limbo. The conditions of those incarcerated in El Salvador are notorious and likely violate a number of human rights under international law. The United States is paying El Salvador a fee of $6 million per year to house some three hundred deported people.
Those incarcerated include a Maryland father, Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran with no criminal record who won a withholding of removal in US immigration court years ago. He was nonetheless illegally detained and deported to CECOT, seemingly by mistake. The Supreme Court issued an opinion on April 10 that Abrego García’s return should be facilitated, but not effectuated, by the United States, because mandating his return would infringe on Salvadoran sovereignty, as he is now under jurisdiction of the Salvadoran state.
Trump could admit the government’s mistake of accusing Abrego García of being an MS-13 gang member and demand his return. Instead, he and his adviser Stephen Miller have insisted that Abrego García was “sent to the right place” as a member of MS-13, using a fear tactic to frame Abrego García’s deportation as a security issue. Trump has endorsed the deportation of immigrants regardless of their criminal histories as part of his mass deportation plan. And he hasn’t stopped there. In the meeting with Bukele on Monday, Trump declared that “we also have homegrown people who push people into subways. . . . I’d like to include them in the group of people to get out of the country.”
The dehumanization of Abrego García and others is meant to appeal to Trump’s nativist base, while the threat to potentially deport US citizens encourages silence and acquiescence to the Trump administration’s array of far-right policies.
Feeding Off Each Other’s Politics
The alignment of Trump and Bukele is not new, but it is emblematic of the democratic backsliding on display under each of their second administrations. Each seeks to remake his respective government to serve his personal power, with Bukele going as far as to refer to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator.”
The US right and Salvadoran right have fed off each other’s successes historically, from the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, during which the United States provided extensive military and financial support to the authoritarian government, to economic intertwining through El Salvador’s dollarization in 2000. Since the 1990s, extensive remittances from Salvadoran migrants and refugees in the United States have been an important part of the former’s economy; money sent back to El Salvador from family members in the United States accounts for nearly a quarter of Salvadoran GDP. This deep interconnectedness has been visible under previous administrations in both countries, but the current moment showcases symmetrical authoritarianism, as both Trump and Bukele share a number of political affinities.
Before Trump entered office to fire over fifty thousand US federal employees and try to bust their unions, Bukele fired over twenty-two thousand Salvadoran government workers and imprisoned at least sixteen union leaders, among the many thousands of Salvadorans not charged with crimes but nonetheless swept up in Bukele’s state of exception. Austerity coupled with mass layoffs has characterized both right-wing administrations. So has bald-faced authoritarianism.
For his part, Bukele staged a militarized takeover of the Legislative Assembly to push through his preferred legislation, forced out judges and replaced them with loyalists, and declared a state of exception that concentrates power in the executive, now in place for more than three years. Trump’s comments about running for a third term mirror Bukele’s defiance of the Salvadoran constitution in running for a second term. While not labeled as such, Trump’s current attack on higher education and international students, among other examples, shows that he is creating a de facto state of exception, where the rules of the democratic game have been suspended.
Trump and Bukele are also both real estate moguls who have used their position as presidents for personal enrichment. From Trump’s crypto memecoins to his appointment of Elon Musk to head the invented Department of Government Efficiency despite blatant conflicts of interest with his own businesses, the first several months of the second Trump presidency have been defined by the rich profiting off the public.
Bukele is no stranger to this form of accumulation. He has acquired numerous properties during his tenure as president, including, most recently, a beachfront expanse that abuts a national reserve. This and other government corruption has been covered by Salvadoran journalists at El Faro, the leading independent Salvadoran news source, which was so harassed and surveilled by Bukele’s government that it relocated to Costa Rica. Meanwhile, Trump’s press secretary has banned AP journalists from the White House for failing to heed his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and refused to answer the emails of journalists who have pronouns in their signatures.
An Authoritarian Without a Mandate
Yet where Bukele has received popular support to enact his draconian policies from voters exhausted by decades of predatory violence from both state actors and gangs, Trump has never been elected on a popular mandate. Salvadorans have proved willing up until now to countenance human rights violations and mass incarceration in exchange for a significant decline in gang violence, reelecting Bukele with an 85 percent supermajority last year despite the Salvadoran constitution’s ban on second terms. Even as his popularity shows signs of flagging, Bukele’s consolidation of power leaves slim possibility for a democratic challenge to his party’s rule.
Trump, in contrast, won less than half of the vote in 2024, and his approval rating has already tumbled shortly after taking office. Aside from essentially breaking even after winning the election in November, Trump has had a net unfavorable public opinion for his entire political career. The reason the MAGA crowd is so obsessed with Bukele is because he’s succeeded in garnering the support of a supermajority to enact a far-right agenda — something that’s so far eluded MAGA Republicans, who have nonetheless taken advantage of the Democratic Party’s disarticulation.
The current era of democratic erosion in both countries is deeply concerning, as without a commitment to basic premises such as free and fair elections and fundamental constitutional rights, countries cede terrain to authoritarianism. For example, Trump’s attacks on universities and freedom of expression (including through international student visa revocation) and constant threats and backtracking of tariffs all point to a personalization of power that undermines democratic governance.
At this moment in both El Salvador and the United States, basic human rights are under threat. Anticipatory obedience, complacency, and other forms of silence hasten the collapse of the democratic order that best guarantees the very rights at stake. Democratic norms and institutions are easier to break than to build or rebuild.
The United States has experienced no comparable crisis of security to justify a state of exception like El Salvador’s. Trump is trying to bring it here anyway. We ignore it at our peril.