MIKEY SMITH: 6 dictator-esque things Donald Trump did in 24 hours as he threatens US citizens

A lot of people think Donald Trump is modelling himself on Vladimir Putin.

Autocratic leader. Ageing strongman. Says weird things and locks up people who disagree with him.

But last night, the US got a proper glimpse of another autocratic, antidemocratic leader Donald Trump is paying a lot of attention.

He sat down in the Oval Office with Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador - and it was pretty chummy.

The pair laughed and joked about locking up US citizens in a foreign prison with no possibility of appeal or parole, and little by way of due process.

And they, of course, had a laugh and a joke at the expense of the media - who dared to ask some pretty normal questions. Like "what on Earth?"

Here's how Trump burnished his authoritarian credentials yesterday.

So Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador visited the White House yesterday.

If you're not familiar, 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, a mega prison with a capacity for 40,000 prisoners, where conditions are exceptionally harsh.

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" - a term regular readers of our Trump roundups will be familiar with.

So now we're all caught up, what does this have to do with Trump?

Well, the Trump administration has been rounding up people they claim to be gang members and deporting them, without any trial or due process and deporting them to, you've guessed it, El Salvador.

More or less directly to the CECOT gulag.

At least one of the arrests and deportations that we know of was illegal and accidental.

the Trump administration admitted to mistakenly deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran father of a 5-year-old disabled child.

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a US citizen has no criminal record in the US.

And after fleeing gang threats in El Salvador to the US in 2011, aged 16, he was granted protected legal status known as "withholding of removal" from a judge who found he would be targeted by gangs if he was deported back.

He's now in CECOT, with no way of contacting his family or lawyers. Despite the Supreme Court ordering him to be brought back to the US, the White House has refused.

Before the press was allowed into the Oval Office, this delightful moment was caught on the live feed being beamed back to El Salvador.

In a quiet moment, Trump and Bukele can be heard chatting about how great his brutal, authoritarian crackdown is, and how it's great they're deporting so many people to El Salvador.

Then Trump, chillingly, says: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."

Later in an interview with (who else) Fox News, Trump elaborated.

"I call them homegrown criminals," he said. "The ones that grew up and something went wrong and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat and push people into subways.

"We are looking into it and we want to do it. I would love to do it."

Returning to the case of Kilmar Abredo Garcia, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Supreme Court had only said the White House had to "facilitate" his return to the US - as in, if El Salvador want to release him, they'll send a plane.

So would they release him, Bukele was asked?

"How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it," he replied. "The question is preposterous."

Trump sat next to him, smirking, and referring to the media outlets who asked the question - whether he would release an apparently innocent man who has a wife and family in the US so he can come home - as "sick people".

The Constitution of El Salvador says Presidents are only allowed to serve for one five-year term, after which they have to wait 10 years to run again.

Which might lead you to ask why, after having been first elected in 2019, Bukele came to be elected for a second time last year?

Well, in 2021, the Salvadoran Supreme Court ..."reinterpreted" the Constitution, saying it was totally OK to run for another term as long as he took six months off before the election.

Why does some of this sound familiar?

Last week, a federal judge ordered the White House to stop blocking the Associated Press from Presidential events and Oval Office press conferences.

In a particularly petulant strop from the Trump administration, the news agency was banned after they refused to start calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

But US district judge Trevor N McFadden - a Trump appointee - said they had to let them back in, or they'd be in breach of the first amendment.

Regular readers will recall we predicted the Trump administration would simply ignore this ruling and continue to block AP from the Oval Office, because Donald Trump is an authoritarian who cares not even a little bit for courts or laws.

Well, guess who wasn't welcome in the Oval Office for Bukele's sit down with Trump?

The Trump administration is appealing the decision and arguing with the news outlet over whether it needs to change anything until those appeals are exhausted.

The US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit set a Thursday hearing on Trump's request that any changes be delayed while case is reviewed.

The White House says it’s freezing more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University, after the institution said it would defy the Trump administration’s demands to limit protests on campus.

Trump's administration had called for broad government and leadership reforms at the university, as well as changes to its admissions policies. It also demanded the university audit views of diversity on campus, and stop recognising some student clubs.

Harvard President Alan Garber said the university would not bend to the government's demands - making them the first of seven targeted universities to refuse.

He said in a statement: "The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights...

"No government - regardless of which party is in power - should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue."

He added: "Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration."

In response, Trump took to Truth Social and threatened to also revoke Harvard's charitable status.