The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, joined the host of world leaders congratulating President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday for his electoral victory, praying that God will “guide” Trump and describing his win as a “fork in [the road of] human civilization.”
Bukele shared an image of Trump greeting him during a meeting while he was still president, when the two maintained a friendly working relationship. America’s relationship with El Salvador soured dramatically under outgoing President Joe Biden, who antagonized Bukele by questioning domestic presidential decisions and encouraging migration out of Latin America. Bukele’s administration has prioritized limiting migration out of the country and encouraging Salvadoran repatriation.
“May God bless you and guide you,” Bukele wrote in his congratulatory message:
In a separate post on social media outlet X, formerly known as Twitter, President Bukele mused on the election.
“No matter your political preference or whether you like what happened or what’s yet to happen,” Bukele wrote. “But I’m certain you don’t fully grasp the fork in human civilization that began yesterday”:
Bukele has yet to elaborate on the comment.
The Salvadoran president is one of the world’s most popular, winning reelection in a race recognized as fair by the Organization of American States (OAS), with a whopping 85 percent of the vote in February. His third-party New Ideas movement largely eliminated any political power for the nation’s mainstream parties in the Salvadoran Congress, as well, rising in popularity on the back of a promise to eradicate the country’s powerful gangs, most prominently the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and 18th Street gangs. Bukele, even opposition media have acknowledged, largely eliminated the gangs between his first term in office in 2019 and 2023 through a program of mass incarceration and empowering the police and military to target gang leadership structures.
As a result of the anti-gang program, El Salvador has seen a boom in foreign investment, tourism, and small businesses, which Bukele has expressed hope will entice Salvadorans around the world to return home.
Bukele has openly thanked the Trump administration for support in fighting the gangs. He struggled to receive the same kind of anti-crime support from Biden, with whom he feuded openly. In 2022, responding to a Biden administration State Department spokesman claiming Biden supports the anti-gang operations, Bukele emphasized, “yes, we got support from the U.S. government to fight crime, but [that] was UNDER THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.”
Biden’s White House, he accused, was “only supporting the gangs.”
Speaking to reporters in 2024 while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Bukele lamented that his country was “not in the priorities of the current administration.”
“For us, the United States is always our first partner in every way, economically — a large part of our population lives here — the currency, etc. In fact, the influence of the United States is in every sense of the word,” he said at the time. “Unfortunately, the [Biden] administration has not been very interested in working with us since the beginning.”
With Trump, he said, the bilateral relationship was “much better.”
Bukele has also been a harsh critic of attempts to prosecute President-elect Trump. In an interview with Tucker Carlson in June, Bukele predicted that Trump would win the presidency if the Democrats found no legal way to take him off of the ballot.
“Either you stop the candidacy, or you let him be. But just, you know, hitting him with – you’re making the greatest campaign ever,” Bukele predicted. ” They’re making a huge mistake – huge, huge, huge, mistake.”
Bukele’s relationship with Trump has not been without some disagreement. While Trump has complimented Bukele in the past, the president-elect made comments in July in which he appeared to downplay the success of the anti-gang program, accusing Bukele of flooding America with gang members.
“A certain country, and I happen to like the president of that country very much, but he’s been getting great publicity because he’s a wonderful shepherd of the country,” Trump said. “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.”
“He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job,” Trump continued but added that if he were president of the unnamed country, “I would be worse than any of them. I would have had the place totally emptied out already.”
Trump later clarified that he was referring to El Salvador. Bukele responded to the comments only by writing a social media message reading, “Taking the high road.”
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