What The Hell America!

Sargent: Chris, it looks to me like Donald Trump is actually trying to import Bukele’s style of authoritarian leadership into the U.S. He met with Bukele in the White House and the two of them were very, very friendly with one another. And it was overwhelmingly clear that Donald Trump sitting next to Bukele really felt like this guy is someone that he should be emulating. And Trump went through this little routine. He abused the press in front of Bukele, which was a way of saying, Hey, look, you can knock around all your vermin opponents, so can we here. We’re stomping on them right on national television. This is an effort to import Bukele-style leadership into the U.S.

Newman: Greg, I’m so happy you asked this question. It’s something that I don’t think enough in the media are focusing on. Because frankly speaking, the fate of U.S. democracy and the fate of Salvadoran democracy right now, they’re intertwined in a common story. And yet I don’t think nearly enough people in the U.S. know about the history of El Salvador, nor do they know about the history of the involvement of the U.S. in El Salvador. I’ve been going there for 10 years, and I have witnessed with my own eyes El Salvador’s descent into fascism. And I think it’s worth noting that President Bukele, while autocratic, dictatorial—I think he refers to himself as the world’s coolest dictator—is quite popular in El Salvador because in the short term he has decreased street crime.

But the way he’s done it has been by implementing something that he refers to as a “state of exception” in El Salvador. I’ll refer to it as a state of deception. I think, for your listeners, it could be understood as martial law, where approximately 75,000 people have been arrested, imprisoned, put into these black sites where their family members don’t know where they are without any access to a trial, any counsel, any indicia of who their accusers are or what evidence is being used against them. Bukele’s popularity rose by politically demagoguing the exact same people that Donald Trump—quite literally, the exact same people, MS-13. So if you’re Donald Trump, you’re sitting here going like, Wow, I need to copy what that Salvadoran dictator is doing.