An Oval Office meeting on Monday revealed how Trump would like to rule — and why he might not be able to.
President Donald Trump’s press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was, at heart, an authoritarian political performance.
This was clearest in their discussion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man that the Trump administration seized and then erroneously sent (by its own admission) to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. The two men were sneeringly dismissive of the court order requiring his return, offering an obviously absurd argument that neither country could facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.
“This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court — and for the rule of law,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer explains.
This is par for the course for Bukele. Though elected to El Salvador’s presidency, he’s since governed as an out-and-out dictator who suspended civil liberties indefinitely, blatantly violated the Salvadoran constitution’s limit on consecutive terms, and sent the military into the Salvadoran legislature to force them to vote the way that he wanted. Bukele doesn’t care what the Salvadoran courts or constitution says; he has enough power that he can simply do what he wants.
Trump’s second-term record suggests he aspires to that kind of power. But he doesn’t have it. He’s operating in a system where law and the political opposition create real, if incomplete, constraints. If he simply ignores those constraints, he could face a collapse in support from the public, social elites, and perhaps even a critical mass of Republicans. As much as Trump wants to be Bukele, he’s ruling a country with a far more functional democracy — at least, for now.On the Right
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It is possible to turn a seemingly healthy democracy into an authoritarian state. Just look at Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — perhaps the only elected authoritarian that the American right admires more than Bukele. But where Bukele is violent and vicious, Orbán is suave and subtle — systematically manipulating law to tear apart democracy while keeping its basic veneer intact.
Trump has, at different times and in different ways, borrowed from both styles. His treatment of Abrego Garcia and other migrants is pure Bukele; his effort to bend American universities to his will is pure Orbán. But the styles are in direct tension with each other: one featuring showy displays of might, the other operating in the legal shadows to hide its true nature.
