Name: El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele: The Authoritarian Leader Captivating America’s Far-Right
Uploaded: 2025-04-14T16:29:00Z
Duration: 9 min
Description: El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is one of the biggest right-wing icons in the world. We’ll explain how he became an influential figure in the MAGA movement with close ties to many of Trump’s allies.

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El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is one of the biggest right-wing icons in the world. We’ll explain how he became an influential figure in the MAGA movement with close ties to many of Trump’s allies. Photo: kevin lamarque/Reuters

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250414/c1ca08d3-50f4-4c15-9097-0704191f935f/5/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is one of the biggest right-wing icons in the world. We’ll explain how he became an influential figure in the MAGA movement with close ties to many of Trump’s allies.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele: The Authoritarian Leader Captivating America’s Far-Right

And I wanna just say hello to the people of El Salvador and say they have one hell of a President.

Reporter: Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, has become one of the biggest right-wing icons in the world. His crackdown on El Salvador's gangs has inspired many in the US conservative movement, especially members of Trump's inner circle.

A lot of us in the MAGA movement believe that the good ideas we've seen in El Salvador we can learn from.

Reporter: Bukele has agreed to accept US detainees at El Salvador's mega prison, making him a key player in Trump's mass deportation strategy.

I have great respect for him, I know him. He's very tough on crime.

Reporter: But concern is growing over Bukele's increasingly close relationship with Trump and many of his allies. Since taking office in 2019, Bukele has helped turn a country that was once the murder capital of the world into one of the safest in Latin America.

We didn't think about to cleanse our society.

Reporter: He has jailed over 1% of the population, giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world. He also built the world's largest prison, known as CECOT. But the country's transformation hasn't come without criticism. Since 2022, Bukele has ruled under emergency powers that suspend civil liberties, including due process. Rights groups say his time in office has been marked by an erosion of checks and balances, widespread human rights violations and arbitrary detentions, along with the weakening of opposition parties and attacks against freedom of expression and independent media. Bukele's press office denied the allegations, and said that before Bukele took office, there were widespread human rights abuses by the gangs on law-abiding citizens. The president addressed the concerns of rights groups in 2024, saying this.

They were worried about the human rights of the killers, which, you know, they have human rights, I don't say they don't, they're humans. But if you have to prioritize, what will you prioritize?

He's a democratically elected president.

Reporter: Damien Merlo has been working with Bukele since 2018 and acts as the president's advisor and his link to DC.

If people aren't happy, then the next election, they can vote for someone else.

People are participating at a very high rate in these elections, and they are voting for his party and for his allies.

Reporter: Former congressman Matt Gaetz led the launch of a bipartisan El Salvador caucus in 2024.

My friends.

Reporter: He owns a home there and visits several times a year. Bukele's landslide victory in 2024 came after the courts allowed him to seek reelection despite a constitutional ban on running for a second consecutive term.

I believe El Salvador should amend their constitution, should remove the presidential term limit and should allow President Bukele to continue this transformation that will lift people up.

Reporter: A big part of Bukele's appeal is his use of social media to rebrand El Salvador in the eyes of the world. Bukele now markets the country as the land of surf, volcanoes and coffee. He hosts international events like.

The 72nd Miss Universe competition.

He comes from an advertising background and he knows exactly how to market not just to his own country, but increasingly to the outside.

Reporter: Vera Bergengruen is one of two US journalists who have interviewed Bukele in the last five years.

When he became president, it was quite a noticeable shift where he started, for example, tweeting a lot more in English. And even the videos that are in Spanish tend to have English subtitles.

He knows that's where his growing fan club is. One of the other things that really struck me is also how he's changed some of the rhetoric he uses. For example, in his interview with Tucker Carlson and also in general, he speaks a lot more about God.

All my security cabinet are believers. They all believe in God. We're a secular country, of course, but we all believe in God.

He speaks a lot more in the language of kind of the Christian right wing of the United States. And everyone I spoke to in El Salvador and elsewhere who's tracked him for a long time, says that kind of language is quite new.

President Bukele sort of first was noticed by the MAGA movement when we did the visit to the Heritage Foundation.

Reporter: That's the Conservative Research Institute in DC behind Project 2025, a controversial policy blueprint for the federal government.

El Salvador needs the support of the most influential think tank in the world.

A big turning point was when he traveled to Maine to do the interview with Tucker when he was still at Fox.

I think most governments would rather let people have guns than free speech. Free speech is a real threat to them.

Well, that's why they hate free speech.

He was invited to CPAC, which is sort of an annual Woodstock for Republicans. What I remember so vividly is, as President Bukele was coming in the backroom, in the kitchen, the entire hotel staff, it seemed, was there holding, "We love you, Bukele," holding their Salvadorian flags. And he gave this remarkable speech.

They say globalism comes to die at CPAC. I'm here to tell you that in El Salvador, it's already dead.

Matt: He probably had the second-longest line for pictures after President Trump.

Bukele has done quite an impressive job making inroads with the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

Reporter: Donald Trump Jr. and Alex Brustowitz, the digital strategist behind Trump's podcast strategy, were among many MAGA Republicans at Bukele's second inauguration. Bukele has also developed a relationship with Elon Musk.

I was like, "How did you put all those thugs in prison without dying?" 'Cause seems like that would've been not easy.

Reporter: They met in person for the first time in Texas in late 2024.

Welcome to Tesla.

Thank you.

Reporter: Bukele and Trump have kept up a relationship over the years. They met in person for the first time in 2019.

Bukele, you know, makes no secret of the fact that he's a big fan of Donald Trump.

President Trump is very nice and cool, and I'm nice and cool too. We both use Twitter a lot, so we'll get along.

He shares a lot of his ideas about being tough on crime, but really it's the global right-wing language of being against international institutions.

The EU was set up in order to take advantage of the United States.

The corrupt system work in tandem with the so-called international community, the NGOs, and of course the fake news.

Bukele, he's a strong critic of aid in a lot of ways. In the past, these nations have defined their relationships with the United States and other hegemons through the distribution of foreign aid. The chance for that type of nationalism to resist the globalist impulses does inspire some of us.

Reporter: Bukele's allies also fired top judges and packed the courts with loyalists.

That is incredibly appealing to a lot of people in Trump's orbit as well, the idea that if a judge is trying to block you, then you can just basically get rid of them and just carry out your agenda.

Reporter: Bukele's new court allowed him to run again in a consecutive term. Trump himself hasn't ruled out running for a third term.

People are asking me to run and there's a whole story about running for a third term. I don't know, I never looked into it. They do say there's a way you can do it.

Reporter: In the last few months, Trump has been praising Bukele, calling him, "A model for others seeking to work with the United States." But just last year, Trump's opinion of him was quite different.

He says how well the country's doing because their crime rate is down. And he said he's training all of these rough people, they're rough, rough, rough. But then I realized, he's not training them, he's sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he's sending them all to the United States.

It does remain to be seen if Bukele keeps getting all of this global credit as being the greatest crime fighter, you know, in the hemisphere, whether Trump will want to keep praising him or whether he will kind of go back to what he tends to do, which is just kind of go after basically any Latin American country as a bad place that is sending criminals to the United States.

Reporter: For now, though, Bukele remains an important ally of the Trump administration, especially with Bukele's influence spreading across Latin America.

I think the Trump administration has realized that he's a reliable partner on rebuilding the economy of El Salvador, which is one of the root causes of migration in the US.

To see a renewed nationalism, that invigorates the opportunities for people like Milei, Bolsonaro, if he's allowed to run again. That does give us comfort in the United States that there is someone of common mind who doesn't believe that China is the ideal partner on every project.

But he's still ruling under a state of emergency. And there's a lot of people who are concerned that by, you know, this kind of Bukele worship or making him an icon, people are encouraging the routes that he took, which would be pretty unlikely in the United States, but a lot of critics would say that we're already seeing a lot of that in the second Trump term.