President Donald Trump’s press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was, at heart, an authoritarian political performance.

This was clearest in their discussion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man that the Trump administration seized and then erroneously sent (by its own admission) to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. The two men were sneeringly dismissive of the court order requiring his return, offering an obviously absurd argument that neither country could facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.

“This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court — and for the rule of law,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer explains.

This is par for the course for Bukele. Though elected to El Salvador’s presidency, he’s since governed as an out-and-out dictator who suspended civil liberties indefinitely, blatantly violated the Salvadoran constitution’s limit on consecutive terms, and sent the military into the Salvadoran legislature to force them to vote the way that he wanted. Bukele doesn’t care what the Salvadoran courts or constitution says; he has enough power that he can simply do what he wants.

Trump’s second-term record suggests he aspires to that kind of power. But he doesn’t have it. He’s operating in a system where........

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