Donald Trump’s meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at the White House today was a case study in showmanship.

Bukele revelled in hostile questions from the American press, grinning widely as he claimed that it would be “preposterous” to return a person whom the Trump administration mistakenly deported to his country. Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and Pam Bondi all took turns offering vehement defences of the White House’s immigration policy, particularly in relation to the murky legality of these migrant deportations to El Salvador.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the visit has infuriated liberals across the country. As they saw it, these were two authoritarian leaders willingly dispensing with rule of law and due process in their respective countries. But what they fail to understand is that, beyond the optics and rhetoric, Trump’s approach to dealmaking with foreign leaders has more going on beneath the surface.

Yes, he’s flattered everyone from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping. But on Putin, for example, Trump in his first term would speak warmly while also arming Ukraine. Biden, on the other hand, would trash Putin while waiving sanctions on Nord Stream 2. Trump’s logic is that it makes no sense to engage in transactions for the sake of peace or diplomacy if you’re undermining your interests by insulting the other side.

This is controversial, but the alternative remains double-standard diplomacy, wherein US officials amplify the wrongs of our enemies and ignore the wrongs of our allies, feigning love or hate to keep up appearances for the sake of politics over substance. We’ve yet to fully discover which approach is less awful.

This is how Joe Biden treated Bukele. There was an incredible Associated Press story published last June with the headline: “US dampens criticism of El Salvador’s president as migration overtakes democracy concerns”. What changed? Biden recognised that Bukele’s approach to mass migration worked, and in a way that benefited the US. So the Salvadoran president went from a target to a partner (the Biden administration even sent a delegation to Bukele’s inauguration), and the rhetoric shifted from hostile to friendly.

In fact, Bukele’s anti-democratic bent went from being a grave concern to a secondary priority when Biden noted how El Salvador was decreasing the flow of migrants to the Mexican border. The Salvadoran President accepted more than $600 million in aid from 2019 to 2022, the bulk of which came during Biden’s presidency as the US sought to tear El Salvador away from China.

At least with Trump, his cooperation with Bukele isn’t dressed up in faux-democratic packaging. Western diplomacy is often performative, but the current President is just less wedded to the political game and more interested in approaching negotiations like business. That may be good or bad, but it’s at least more transparently transactional. Like his approach to Russia during his first term, Trump may be adopting a harder line behind closed doors.

It’s also possible that Trump sincerely likes Bukele. They’ve both expressed the same fondness for Napoleon’s sentiment that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” They both love showmanship and social media. They both believe it’s in their country’s interest to orchestrate dramatic crackdowns on crime.

In the end, Trump’s unapologetic style doesn’t make him an outlier —it makes him the clearest expression of American foreign policy instincts. His bluntness strips away the usual pretences of American foreign policy, exposing the transactional nature that’s always been there. And in Bukele, he’s found a counterpart who thrives in the same theatre, where power speaks louder than principle, and appearances are just another tool of the trade.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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