El Salvador’s leader is offering his giant prison for U.S. deportees and punitive populism as a model.

Who is Nayib Bukele? 
He’s the 43-year-old president of El Salvador, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and a “philosopher king.” Since his 2019 election, Bukele has consolidated power in the Central American nation and presents himself as a tech-savvy, 21st-century leader. Highly image-conscious, he is active on social media, often dresses in black, is fond of leather jackets, and sports a sharply sculpted beard. Bukele has successfully made war on the violent gangs who once terrorized the country, but at a price: El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 1 in 13 young men behind bars—some as young as 12. A single anonymous tipster’s phone call can land someone in a teeming, overcrowded jail, where unsanitary conditions, torture, and ritual humiliation await. But because gang violence has subsided, Bukele has an 83 percent approval rating, and he offered his hard-line policies as a model for the U.S. at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “How many young people have you lost to the streets of Philadelphia or San Francisco to fentanyl?” he asked. “Dark forces are already taking over your country.”

How did he become president? 
By exploiting widespread disillusionment with El Salvador’s corrupt, incompetent leadership. Bukele was born into a large, wealthy Christian Palestinian family: His grandfather arrived in El Salvador in 1921, and his father converted to Islam, became an imam and public relations magnate, and launched the country’s first McDonald’s. (Bukele is not religious but says he’s Christian.) After running some small businesses and a political advertising firm, he entered politics and became mayor of San Salvador in 2015. Four years later, he launched a mostly online campaign for the presidency as an anti-corruption maverick, demanding of establishment opponents that “you bastards return what’s been stolen!” At 37, he became the country’s youngest-ever leader and immediately installed his brothers, other relatives, and friends in his cabinet.

How has he governed? 
With “la mano dura”—an iron fist. He has fired judges, used troops to intimidate legislators, and gerrymandered the country’s electoral districts to benefit his New Ideas party, which now has a supermajority. Journalists and activists have found their phones hacked and their messages drowned out by swarms of paid online trolls. At first, Bukele reportedly worked with the country’s two main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, to limit violence. But when they killed 87 people one March 2022 weekend, he immediately declared a monthlong “state of exception,” which he has since renewed 33 times. Police with triple-digit daily-arrest quotas raided homes and made warrantless arrests. Tens of thousands of gang members were given mass trials and jailed; human rights groups estimate at least 25,000 of the 100,000 prisoners are not criminals and attribute nearly 300 prison deaths to torture. Former prisoners have reported enduring frequent beatings, sharing one toilet among 150 people, sleeping in excrement, and eating just two meager meals a day. In 2023, Bukele opened the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, for 40,000 prisoners. The government has vowed the inmates “will never leave” unless they’re in a coffin. “Everything in life has a cost,” Bukele says, “and the cost of being called authoritarian is too small to bother me much.”

What do Salvadorans think?
Independent polls show overwhelming support for Bukele. A decade ago, gang violence had made El Salvador a de facto war zone, with an unrivaled homicide rate of 105 per 100,000 people. By 2023, an independent researcher found, it fell to 4.5 per 100,000—just under the U.S. murder rate. Residents who once feared leaving their homes to buy food say they now let their children play in the street. “We’re starting to feel security,” said Nöe del Cid, who was partially paralyzed by gunfire in 2003. “He took the action that we needed him to take.”

Who else supports Bukele?
In Latin America, political parties in Honduras, Ecuador, and elsewhere cite Bukele’s name and promise to follow his tough-on-crime approach. “La mano dura” has fans in the Trump administration, too. In February, Bukele offered to rent out space in CECOT for U.S. migrant deportees, and when the first flights landed in March, his X profile was brimming with retweets of praise from Elon Musk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other Trump allies. “Needs to happen and will happen in the U.S.,” Musk tweeted.

Does Bukele have a vulnerability?
Yes—El Salvador’s economy. Despite a sharp decline in crime, the impoverished country has seen little foreign investment, and Bukele’s spending on security, Covid aid, and splashy infrastructure projects helped push the country’s public debt to 84 percent of its GDP. He has promoted government investment in cryptocurrency and now claims he can produce revenue with forced labor at CECOT through a “Zero Idleness” program. The Trump administration is paying El Salvador $6 million to house deported migrants, and Bukele has offered to house additional thousands of American-born prisoners, including citizens convicted of crimes. “You have 350 million people to liberate,” Bukele told him. “To liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. We’re very eager to help.”

The Bitcoin bust 
In 2021, Bukele declared El Salvador the first nation to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender. His government set up 200 cryptocurrency ATMs and an app that gave each Salvadoran citizen $30 worth of Bitcoin. He attempted to turn a seaside town into “Bitcoin Beach,” and announced plans for a “Bitcoin City” fueled by geothermal energy. But with 70 percent of Salvadorans lacking bank accounts and nearly a third lacking internet access, only 12 percent of them wound up participating. When the value of Bitcoin tanked in 2022, Bukele tweeted that those affected should “stop looking at the graph and enjoy life.” Despite its lack of success, Bukele has continued his policy of adding to the country’s Bitcoin holdings, recently valued at more than $550 million. “It won’t stop now, and it won’t stop in the future,” he recently posted on X.

There’s a “long list of liberal politicians who are mad as hell,” said John Hendrickson in The Atlantic, but Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are two of the few who genuinely “aren’t going to take it anymore.” They’ve been criss-crossing the country on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, drawing at least 200,000 people to their rallies. They’re visiting blue and red states alike, filling stadiums in Arizona, Idaho, and Montana. “The American left’s favorite double act” is “filling the void of opposition” left by Democratic leadership. Sanders has been railing against billionaires for decades, but “his rhetoric has never been more resonant” as the stock market nose-dives and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, guts the federal bureaucracy. At 83, Sanders is nearing his career’s end, but 35-year-old Ocasio-Cortez is hitting her prime, raising questions about a presidential run in 2028. “We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us,” she said to 36,000 people in Los Angeles. She and Sanders are “attacking apathy”— even if that means “targeting timid Democrats.” 

All this might please the rallygoers, but it’s “not exactly a fresh shtick,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. Since January, Democratic voters have sought “futile, emotive gestures” from their representatives, and these two are the first to supply them. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez play to their democratic-socialist base by blaming every woe on economic inequality. Of course their “magical misery tour” is packing arenas, but it only proves “the market for retributive paranoia is not yet saturated.” 

Not everyone is “feeling the Bern,” said Perry Bacon Jr. in The Washington Post. This tour’s success doesn’t mean rank-and-file Democrats are “clamoring for the party to become more progressive.” What they want are leaders who will not be “so hesitant to take on President Trump and Elon Musk.” The fear of Trump’s retaliation cuts across parties. “We are all afraid,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said last week. Democrats are looking for fighters who will overcome those fears. It will take “a mass countermovement” to combat Trump, said David Brooks in The New York Times. AOC and Sanders provide a “hint of something larger,” but their “partisan rallies” make this look like “a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans”—and what’s happening isn’t normal. I’m “not a movement guy” and “don’t naturally march,” but Trump is “shackling the greatest institutions in American life.

For Jon Hamm, things often take time, said Austin Considine in The New York Times. The actor rose to fame relatively late, in Hollywood terms, after hooking the role of the enigmatic Don Draper in Mad Men in his mid-30s. “I was a late bloomer in every sense,” Hamm says. His mother died when he was 10, and he lost his father a decade later. His life has shared some of the darkness of Draper’s. For a long time, Hamm says, he wasn’t able to “really participate in life in the way that my friends that had normal adolescences” did. He was, as his therapist used to say, “kind of surviving.” 

When Mad Men ended, the strains and struggles returned. Hamm kept working, but often in supporting roles, and when he did get star turns on the big screen, the results were middling. His personal life was plagued by demons: He separated from his longtime partner and entered rehab for alcohol addiction, and reporters dug up an old fraternity incident in which Hamm was charged with hazing but ultimately not convicted. Now he’s finally “part of the conversation again,” starring as another brooding character trying to hold on to success in his new Apple TV+ show, Your Friends & Neighbors. “There’s no way over but through, right?” Hamm says. “Part of the challenge is having the wherewithal, having the confidence, to say, ‘It’s going to take a minute.’”