One afternoon last year, Donald Trump welcomed “a friend” to the White House – El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, the world’s most popular authoritarian. “I knew him as a very young man,” the US president said before the cameras. “He’s done a fantastic job. Mr President, it’s an honor to have you.”

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Throughout Trump’s exile from power, Bukele stayed close to Maga, spending more than $1.5m to lobby Maga figures such as Donald Trump Jr., senator Ted Cruz, then senator Marco Rubio, senator Mike Lee, representative Lauren Boebert, and former representative Matt Gaetz, according to Mother Jones. In time, Bukele emerged as a Maga luminary himself – the poster boy for strongman solutions.

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Bukele’s blueprint happens to mirror a different one: the sequential architecture for consolidating power outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report, which would become Trump 2.0’s policy roadmap. We can’t know that the report took inspiration from El Salvador. But the Heritage Foundation lavished praise on Bukele as early as 2019, and Project 2025 was drafted over the first year of his state of emergency. Much of what Project 2025 proposes is what Bukele had by then accomplished: turning tens of thousands of civil service positions into political appointments; increasing the president’s control over the levers of justice; deploying the military domestically; crippling unions; targeting media.

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At one of the largest ICE camps in the country, in Texas, human rights groups collected accounts from detainees describing officers who crushed men’s testicles, stomped on them, and beat them while handcuffed. Three men died there in six weeks; one death ICE attributed first to “medical distress”, then to a suicide attempt, before the medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Thirty-six Texas state house Democrats have cited “numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment” and demanded an investigation. As historian Andrea Pitzer said in the New York Times, “the point isn’t that they hide it. The point is to instill terror on the society as a whole.” Brutality on the streets and secrecy in the camps work together: “the goal is always to use one group as an example of what can happen to everybody.”

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