The US President will make an as-yet unspecified announcement from the Oval Office tonight – after it emerged a deeply controversial world leader is in Washington for a visit
Donald Trump is set to make a mystery announcement tonight in the Oval Office – as El Salvador’s far-right leader made an unexpected visit to the US.
Nayib Bukele was a surprise guest at Trump’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning. His government has presided over a brutal crackdown on gangs – has been very close to Trump since his re-election.
He was invited to Washington to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning – an annual event gathering faith leaders and politicians. Bukele has been exceptionally successful at reducing the crime rate in El Salvador, mainly through a brutal crackdown on gang membership.
He increased prison sentences for gang members from 3-5 years to 20-30 years and reduced the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 12. He launched a nationwide crackdown, arresting and detaining some 85,000 people over the course of three years. Many of them are held in CECOT, which is said to have capacity to hold as many as 40,000.
Human rights groups have raised concerns that the arrests were largely arbitrary, and had little to do with gang violence – suggesting Bukele had used them to consolidate his own power and to target critics of his Presidency. Many arrests were based on the suspect’s appearance, tattoos or location. Human Rights Watch said the government’s policy had been “first arrest, then tweet, and investigate later”. On the other hand, in El Salvador he and his crackdown is incredibly popular with those who haven’t been arrested and thrown in the gulag.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. In 2019, when he was trying to get the legislature to sign off funding for his crackdown, he called for his supporters to surround the Assembly building and ordered 40 soldiers into the meeting to coerce legislators into approving it. Opposition politicians have described this as a “self-coup”.
Meanwhile, concerns are growing that Trump is gearing up to undermine the 2026 midterm elections. The US President will address the nation from the White House at midnight UK time – but the topic has yet to be confirmed.
Trump’s focus in recent days has been on his long-running claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him – which has been repeatedly and conclusively proven false. Yet he continues to use the federal government’s resources to “investigate” the result of six years ago, insisting the election was rigged. And in an interview broadcast last night he refused to commit to accepting the result of November’s elections if Republicans are dealt a hefty defeat in the poll.