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Front Burner Transcript for November 26, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: They said he's a strong man. Sometimes you need a strong man.

[Music: Theme]

JAYME POISSON: Hi there. I'm Jayme Poisson. After winning the American presidency earlier this month, the first international leader that Donald Trump met with was Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding, mutton-chopped, self-declared "anarcho-capitalist" president of Argentina, who over the past year has shut down half of the government's ministries and gutted spending by 30%. In August, when Nayib Bukele, the young president of El Salvador, who has referred to himself as the "world's coolest dictator," was inaugurated for a second term, his guests included some of the closest members of Trump's inner circle. While these two Latin American leaders have often been compared to Trump and are seen as taking cues from him, now it appears that Trump and his team are also taking cues from them. Call it a right-wing strongman feedback loop. So how have Bukele and Milei reshaped their respective countries for better and worse? And if Trump and his allies are indeed taking notes from them, what might we see from a new Trump administration? For that, I am joined by Tracy Wilkinson and Natalie Alcoba. Tracy is based in Washington, and she's been a journalist with the L.A. Times for decades in many countries, including several years as a correspondent in El Salvador. Natalie is an Argentine-Canadian journalist based in Buenos Aires.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Natalie, Tracy, thank you so much for coming on to Front Burner.

NATALIE ALCOBA: Hey there.

TRACY WILKINSON: Hi. Thank you for having us.

JP: I want to start by talking about Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. People might know him as the guy who made El Salvador the first country to adopt bitcoin as its official currency. But Tracy, just briefly, could you give us a sense of who he is and how he reshaped El Salvador over the past five years in office?

TRACY WILKINSON: Well, he came from neither of the main political parties that have ruled in El Salvador for decades, and so he was seen as something of an outsider, even though he served as mayor of San Salvador, the capital. He was young. He calls himself, as you mentioned, the coolest dictator now; millennial. He brought in crypto.

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NAYIB BUKELE: I don't know the exact number, but I would think around 5 million Salvadorans have been [indistinct] right now. We demonstrated that bitcoin could do a lot of good things.

TRACY WILKINSON: And he did a lot of things that seemed very modern.

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[Nayib Bukele speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Standing here before all of you at this 74th General Assembly is a privilege and an honour that I wanted to share with the world. Given that the world, the new world, is not here in this General Assembly, but rather out there where this photo will be seen and shared. And believe me, many more people will see that selfie once I share it, than will listen to this speech.

TRACY WILKINSON: And he also, most important, he managed to bring crime down. El Salvador was notoriously dangerous. Gangs controlled large parts of the country. And he has brought the crime rate down, the homicide rate down, and that has been welcomed by most Salvadorans. However, how he did it is where the controversy comes in. He basically jailed thousands of people.

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REPORTER 1: President Nayib Bukele and the national police touting the efforts on social media all week, citing over 2,000 arrests made in just four days. Tweeting also that those arrested would not be freed and announcing meals for incarcerated gang members would be cut to one a day.

TRACY WILKINSON: Today, about 1% of the entire national population is in jail. [JP: Mm-hmm.] With most of it without due process, no formal charging. They just, you know, may have gang affiliations, may not. And that has brought crime down. The statistics are a little unclear in terms of how low the homicide rate is. He would tell you that El Salvador is now the safest country in the Western Hemisphere. That is-- there's some dispute about that. There are reports that a lot of people have also just been killed and carted away into mass graves so that they don't inflate the homicide rate. So, there are a lot of questions about human rights and civil rights and dissent and political activism, all of those things being repressed in order to keep crime down.

JP: How has Bukele taken inspiration from Donald Trump, you think?

TRACY WILKINSON: Well, I think that Bukele, like Trump, is very much someone who doesn't really pay attention to the rules, to the Constitution. In fact, this second term that Bukele just ran for and won was constitutionally prohibited. [laughs] Presidents in El Salvador are not allowed to run twice, and so-- but he did it. And he got, you know, he got his buddies in Congress to sort of write a special clause for him. So Bukele definitely admires that in Trump: the willingness to flaunt the rules, to ignore the Constitution, and to use all power possible to enrich oneself and to rule as he sees fit.

[music]

JP: I know that you used to live in El Salvador many years ago as a correspondent for the L.A. Times, right. I know you've been there lots over the years, and you went back in August for the first time in a decade. And just what did you see of how the country has changed under Bukele?

TRACY WILKINSON: I can attest that it is safer. When I had left the last time a decade before, you literally could not go from one neighbourhood to the other if you weren't, you know, if you were wearing the wrong colors -- kind of like Crips and Blood in L.A., that kind of thing. And that you, you couldn't go to a school, people were just... I mean, the gangs really ruled entire neighbourhoods in the capital and other major cities. You wouldn't dare go out at night, you often couldn't go to your work. All of that has changed. You can go out at night. It is safer.

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REPORTER 2: The U.S. State Department lowered its travel advisory for El Salvador, citing a significant reduction in crime. It also warned that Bukele's emergency measures allow authorities to arrest anyone suspected of gang activity and suspend constitutional rights.

TRACY WILKINSON: But I also noticed a kind of dampening of what used to be a really high-spirited political activism and, you know, just spirit in the country. El Salvador was always known as the most industrious country in Central America because everyone was very much on the move and industrious, and a lot of political activism. And as I say, that all seemed to be tamped down dramatically.

JP: Right. And have there been crackdowns on his political opponents, on journalists? Can you tell me more about that?

TRACY WILKINSON: Definitely, definitely. Most independent journalists have either just shut up or have had to leave the country. There's a very well-respected, probably the best news organization in Central America, El Faro. Most of its members had to flee. And again, it wasn't a, it wasn't a threat of death. It was more using sort of lawsuits and accusing them of taking foreign money and accusing them of money laundering in those kinds of ways to kind of insidiously undercut them. And they still do publish, but they've-- most of their employees have had to leave the country. And most other press has to either be servile to Bukele and his government or pretty much not say much of anything.

JP: We talked earlier about how Bukele may have taken inspiration from Donald Trump, but we also know that influential people in Trump's inner circle are looking to Bukele for inspiration, right? A lot of very high-profile Trump allies flew down to El Salvador for Bukele's inauguration when he was re-elected. And can you tell me about that?

TRACY WILKINSON: It was quite the ceremony. The guests of honour were Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, a lot of members of the sort of U.S. right wing. There's a political action committee, conservative political action committee, which is very influential. They were there. Some Florida congresspeople were there. You know, kind of a lot of people from the MAGA world, from Trump world were there. And Carlson, Tucker Carlson, did a long interview with Bukele in which he just sort of gushed all over Bukele.

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NAYIB BUKELE: I could ask you, why did you come, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I came because I think something remarkable is happening here. That's why.

TUCKER CARLSON: That you've transformed the country in a good way and that you're literally the most popular elected leader in the world. Again, not speculation. Provable fact.

TRACY WILKINSON: And so what I think the Trumpsters get out of that is that they can point to a country where Bukele has done a lot of things that Trump has either done in the past or is talking about doing again, like breaking the rules and busting the institutions and so forth. And be such a popular leader. Whether he really-- whether Bukele really is or isn't is not the point. He has this image, he has this big PR firm telling the world that he's a very popular leader. So Trump and their people can say, hey, we can break all these rules and be really popular. You know, El Salvador's-- The United States is such a huge country, it doesn't really need El Salvador as a model. But it is a country that Trump and his people can point to. And also the whole Christian nationalism movement is very strong right now in El Salvador. So that's another element that Trump and his people can point to and say, here, look, you know, right in our-- you know, our next-door neighbours, all these things are working. We can do it, too.

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TUCKER CARLSON: "The first point of my plan is seek God's wisdom."

NAYIB BUKELE: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is what you said.

NAYIB BUKELE: Yeah, I said that. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would that be the first point of an economic plan?

NAYIB BUKELE: Why wouldn't it be? What should be the first part of the plan?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I think it should be.

NAYIB BUKELE: Yeah.

JP: I want to talk about Matt Gaetz specifically for a moment. He's the extremely controversial former Republican congressman that Trump initially tapped to be his attorney general, but who just withdrew his name the other day. But he actually, he took a tour of one of El Salvador's most notorious prisons and said that El Salvador should be a model for cracking down on crime in the U.S.

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MATT GAETZ: El Salvador is a country on the rise. Because people are safe and they are hopeful and they will be prosperous, and they will grow great families and great churches and great businesses. And all of that is possible because the people here are not committing the murders and committing the rapes and the robberies and all the things that stop a strong country from standing up and fulfilling its great destiny.

JP: Do we have a sense of if that's a sentiment that is shared by others close to Trump, that El Salvador should be a model for them when it comes to cracking down on crime?

TRACY WILKINSON: I think so. He, you know, again, tough on crime. It was very much part of the Republican platform. You know, I think Trump made some-- certain statements like, you know, a few bad days for some criminals, with, you know, cops-- implying that cops could just go and beat up criminals. That was the implication. And the equivalent would be, I guess, maybe also the treatment of migrants. You know, using the military to deport migrants from the United States is akin, I suppose, to rounding up gang members in El Salvador. So I do think they take some note that this has been a, a technique, a tactic, that has really worked in El Salvador, at least in terms of the superficial lowering of crime.

[music]

JP: Okay, Natalie, I'm going to bring you in here now. So you came on to the podcast last year to talk about Javier Milei when he had just become president of Argentina.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 3: A self-described anarcho-capitalist, he's unlike any leader the country has ever had.

REPORTER 4: The libertarian populist has promised to eliminate government agencies and favours outlawing abortion. He also supports legalizing the sale of human organs and calls global warming a socialist lie.

JP: Kind of like Bukele, he basically, he came out of nowhere. He wasn't affiliated with either of the two major parties in Argentina. And so now that he has been in power for a year, talk to me a bit about how he's reshaped Argentina.

NATALIE ALCOBA: Yeah. So I mean, Milei has pretty quickly put his self-described shock therapy to work here. So he's... I mean, and that's kind of across the gamut.

SOUNDCLIP

FEMALE SPEAKER: Tiene un Plan B?

MALE SPEAKER: Don't know a Plan B.

NATALIE ALCOBA: He's slashed half of the number of government ministries. He's dramatically reduced public spending, fired tens of thousands of public service employees. He's cut subsidies to energy, transit. He's also cut funding to public universities. And he's starting to work on deregulating things like health insurance and moving to privatize state agencies. He's also curtailed, I think we can say, he's curtailed public protest with new regulations that crackdown on where it can happen. And he's made a particular target out of the women's movement, which gained a lot of ground in the last few years, in particular when it comes to abortion legalization, which is something that he opposes. [JP: Mm-hmm.] I think in terms of on paper, his most impressive achievement so far has been around inflation, which is a chronic problem [JP: Right.] here in Argetina. I mean, the numbers are astronomical. The first-- Actually, the first month that he took office, inflation skyrocketed to 25%, in part because he devalued the currency. But he's managed to drive that down to the last-- the last figure that we have for the month of October is less than 3%, which is an incredibly low number.

JP: Yeah. Sorry, I know he's gotten a lot of praise for that, but I understand there's a flipside to it, too, right? There's a recession.

NATALIE ALCOBA: Right, of course. Yes, there is a flipside. There's a recession and poverty has gone up. So Argentina also has been suffering through high levels of poverty for several years. But in this first half, it's the first half of this year, poverty jumped 11 points. So that now it's 52%, and the child poverty rate in particular is more than 60%.

JP: Wow.

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REPORTER 5: In the first six months of the Milei administration, 10,000 businesses closed and 182,000 jobs were lost.

[Unidentified speaker speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: How much do the tomatoes cost?

REPORTER 5: Mariano owns a grocery shop in a middle class district of central Buenos Aires.

[Grocery shop owner speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: People don't have any more money, that's the reality. My customers buy by the units -- one banana, one tomato. And we do the same thing.

JP: Can you tell me more about how you can see the impacts of that on the streets and people's day-to-day lives?

NATALIE ALCOBA: Yeah. I mean, the numbers tell us that inflation has gone down, is driven down, but it's still incredibly difficult for people to meet-- to make ends meet. The same kind of notion that occurred before of not really being able to grasp what it is that something's worth and being able to see different sorts of prices in different places continues to this day. You know, dramatic levels of, you know, people losing their work, losing their jobs. But really, you know, aside from inflation on certain goods coming down, these other elements of people's day-to-day expenses -- you know, how much it costs for them to get around on transit, what they pay for utility bills, what their health insurance costs, what rent costs -- all of that has gone up significantly. And so you really, you really do feel a palpable sense of people being stretched. And yet, support for Milei is still strong. He's still... you know, he's dropped a bit in support, but he's still, you know, above 40%, which is a high number a year into his mandate.

JP: I know very soon into Milei's rise, media started drawing these comparisons between him and Trump. And just tell me more about why.

NATALIE ALCOBA: Yeah. So yeah, so it was... You know, now we're kind of used to seeing the two of them kind of spoken about in the same sentence. But at the time, it was something that the media started to pull out. You know, this idea of them both being populist outsiders, they both had this message that was considered to be anti-establishment or anti-political class. You know, Milei often talked about, you know, corrupt politicians, and that was where he said that a lot of the savings could be found. The politicians aren't spending your money correctly. They both have this... they had this kind of unvarnished, sometimes really aggressive rhetoric. So the way they spoke, this flamboyant way of speaking was also similar. And they have this... you know, they both with this mop of hair, this, this look, um, that, you know, can kind of come across in a similar way. They both rose to public notoriety on television. So there were a lot of superficial parallels, even if, you know, their politics may be different.

[music]

JP: You know, I know another of Milei's fans is Elon Musk, right. He and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy will be leading up this new unofficial department in Trump's government -- DOGE, short for the Department of Government Efficiency -- which is supposed to be about cutting spending. And what kind of admiration has Musk expressed for Milei and his policies?

NATALIE ALCOBA: Yeah, Musk has been, Musk has been like a superfan since the early days. And by the early days, I mean in the campaign. He's been pretty effusive with his praise of Milei through his comments on X. When Milei actually won the presidency, he posted-- Like, the photo that Musk chose to post on X of Milei was one in which Milei was posing with a 'Don't Tread on Me' flag. And Musk said that, you know, prosperity is coming, is coming back to Argentina. I mean, I think it's-- I think we should also note that Musk has interests in Argentina. His Starlink satellite internet service got approval to operate in Argentina just a couple of months after Milei took office after his government deregulated internet services. But so, most recently, we've seen this back and forth between Musk and Ramaswamy talking about the way in which Milei has approached government cutbacks, and Milei even going so far as offering pointers to the two of them through an interview, where he tells them...

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MILEI TRANSLATOR: My advice would be for them to go all the way, to push it to the very limit. And do not give up. Do not let down their guard.

NATALIE ALCOBA: And Ramaswamy actually also posting on X that what the U.S. needed was Milei-style cuts on steroids.

JP: And just, coming back to Trump, I mean, Milei has succeeded, I think it's fair for me to say, in making these inroads with Trump.

NATALIE ALCOBA: Yeah, definitely. I mean, they've both cultivated this public sense of camaraderie and esteem between the two of them, Trump and Milei. Trump congratulated Milei after his victory.

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DONALD TRUMP: A very special congratulations to Javier Milei on a great race for president of Argentina. The whole world was watching, and I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around...

NATALIE ALCOBA: Milei of course did the same. A week after Trump's election, the two had-- apparently had a phone call, in which, according to Milei's spokesman, Trump called Milei his favourite president. And then they also met. Milei was the first leader with whom Trump met in person at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, where Milei spoke. It was an America First Policy event, and he, you know, had such turns of phrases like, "The winds of freedom are blowing much stronger."

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[Javier Milei speaking Spanish]

[music]

JP: Tracy, before we go today, I wonder if I could bring you back in now. So Argentina and El Salvador are obviously very different countries from the United States. But if you're looking at all of this, what might it all mean for the U.S. and how the incoming Trump administration might try to incorporate these ideas? Just big picture here.

TRACY WILKINSON: Well, as I mentioned, you know, the Trump administration is going to be looking at pointing to a country that has had success in cracking down on crime, in promoting, you know, Christian nationalist values. Something that Natalie mentioned, it's true in El Salvador, too. Bukele is very opposed to abortion, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, etc. And so any time that the Trump conservatives can point to a country where all of that is working, it's good for them. It just, it kind of is a mutual validation. You know, it vindicates what they're doing. And one other point is that Bukele claims that because of all of the success he claims to be having, immigration from El Salvador to the United States, illegal immigration, has come down. And of course, that's something that Trump very much values. And... I'm not sure that it's true. I mean, there have been dips in the numbers, but that can be seasonal, too. So we'd have to see more data. But that is something that definitely Trump and his people will be looking at and saying, you know, see? See, we can make it work.

JP: And just finally, Tracy, as Trump and his administration strengthen alliances with strongmen leaders like this, this kind of love fest, what could that mean for the rest of the world?

TRACY WILKINSON: Well, it's interesting, because, you know, in his first administration, Trump was not liked at world fora like the UN, NATO. He was very dismissive of NATO, as you recall. And this left him very few friends in the world. And it may be part-- well, his own admiration, but it has also, you know, drove him even further into the arms of Vladimir Putin in Russia, the Koreans, the Chinese, etc. And so now, if he can broaden this kind of pool of autocrats who admire him and he can at least for a while admire, it just seems to... in his view, would sort of add to his kind of standing on the world stage, which was lacking in the first administration.

JP: Okay. Tracy, Natalie, I want to thank you very much for being here today. That was great.

TRACY WILKINSON: Thank you.

NATALIE ALCOBA: Thank you.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, I am Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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Trump and the strongman feedback loop - Transcript

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