Donald Trump Wants to Be the Nayib Bukele of America (And It Will Never Happen)

You probably recall that President Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele formed a highly controversial alliance earlier this year. In the name of assisting Trump in his efforts to deport most of America, Bukele offered to house people jettisoned from this country in his state-of-the-art torture dungeon, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Terrorism Confinement Center). Its friends call it CECOT.

The offer from the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” even extended to deportees who aren’t from El Salvador and maybe even American criminals someday, provided the Constitution can quit whining about it.

So generous! This must be El Salvador’s way of paying the United States back for being so cool to them in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Nayib Bukele offers more than just a black hole to disappear migrants and dissidents to, though. His time as president of El Salvador is also clearly the roadmap Trump wants to follow to achieve his ultimate goal of being ordained Forever King of America.

That’s a hurdle Nayib Bukele cleared very recently when his country’s Supreme Court decided to abolish presidential term limits. When he took office, the constitution of El Salvador limited presidents to one term. That was roughly six years ago. Fascism comes at you fast.

Despite Bukele often being referred to as “the Donald Trump of El Salvador,” it’s kinda the other way around.

For example, there was that time when Bukele entered the country’s legislative assembly chambers with 40 armed military guards in tow hoping to force a vote at gunpoint on a matter that wasn’t going the way he wanted. The standoff ended exactly the way you’d expect … with him bowing his head and praying for a few long minutes before looking up and letting everyone know God said he should give them more time to think.

You’re probably wondering what kind of punishment he received for this transgression. None. There was no punishment. It was decided that any decisions made in that moment were not legally binding, but beyond that he just went back to presidenting as usual.

This incident is rightly compared to the events of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol when people call Bukele his country’s version of Trump. Except the Bukele incident happened almost a year earlier on February 8, 2020. So who’s really following who?

A Human Rights Watch article about this moment in Salvadoran history that was published shortly after praises the fact that, in the end, the guardrails that existed to prevent the country from slipping back into a dictatorship held. Now, that article serves as an alarming real-life example of how quickly those guardrails can be driven right the hell through.

A few years into his first term, Nayib Bukele started floating the idea of maybe running for president again in 2024. By this point, “his excellency” and his Nuevas Ideas party held 56 of the 84 legislative assembly seats, enough of a majority to ensure literally any vote went their way. Seeing as how the only thing standing between him and subverting the constitution to run for president again was a few bullshit Supreme Court judges who’d opposed Bukele in the past, the legislative assembly just held a vote to have those judges removed. Easy peasy!

Did they have the authority to do that? Not really! But what were those judges gonna do? Kick the president’s ass? Nah, they just got removed and replaced by judges who agreed that, yeah, Nayib Bukele should get to run for president again.

So he did. And he won. By a lot. In the 2024 El Salvadoran presidential election, Nayib Bukele won with EIGHTY FIVE PERCENT of the vote.

That’s where things get tricky for Trump. Nayib Bukele Stone Cold Stunnered the Salvadoran constitution into submission in the shadow of a crackdown on violent crime that is as popular as it is controversial.

Sure, his anti-crime measures are rife with rights abuse allegations, and things like due process and habeas corpus were abandoned years ago. There are also strong suspicions that at least some of the progress has more to do with fudging the numbers and/or a secret deal between gangs and the government than effective policymaking.

That said, with the exception of what remains of the opposition in that country, it seems like the people of El Salvador don’t care about any of that in the slightest, and it’s not hard to understand why.

In 2015, when Bukele was elected mayor of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, the country’s homicide rate was 106.3 per 100,000 residents. That unfortunate math works out to 6,656 murders in one year, in a country with a population of right around six million people. There are eight million people in New York City and there were only 352 homicides there in 2015. There were right around 7,000 murders in the entire United States in 2024, and that’s with a population of 340 million.

El Salvador used to be called “the murder capital of the world” and that’s not a nickname you give yourself. You earn it.

Fast forward to 2024. There were 114 homicides reported in El Salvador that year. That is the lowest homicide rate in the entire Western Hemisphere. Even if the numbers are being finessed a little, it’s not so much so that there are still 6,000 murders a year. People would notice.

So, again, it’s pretty easy to see why Nayib Bukele has what currently looks like unshakable support among the people of El Salvador. Voters didn’t recoil in horror at his dismantling of the constitution because it happened alongside a dramatic and legitimate improvement in quality of life for a lot of people.

If Trump decides to go full authoritarian and abolish term limits or something similarly crazy, he will not have that same goodwill and appreciation from the people going for him. He won the 2024 election by a slim margin, around 1.5 percentage points, and his approval rating has been falling consistently since he returned to office.

You know what else has been falling pretty consistently? Crime rates in the United States. That’s the barrier Trump will never cross in his efforts to claim the title of world’s second coolest dictator. When you’re in a country of six million and 6,000+ of you are getting murdered every year, you don’t have to debate back and forth about whether crime is really as bad as people say it is.

That we are having that debate in this country should tell you everything you need to know about how bad things really aren’t. Not to say there is no crime. There are obviously crimes, violent and otherwise, committed every single day all over the country. It’s just that it’s not nearly at “declare a national emergency and send in the troops” levels.

We’d probably put a way bigger dent in the problem by investing in historically underserved communities and things of the like, but we know that’s not happening under Trump. So instead we get tales about roving mobs of criminals and drug addicts terrorizing America’s cities and promises that they will be put down by military force. People know it’s a lie, and it will never earn him the kind of support Nayib Bukele enjoys.

The question is does that even matter now? Trump doesn’t have the people on his side the way Bukele does, but it sure seems like he’s got the Supreme Court already. They just signed off on ICE using racial profiling as an immigration enforcement tactic and didn’t even bother explaining why they made the decision. They just let Trump have his way because he wanted it.

If he wants to declare a national emergency and send troops into every major American city, it will reach the Supreme Court eventually and they will side with Trump. And if he decides that national emergency is still raging out of control by 2028, he will argue that the country can’t possibly switch presidents until it’s over. That will eventually be in front of this same Supreme Court too, and they will side with Trump.

So when I say Trump becoming America’s Nayib Bukele is never going to happen, I mostly just mean it’s not going to make people like him more. Unfortunately, it seems like unless there are some dramatic changes within the nation’s highest court, support from the people is a thing he probably won’t need.

Hey you know what would be cool? If you clicked that subscribe button down there. Also for more about Nayib Bukele and his takeover of El Salvador, check out this episode of the In Broad Daylight podcast.