Former President Donald Trump accused an unnamed leader of reducing crime in his nation by “sending … murderers to the United States of America.” That comment in his Republican National Convention (RNC) speech on Thursday night apparently offended El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, who cryptically vowed to take the “high ground” in response to the remark.
Trump formally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination on Thursday night with an extensive speech that began with a moving personal account of his near-death encounter on Saturday, in which a shooter injured him in the ear, critically injured two others, and killed one of the president’s supporters, former fire chief Corey Comperatore. Trump began the speech by honoring Comperatore, displaying his firefighter uniform and kissing it in homage.
Much of Trump’s speech focused on President Joe Biden’s migration policies, accusing the Biden administration of insufficiently protecting the southern border, resulting in a surge of crime in America. The former president claimed that several Latin American countries – naming Venezuela and El Salvador in particular – were improving their national crime rates by “emptying out” their prisons into the United States.
“They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said. “They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.”
He then accused “a certain country” of getting “great publicity” through the strategy of harming America with migration – remarks that many interpreted as being directed at Bukele.
“A certain country, and I happen to like the president of that country very much, but he’s been getting great publicity because he’s a wonderful shepherd of the country,” Trump said, continuing”:
He says how well the country’s doing because their crime rate is down. And he said he’s training all of these rough people. They’re rough, rough, rough. He’s training them. And I’ve been reading about this for two years. I think, “Oh that’s wonderful; let’s take a look at it.” But then I realize he’s not training them; he’s sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States. And he’s different in that he doesn’t say that.
“He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job,” Trump concluded, adding that if he “ran one of the countries … I would be worse than any of them. I would have had the place totally emptied out already.”
Trump appeared to confirm that he was referring to Bukele later in the speech.
“In El Salvador, murders are down 70 percent. Why are they down?” he asked. “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.”
Bukele posted a message on Twitter during the speech, reading only, “taking the high road”:
Bukele repeatedly uses his platform on Twitter to attack the United States and appeared to eschew the “high road” on Saturday, when Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The Salvadoran president seemed to mock the United States as no longer being a free society, posting as news broke of the shooting, “Democracy?”:
Bukele’s office later posted a more tasteful official response to the shooting, reading in part, “President Bukele categorically condemns the assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump today in Pennsylvania.”
“President Bukele’s prayers are with President Trump and his family during this difficult time. He also wishes him a speedy recovery and hopes he regains his health soon,” the statement read. “There is no place for violence in a democracy. The people of El Salvador stand with the people of the United States in solidarity during this difficult time”:
El Salvador was experiencing some of the world’s highest violent crime rates before Bukele took office in 2019 as a result of a near-complete organized crime capture of the nation. Daily life for citizens was marred by routine extortion, death threats, and the capture of fundamental social areas such as schools, parks, and local businesses. The main culprits were members of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a gang that Bukele has blamed the United States for importing to El Salvador from California.
“MS-13 started in Los Angeles, in the U.S., because Salvadorans weren’t allowed to sell drugs by the Mexican gangs,” Bukele said in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson in June, in which he blamed former President Bill Clinton in part for the Salvadoran crime problem.
Crime rates have plummeted in El Salvador, as Trump suggested on Thursday. According to official Salvadoran statistics, the country documented one of the lowest homicide rates in its history in 2023: 154 homicides all year, compared to 495 a year before. Even media outlets critical of Bukele’s use of emergency decrees to greatly expand law enforcement operations in the country have conceded that gangs have largely disappeared from the daily life of residents, allowing families to return to parks and public spaces and locals to open businesses without being extorted.
FLASHBACK — Law and Order: El Salvador Builds “Mega Prison” to Eradicate Gangs
Presidency of the Republic of El Salvador via StoryfulBukele’s successes resulted in an overwhelming victory in El Salvador’s 2024 presidential election, receiving 85 percent of the vote. No major independent election observer or international institution questioned the legitimacy of the election results.
Bukele and Trump had a friendly working relationship while the latter served in the White House. Following President Joe Biden’s victory, however, Bukele has repeatedly used Trump’s legal challenges to disparage the United States as a whole.
“The United States has lost its ability to lecture any other country about ‘democracy,'” the Salvadoran president declared in December, when the Colorado Supreme Court attempted to remove Trump from the state ballot.
Following Trump’s indictment in New York in March 2023, Bukele similarly proclaimed, “It’ll be very hard for U.S. Foreign Policy to use arguments such as ‘democracy’ and ‘free and fair elections’ or try to condemn ‘political persecution’ in other countries from now on.”
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