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| Bukele and Trump: Two thugs who deserve each other. |
Donald Trump long has expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders. After an Oval Office visit yesterday from a relative unknown on the world stage, we will have to make room for another strongman ruler. How did Trump become smitten this time? We learn the details in a jointly published article at Politico and Yahoo! News under the headline "Trump, in a rare move, deferred to another world leader. It’s a clear legal play; El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is urging Trump to emulate his iron-fisted playbook." The reporting triumvirate of Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein and Hassan Ali Kanu explains:
Move over Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. Donald Trump’s latest strongman bromance is with “President B.”
Though Trump has long admired foreign authoritarians, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s repressive regime is in some ways the beta test for Trump 2.0. Bukele calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Trump said he would be a dictator on Day 1. And Trump has floated or deployed many of the same tactics Bukele used to consolidate power: removing judges, intimidating political adversaries, bypassing due process and evading term limits.
Now, Bukele is actively helping Trump sidestep court orders in the United States.
In short, Bukele is helping Trump break the law by defying a court order. Is that the kind of company a U.S. president should be keeping? The answer is no. But given Trump's shaky judgment -- the kind that led him to be a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist -- we probably should not be surprised that he would cozy up to a glorified thug such as Bukele? Is our assessment too harsh? Consider the following from a 2024 Associated Press report:
The human rights organization Cristosal says that at least 261 people have died in prisons in El Salvador during President Nayib Bukele’s 2 1/2-year-old crackdown on street gangs.
Under a state of emergency originally declared in 2022 and still in effect, Bukele’s government has rounded up 81,110 suspected gang members in sweeps that rights groups say are often arbitrary, based on a person’s appearance or where they live. The government has had to release about 7,000 people because of a lack of evidence.
The group said in a report that, as of April 15, 88 of the 261 deaths “may have been the result of a criminal act,” though it did not specify what those acts may have been.
The report said 87 of the deaths were due to illnesses, 14 were apparently “acts of violence” and no cause could be immediately identified for the other 72.
Building a society on democratic principles does not appear to be a high priority for Bukele. Trump is not big on democratic principles either, so it's little wonder the two leaders get along famously. Yesterday's meeting was driven by what amounts to a state-sanctioned kidnapping . . . by the United States. And Trump showed no signs of being concerned about it. The Politico reporting team described the administration's tactics as "summary deportations," where due process plays little, if any, role. The Cheney/Gerstein/Kanu team writes:
Trump’s “nothing I can do here” stance is unusual for a president who prides himself on strong-arming other world leaders to do his bidding. And it escalates a clash with the courts in advance of a crucial Tuesday hearing before U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who ordered Abrego Garcia’s return and is growing frustrated with the administration’s recalcitrance.
Hours after Bukele’s White House visit, the Trump administration quoted some of his comments in a daily report Xinis has demanded. Also in that document, the acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Mazzara, declared that “DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.” The filing included no information in response to Xinis’ substantive questions.
The burgeoning partnership between Trump and Bukele is not limited to Abrego Garcia. Trump sent hundreds of other deportees to El Salvador last month, many without due process. And on Monday, he intensified his threats of lawless deportations even further: He openly mused about sending U.S. citizens to the Salvadoran prison.
That Trump would even think of sending U.S. citizens to a prison in El Salvador, under Bukele's control, shows how little regard he has for the rule of law. It also suggests Trump is becoming more unhinged and dangerous by the day. From Politico/Yahoo!:
“Sending U.S. citizens to another country’s prison that has significant human rights concerns and does not meet our constitutional standards for conditions is illegal,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It would also violate the First Step Act, which President Trump signed in 2018 and mandates that the federal government place people in ‘a facility as close as practicable to the prisoner’s primary residence, and to the extent practicable, in a facility within 500 driving miles of that residence.’”
Pushing legal limits
Even without casting out U.S. citizens, Trump has tested the boundaries of his legal authority to deport foreign nationals without due process. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a rarely used wartime power, to send hundreds of Venezuelan nationals and other foreign citizens he’s deemed terrorists or gang members into the open arms of Bukele’s government. Salvadoran officials quickly — with cameras rolling — shackled, shaved and shuttled them into the massive detention facility known as the Terrorism Confinement Center.
Trump’s summary deportations, however, appear to have been riddled with errors that have raised alarms about whether the administration is sending the wrong people to potentially indefinite imprisonment in brutal conditions outside the protections of the U.S. Constitution. The Justice Department has already acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia was deported in violation of a 2019 immigration judge’s order that found he could not be sent there due to potential persecution by a local gang. Trump immigration and Justice Department officials, including Solicitor General John Sauer, have repeatedly called the deportation an “administrative error.”
But top White House adviser Stephen Miller contradicted that admission Monday.
“He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Miller said on Fox News, adding: “This was the right person sent to the right place.”
Amid the conflicting statements from the Trump administration, Bukele muddied the waters further Monday by disclaiming that even he lacks the power to return wrongly deported people currently held in his country.
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele asked about Abrego Garcia. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
The implication of the leaders’ rhetoric is a remarkable catch-22: Both the American and Salvadoran governments are asserting they have no authority to fix what multiple judges have found to be a grievous error.
Xinis, an Obama appointee to the federal bench in Maryland, is one of those judges. What happened to Abrego Garcia, she wrote, “shocks the conscience.” She has scheduled another hearing for Tuesday afternoon as lawyers for Abrego Garcia urge her to hold Trump administration officials in contempt for defying her orders.
Before the press was allowed into the Oval Office yesterday, the two presidents had a mostly private discussion that revealed a lot about both of them -- and it wasn't pretty. Cheney/Gerstein/Kanu write:
Trump sees value in violent videos
Trump offered various reasons Monday for embracing El Salvador’s prisons, including that doing so could save the U.S. money and that they appear to be more secure than U.S. facilities. But it was evident that what he most appreciates about Bukele’s approach is the imagery of prisoners being roughly handled by guards, having their heads shaved and being forced into massive group cells.
Speaking in quiet tones to Bukele before the press corps was ushered in, Trump raised the issue of sending Americans there.
“The homegrowns are next,” Trump could be heard saying on a live video feed sent out by Bukele’s office. “You got to build about five more places.”
“Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele replied, drawing scattered laughter from U.S. officials in the room.
Trump then gushed over the slickly edited, Hollywood-style videos Bukele’s operation has cranked out for each batch of prisoners the U.S. has dispatched there in recent weeks.
“I’ll tell you who’s good: whoever sends us those tapes that you get. They become sensations in this country,” Trump said. “Getting out of those planes, that’s what people want to see: Respect, they want to see respect. … Whoever does that does a great job.”
Trump even compared the videos to the epic films of Cecil B. DeMille.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who traveled to the Salvadoran prison and recorded a social-media video in front of one of the group cells, also highlighted the propaganda value.
“It’s been a powerful message of consequences,” she said. “This is a clear consequence for the worst of the worst.”
Bukele’s bombast
Bukele, for his part, has deftly associated himself with the key figures in Trump’s MAGA orbit to solidify his credibility with the president. On X, he regularly interacts with and reposts Elon Musk, former congressman Matt Gaetz, and right-leaning journalists who have posted favorably about the deportation efforts.
And Bukele has used social media to revel in helping Trump circumvent orders from U.S. courts. When a judge ordered planes carrying Venezuelan deportees last month to either turn around or bring those prisoners back to the U.S., Bukele responded on Twitter: “Oopsie…too late,” followed by a tears of joy emoji.
Bukele publicly floated the idea of taking in American-citizen prisoners in February, writing on X that his country was prepared to help the U.S. “outsource part of its prison system … in exchange for a fee.”
“The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable,” he said.
While violent crime in the U.S. is at or near record lows, Bukele portrayed the country as besieged by criminals and was explicit Monday that the U.S. should emulate the approach of El Salvador, which now has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world.
“You have 350 million people to liberate. To liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some,” Bukele said. “We’re very eager to help. … We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with. And we’re a small country but, if we can help, we will do it.”
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