President Donald Trump held a phone conversation with Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele on Thursday in which he celebrated Bukele as an “example” for his peers and promised to support his efforts to stop organized crime and illegal immigration.
Bukele was the second world leader that Trump held a conversation with since being inaugurated president, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Trump also held a phone conversation with genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping shortly before his inauguration on Monday and hosted four world leaders at his inauguration on Monday: Argentine President Javier Milei, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, and Paraguayan President Salvador Peña. Bukele was reportedly invited by did not attend. No foreign leaders had ever attended an American president’s inauguration before this week.
Trump has notably prioritized these phone calls over conversations with leaders in Europe – a sharp contrast to his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose foreign policy consisted almost entirely of outreach to Western Europe.
Trump and Bukele maintained friendly ties during the former’s first term in the White House. Bukele openly lamented that El Salvador’s relationship with America deteriorated significantly under Biden and was all but openly supportive of Trump during his 2024 campaign, asserting that Trump could win the election and that legal attacks against him would help him build the “best campaign ever.” The relationship appeared to hit a snag last year when Trump criticized Bukele for allegedly improving his country by deporting criminals, a claim to which Bukele did not respond.
The White House confirmed the phone call between the two leaders late on Thursday and offered few details on the conversation.
“The two leaders discussed working together to stop illegal immigration and crack down on transnational gangs like Tren de Aragua,” the White House readout explained. “President Trump also praised President Bukele’s leadership in the region and the example he sets for other nations in the Western Hemisphere.”
The government of El Salvador did not offer its own readout of the conversation, instead publishing a Spanish-language version of the White House document. Bukele himself shared the readout on social media, accompanied only by a “kissy face” emoji as commentary.
President Trump has made Latin America and the Western Hemisphere generally a top priority for his second term, a shift from the Biden administration which received hefty criticism for ignoring the region America is located in. As president-elect, Biden largely ignored Latin American leaders, failing to make contact with the leaders of Brazil, Mexico, or Colombia – the largest nations in the region – following a campaign that saw Democrats drop significant percentages of the Hispanic vote and Hispanic leftists complain that Biden neglected them. An anonymous report in the outlet Politico claimed that a top Hispanic staffer left the Biden campaign because it was “hyper-focused on whites.”
The Biden administration’s disregard for Latin America caused significant diplomatic and human rights issues following the massive July 11, 2021, protests in Cuba in which tens of thousands of people demanded an end to communism. Biden staffers claimed that the protesters, taking the streets chanting “freedom!”, were protesting demanding more resources against the Wuhan coronavirus – a claim eliciting international mockery, and took no significant action in response to the human rights crisis on an island hosting a major American military facility.
“Despite the support that President Biden is offering to the people of Cuba today, this White House has openly admitted that the issue of the island is not a priority for this government,” Univisión White House correspondent Janet Rodriguez told Univisión viewers at the time.
Bukele, as president of a key regional ally, also struggled to get Biden’s attention.
“Well, we have always been willing to work but I think it is not in the priorities of the current administration,” Bukele said in February while attending the Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC). “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.”
“We will always be willing to work. Unfortunately, the [Biden] administration has not been very interested in working with us since the beginning,” he continued. “It might be a priority that they don’t have.”
Bukele said at the time that working with Trump was “much better, of course.”
El Salvador relied on Republican allies in the United States to prioritize issues of mutual importance during the Biden era. In April 2023, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) traveled to the country, condemning Biden for “alienating” Bukele during a crisis on the U.S. southern border. In response to Bukele’s widely successful gang crackdown, Rubio noted, Biden responded by “badmouthing the guy, by sanctioning people in the government, by going after them because they’re being too tough and too harsh, and so forth.”
“And on top of everything else, this is a guy that has tried to be friendly and an ally to the United States, and we have a problem with our foreign policy. We treat our enemies better than we treat our friends,” he lamented.
Rubio became the first confirmed cabinet member of Trump’s second term this week and the first Hispanic American to serve as secretary of state.
Rubio announced this week that his first international trip will be to Latin America.
Bukele maintained in interviews that he believed Trump could return to the presidency. In conversation with journalist Tucker Carlson in June, Bukele compared legal attacks against Trump to attempts by the Salvadoran opposition to keep him out of office.
“If there was a way to stop the candidacy … then he’s probably in trouble,” Bukele said of Trump. “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 predicted, ” They’re making a huge mistake – huge, huge, huge, mistake.”
Trump has been largely complimentary of Bukele with the exception of comments this summer in which he appeared to indicate that Bukele had only succeeded in eliminating gang violence in his country by exporting the gang members.
“In El Salvador, murders are down 70 percent. Why are they down?” Trump asked at the time. “Now, he would have you convinced that’s because he’s trained murderers to be wonderful people. No. They’re down because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America.”
In his interview with Carlson, Bukele had explained that major Salvadoran gangs, like Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), were actually founded in the United States and their members deported to El Salvador during the term of former President Bill Clinton. In response to Trump, however, Bukele merely published a message on social media reading, “taking the high road.”
Bukele ultimately congratulated Trump on his victory, writing a public message reading, “may God bless you and guide you.”
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