New Verb: To Bukele a Problem

The European Conservative magazine has coined a new verb, and I like it a lot.

President @nayibbukele agrees, you should check out our latest commentary by @ChrisMid 👇https://t.co/E34595PWtW https://t.co/NUL20xVc8g

— The European Conservative (@EuroConOfficial) October 27, 2025

It is a variation on the verb "to Trump," but unlike Trumping, to Bukele a problem is to solve it without driving half the world insane with rage. 

"To Trump" is to solve intractable problems while trolling one's enemies.

Of course, Bukele had much easier enemies to conquer. They were only murderous gang members and drug traffickers, with some communist revolutionaries in the mix. Sure, they were tough hombres, but at least they didn't own the mindshare of every cultural institution in the country. 

Trump has to face real poisonous vipers: Democrats, the transnational elite, and almost every media outlet in the world. And he can't round them all up and imprison them. Despite all the claims that Trump is HITLERSTALINMUSSOLINI, he actually remains bound by the law and respects our Constitution. 

It is impossible to overstate the challenges Bukele faced when he assumed office. El Salvador was the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere, which, with the exception of Africa, is the most violent and corrupt part of the world--at least south of our border. Bukele took this failed state and made it one of the safest in the world. 

Bukele is now a verb. To ‘Bukele’ something is to fix a problem that liberals say is ‘too complicated’ by simply ignoring their long-winded excuses and just doing the obvious. It is named after the leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has turned a country that was once dubbed the murder capital of the world into one of the safest. 

Meanwhile, Britain, once Europe’s most orderly nation, is mired in rape gangs, knife crime, and shoplifting. The UK doesn’t need Bukele-style mega-prisons, but it certainly needs his clarity.

The problem is that our elites in Westminster have mastered the art of inaction, cloaking their cowardice in excuses about complexity and human rights. They wring their hands over ‘systemic’ issues, treat illegal migration like an unsolvable cosmic mystery, and turn a blind eye to the mass rape of British girls in the name of diversity. 

This has led to a feeling among the public that order is breaking down: our borders are wide open, women no longer feel safe going out alone at night, and shops are looted with impunity. A country that once prided itself on being high-trust is now sliding into suspicion and fear. 

Ask any bloke in the pub, and they’ll tell you the obvious: stop the boats, lock up the criminals, protect the public. But for our elites, this is far too risky if it means a scathing editorial in The Guardian. It’s not resources or nuance they lack; it’s the spine to act.

Is Britain incapable of restoring order? Or is it simply unwilling? 

As Bukele, and to a lesser but still significant extent, Trump, have shown is that so-called "intractable" problems are not insoluble, but rather require intestinal fortitude to solve. 

Further, as El Salvador and, again, to a lesser but significant extent, America show, the longer you let problems fester, the harsher one has to be to solve them. Bukele's success in  cleaning up El Salvador required using extraordinary means, but the result has been a much freer El Salvador despite the necessity of using harsh tactics. 

The same has been true for solving our border crisis. Weakness caused the crisis, but Trump has shown that all the tools were available as long as the executive was willing to use them. The biggest obstacle to success has been our elite, not the inability of our institutions to do what needed to be done. 

Of course, Bukele’s model is not cost-free. He declared a state of emergency and arrested tens of thousands. Civil liberties were suspended, due process curtailed, and anyone suspected of gang ties could be taken off the streets—sometimes based on nothing more than having the wrong tattoo or address.

But Salvadorans judged that risk preferable to daily terror. They accepted the chance of a wrongful arrest over the certainty of being robbed or killed. 

Crime is itself a form of tyranny, and it can rob people of freedom more effectively than the state. Bukele chose to break that tyranny and give freedom back to his people. 

That’s a calculation Britain’s elites can’t even fathom, because they never have to face the consequences of their own cowardice. Britain doesn’t need to copy Bukele’s extreme methods, but his success shows that safety and liberty can rise together.

And this is what makes it so tragic. Britain gave the world habeas corpus and trial by jury—the very principles that once guaranteed our rights under the law. Yet, today, we’ve twisted the idea of ‘human rights’ into a parody, where violent offenders are shielded from deportation on grounds as absurd as their children not liking the chicken nuggets in their home country. 

We don't need to adopt the tactics that Bukele was forced to use to rebuild his broken society, but unless we get our act cleaned up, we (and Great Britain) will have to one day or face the collapse of our society. Britain is much farther along the path to societal collapse due to its even more enthusiastic embrace of Islamists and coddling of their sensibilities, but if we follow the path of our liberal elites, we may someday face the choice of severe crackdowns that will make raids on Home Depots look quaint. 

Societies are much more fragile than the elite seems to think. One of the things our Founders and the people who built our country understood was that building and maintaining a free society was hard and took real maintenance. Our current elite has inherited a society that was built over generations and is squandering the inheritance at an alarming rate, assuming that it exists as a permanent structure, and not a carefully balanced practical project. 

It would be like being gifted an F-35 and flying it with abandon without maintaining it, or being handed the Gerald R. Ford and not taking care of it. In other words, it would be the same as handing our military to the Russians—they would turn it into scrap within a generation. 

So what would it actually mean for Britain to ‘do a Bukele’ or ‘pull an El Salvador’?

It wouldn’t mean tanks in the streets or abolishing Parliament. It would mean a government finally willing to carry out its fundamental role: protecting the British people.

It would mean mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders, building enough prisons to end early releases, and immediate deportation of foreign criminals without endless appeals. It would also mean restoring public trust by finally rooting out the officials who were complicit in covering up the grooming gangs for decades. 

But most of all, it would mean a decisive shift in focus: Protect the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of the criminal minority.

None of this is complicated. It only sounds impossible if you’ve spent too long marinating in the excuses of a political class that’s forgotten why it was elected in the first place.

Why can a small, war-torn nation like El Salvador restore order, while Britain, with its global legacy, wallows in chaos? Bukele prioritises his people’s safety over elite approval, while our leaders prioritise policing speech over cracking down on actual crime.

Britain doesn’t need Bukele’s mega-prisons. But it does need the one thing our leaders lack: the will to protect the rights of ordinary people. Because without safety, there is no freedom.

Trump is doing a Bukele (and vice versa), and unlike that war-torn country, Trump faces an enemy that is much more difficult to defeat: our entire political and cultural establishment. Deporting illegal aliens would be a million times easier if the Democrats joined in the effort and the media didn't focus on sob stories. 

Throwing gang-bangers in jail is a million times easier, in an odd way, than fighting a political establishment that is determined to destroy the country. 

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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