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.
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. Mashed together, they could end up neither being lawless enough to seize power by force nor clever enough to avoid a massive backlash.
This unstable mixture, in short, could have the unintended consequence of inflaming American resistance to Trump’s policies. If that happens, then Trump’s strategic sloppiness may be one of the things that allows American democracy to outlive his presidency.
Trump, between Bukele and Orbán
Bukele is a textbook strongman. He owes his success and popularity to an aggressive reaction to a social crisis — specifically, El Salvador’s gang problem and sky-high murder rate. Powers he claimed several years ago to address this emergency, like sending alleged gang members to the CECOT gulag with no due process, have remained long after the gang violence problem subsided. He appears in public with armed men in fatigues, developing a quasi-fascist aesthetic designed to underscore that he is a tough guy willing to do tough things.
Orbán, by contrast, won power in 2010 amid the fallout of a financial crisis and a corruption scandal. He did not have a mandate to rip up Hungarian civil liberties or democracy; his job, at least in the voters’ mind, was to clean it up.
His methods for consolidating power were thus invisible by design, often billed as good government reforms rather than power grabs. He didn’t arrest dissident journalists but rather manipulated funding streams to make their work impossible. He didn’t simply ignore the Hungarian constitution but amended it in subtle ways that made it harder and harder for the opposition to compete on fair terms. He wears a suit, not a uniform.
Each approach made sense in its own country. When Bukele took power in 2019, El Salvador was in the midst of a crime-induced social collapse. Performing authoritarian strength was exactly what Bukele needed to sell himself to the Salvadoran public. Hungary, by contrast, was, until relatively recently, a Communist dictatorship — and no one wanted to go back. So Orbán needed to pretend to play by the democratic rules and to insist that he was democracy’s truest and best champion.
Prior to Trump’s second term, one of my greatest fears was that it would resemble Orbán’s assault on democracy circa 2010. Many of his top allies, like Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, had openly suggested the United States needed to copy Hungarian policies. And indeed, some signature Trump 2 moves — like cutting off federal grant funds to universities — were straight out of the Orbán tactics.
But much of Trump’s second term has been more Bukele-esque than I expected. It’s not just that he sent alleged gang members to a Salvadoran prison; it’s that he did it in such a showy and obviously unlawful way. The naked assertion that the US government has the power to grab migrants off the street and send them overseas with no due process and no hope of retrieval is far too crass for the Hungarian regime. There is no remotely defensible argument for why such a thing is compatible with the principles of a free society.
This dance happens, in part, because Trump has neither Orbán nor Bukele’s core strengths.
Orbán enjoys a two-thirds majority in parliament, thanks to his ability to stack the electoral deck in his favor. This supermajority allows him to do more than pass any law he wants: He actually has the votes to amend the constitution at will. Orbán’s biggest threat is the public waking up to the true nature of his regime; he thus ensures that his most dangerous moves are hidden beneath layers of opaque bureaucracy and legalese.
Trump, by contrast, faces a number of formal legal checks. The GOP’s narrow congressional majority, the independent judiciary, and the federal system all put real constraints on Trump’s power. Trying to go full Orbán amidst those limitations would require a degree of patience and subtlety that Trump does not appear to possess.
Bukele, for his part, enjoys significant public support because of his authoritarian politics. Many Salvadorans credit his “mano dura” (iron fist) policies with destroying the gangs who were terrorizing their communities. For these voters, democratic freedoms felt like luxuries worth sacrificing in the name of order and stability.
Instinctually, Trump would like to govern like this. He has long openly admired the alleged strength of dictators, praising violent crackdowns like the Tiananmen Square massacre or the extrajudicial execution of drug dealers in the Philippines.
But, despite the administration’s nonsensical claims to the contrary, there is no emergency in the United States akin to El Salvador in 2022, when the country had the highest murder rate in the Americas. In the absence of an acute social crisis, Trump can’t simply assert the powers he’s claiming in the Abrego Garcia case and expect people to get on board.
The end result, then, is that the Trump administration is trying to implement two different strategies for authoritarianizing the United States: both subtle Hungarian legalism and brutal Salvadoran civil liberties crackdowns. Yet both depend on mutually exclusive theories of how to win public support — one hiding authoritarianism beneath a democratic veneer, the other requiring showy demonstrations of strongman might.
It’s possible this mix ends up working for Trump. But I suspect it’ll engender a broader public backlash sooner than he thinks.
