President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador told journalist Tucker Carlson in an interview published Wednesday that he believes former President Donald Trump can win the 2024 election and that attempts to imprison him are only giving him the “greatest campaign ever.”
Carlson spoke to Bukele in El Salvador, where the president was inaugurated for a second term on Saturday. Bukele is arguably the most popular democratically elected leader on earth, attracting a decisive 85 percent of the vote in an election widely regarded as free and fair.
Bukele’s support largely stems from his ambitious government-wide program to eradicate pervasive gang violence in the country, once the murder capital of the world, through aggressive pursuit and imprisonment of suspected gang members. Using a state of emergency decree to dramatically expand law enforcement power, Bukele’s administration made it possible for Salvadoran citizens to maintain small businesses, use public parks and schools, and otherwise live their lives without being subject to gang recruitment, extortion, or the threat of violence, according to accounts even from sources skeptical or critical of his administration.
Gang members resting in metal frame cells at CECOT (Spanish acronym for counter-terrorism confinement center) in Tecoluca on February 6, 2024, in San Vicente, El Salvador. On February 2023, El Salvador inaugurated Latin America’s largest prison as part of President Nayib Bukele’s plan to fight gangs (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images).
Bukele’s ascent to power was unconventional. After being expelled from the establishment leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2017, Bukele launched a third-party run that resulted in his presidential win in 2019. Asked by Carlson to comment on concerns in the United States that the presidential election would not be legitimate, he suggested that corrupt institutions did not make it impossible to win an election against the establishment – and that he himself had won a rigged election.
“It was very hard to win and then … we won,” he stated:
President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024
“We in 2019 – the system was totally rigged, I mean they canceled our party,” Bukele recalled. “We were running with a party and they canceled it, they annulled our party. So I stayed party-less, so we went to a small party and said ‘you dont have any candidates, you are very small, do you want to win the election?'”
“So we got that party registration and they canceled that party and the last day that you can file the candidacies – so we got a medium sized party a 11:11 p.m.,” Bukele explained, “and we were able to file our candidacy. so it was not like it was easy or that the system wasn’t rigged.”
Carlson had asked Bukele if be believed it was possible for Trump to win, and he plainly responded, “Yes.”
Bukele went on to note that the opposition controlled the National Assembly, the federal legislature, at the time of his first election and attempted to leverage that power to impeach him — but failed. Asked if he feared the opposition would attempt to imprison him for defeating them, Bukele told Carlson they already had. He attributed the failure to his popularity, saying his opponents were concerned about the possibility of a major public outcry.
“Even when I was president, even being already in the presidency, they tried to impeach me,” Bukele explained. “They said – there’s an article in the constitution that says Congress can fire the president if he is not fit to lead – so they said I wasn’t fit to lead and they tried to impeach me because of that.”
“They feared that the people would rise up against them,” Bukele added, explaining why he believes he was not impeached.
“What advice would you give to another formally democratically elected leader who is facing jail time?” Carlson asked, apparently referring to former President Trump.
“If there was a way to stop the candidacy … then he’s probably in trouble,” Bukele responded. “But if there’s no way to stop him from competing in the election, all the things that they do to him will just give him more votes.”
“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 said, later adding, ” They’re making a huge mistake – huge, huge, huge, mistake.”
Former President Trump is facing legal proceedings in multiple states, including a recently concluded trial in New York in which a jury found him guilty on 34 counts of crimes involving his business records. Legal experts noted the lack of clarity in the case after the verdict.
Former President Donald Trump, left, and Emil Bove, attorney for former US President Donald Trump, at Manhattan criminal court in New York on Monday, May 20, 2024 (Dave Sanders/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty).
“When they were reading those guilty verdicts, the one thing we didn’t know is really what he was found guilty of,” legal analyst Jonathan Turley said following the verdict. “If you remember, the judge allowed the jury to find guilt on any one of three secondary crimes. We weren’t told whether the jury found any one of those crimes or whether they found all three of those crimes.”
The Trump campaign announced on June 3 that it had raised $141 million in May, much of it after the verdict. A Morning Consult poll taken after the verdict and published on Wednesday found that Trump maintained a slight lead over incumbent President Joe Biden nationally.
