Mick Hartley

Andrew Sullivan (via Jerry Coyne):

In some ways, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally-dressed foreign leaders. The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept his country free from total Russian domination. The second was with Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America.

So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it? They humiliated Zelensky while lavishing Bukele with encomiums for his collaboration in providing an extra-territorial, extra-judicial, concentration camp for whomever in America Trump wants to grab off the street, bundle into an airplane, and get Stephen Miller to call a terrorist. What’s not to like?

But the intense bromance between Trump and this populist dictator is rooted in more than the convenience of cheap gulags. The more you examine Bukele’s rise, tactics, and politics, the more you see that it offers not just an insight into what Trump has already done, but is a playbook for what Trump wants to do in the future.

. . . As president, Bukele bars journalists he dislikes from press conferences and directly communicates via social media. He has a domination complex: according to one of his former aides, Bukele “is explosive. He doesn’t listen, nor is he tolerant. If he meets with you, he’s not asking for your opinion. He just wants you to do what he says.”

Also:

Currently, El Salvador has an incarceration rate of 1,659 per 100,000 of the total population — #1 in the entire world. Second is Cuba, with less than half that: 794 per 100,000. That’s the kind of country Trump loves. European democracies? Nothing but sneering contempt.