In an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson published on Wednesday, El Salvador’s President Najib Bukele said he believes former President Donald Trump can win the 2024 election and that attempts to jail him would only give him “the biggest election battle in history.”
Carlson met with Bukele in El Salvador, where the president was inaugurated for a second term on Saturday. Bukele is perhaps the most popular democratically elected leader on the planet, winning an overwhelming 85 percent of the vote in elections widely regarded as free and fair.
President Bukele’s support is due in large part to an ambitious government-wide plan to eradicate endemic gang violence in the country that was once the world’s murder capital, which he does by aggressively pursuing and jailing suspected gang members. His administration has declared a state of emergency and significantly expanded law enforcement powers, allowing Salvadorans to maintain small businesses, use public parks and schools, and live their lives free from gang recruitment, extortion, and threats of violence, according to sources skeptical or critical of his administration.
Gang members rest in metal-framed cells at CECOT (Spanish for Anti-Terrorism Detention Center) in Tecoluka, San Vicente, El Salvador, on February 6, 2024. In February 2023, El Salvador opened Latin America’s largest prison as part of President Najib Bukele’s anti-gang plan (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)
Bukele’s rise to power was unconventional. After being expelled from the pro-establishment leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2017, he ran as a third party candidate and won the 2019 presidential election. Asked by Carlson to comment on U.S. concerns that the election may be illegitimate, Bukele suggested that a corrupt system means it’s not impossible to win an election against the establishment, and that he won a rigged election.
“It was very hard to win, and … we won,” he said.
President Najib Bukele saved El Salvador, and he may have the blueprint to save the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024
“The 2019 electoral system was totally rigged, which meant they dissolved our party,” Bukele recalled. “We were running as part of a political party, and they dissolved it, they made our party invalid. So I remained independent and went to small parties and said, ‘You don’t have candidates. You are a very small party. Do you want to win the election?'”
“So we registered the party, and then they canceled it, and the last day to run was 11:11 p.m., so we created a mid-sized party at 11:11 p.m. and were able to run,” Bukele explained. “So it wasn’t easy or the system was rigged.”
Carlson asked Bukele if he thought there was a chance that Trump could win, and Bukele answered emphatically: “Yes.”
Bukele also noted that when the president was first elected, the opposition controlled the National Assembly, the federal parliament, and tried to use that power to impeach him but failed. Asked if he feared the opposition would try to jail him for defeating him, Bukele told Carlson that they already had. The president cited his own popularity as the reason for the failure to impeach him, saying the opposition feared a public backlash.
“When I was president, even while I was already in office, they tried to impeach me,” Bukele explained. “They said there is a clause in the constitution that says if the president is unfit to lead, Congress can remove him. So they said I was unfit to lead, and they tried to impeach me for that.”
“They were afraid the people would revolt,” Bukele added, explaining why he believes he was not impeached.
“What advice would you give to another duly democratically elected leader who is facing incarceration?” Carlson asked, apparently referring to former President Trump.
“If there was a way to stop him from running, he’d probably be in trouble,” Bukele replied. “But if there’s no way to stop him in the election, then everything they do to him is just going to give him more votes.”
“They can either drop their candidacy or stay, but just attack him and we can run the greatest campaign of all time,” Bukele said, later adding: “They are making a big mistake. A huge mistake.”
Former President Trump faces lawsuits in multiple states, including a recently concluded trial in New York where a jury found him guilty of 34 criminal counts related to his business records. Legal experts noted the murkiness of the case after the verdict.
Former President Donald Trump, left, and former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Emile Bove, in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, Monday, May 20, 2024 (Dave Sanders/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty).
“When the guilty verdict was read, all we didn’t know was what he was found guilty of,” legal analyst Jonathan Turley said after the verdict. “As you’ll recall, the judge allowed the jury to find him guilty of any one of three secondary offenses. We weren’t told whether the jury found guilty of any one of those offenses or all three.”
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 conducted after the verdict and released Wednesday showed Trump holding a slight lead nationally over incumbent President Joe Biden.
