After ridding his country of violent gangs, one world leader is crediting God with his administration’s success. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele discussed the satanic practices of the MS-13 gang, the “spiritual war” facing the Western world, and how his administration took El Salvador from being the murder capital of the world to the second-safest nation in the Western hemisphere.

“They didn’t start as a satanic organization,” Bukele said of Mara Salvatrucha, the international gang better known as MS-13. “At the beginning, it was some youth causing harm, assaulting, trying to control their territory, selling drugs, things that are bad but probably not criminal.”

“As the organization grew, they became satanic. They started doing satanic rituals,” Bukele explained. “I don’t know exactly when that started, but it was well documented. And we now arrested — we’ve even found altars and things like that … they became a satanic organization.” The Salvadoran president recalled an interview conducted with an imprisoned former member of MS-13, who told of a satanic child sacrifice ritual. The former gang member claimed to have killed so many people that he had lost count of his victims, but said that he went to meet with other MS-13 members and found that they were planning to murder a baby. “And he, the killer that had killed tens of people, said, ‘Oh well wait, what are we doing? Why are we going to kill that baby?’” Bukele recalled of the interview. “And they told him, ‘Because the Beast asked for a baby, so we have to give him a baby.’”

‘A Miracle’ Victory against Gangs

After being elected president in 2019, Bukele implemented his “Territorial Control Plan,” an effort to drastically reduce crime, particularly homicide, in El Salvador. MS-13 was one of his administration’s chief targets. In March of 2022, responding to increased government law enforcement efforts, gang members killed almost 90 people over a single weekend. “When the gangs started attacking us back, basically, they killed 87 people in three days, which for a country of six million people, it’s crazy,” Bukele explained. “It would be the equivalent of having 5,000 murders in the United States in three days.” He continued, “If the state goes after them, the state has no intention of killing or harming anybody but the gang members — so you have 70,000 objectives, which were the 70,000 gang members, but they have six million possible targets.”

Bukele then launched a more severe nationwide crackdown against gangs, bolstered by the Salvadoran legislature’s declaration of a “state of exception,” which suspended the rights of association and legal counsel and extended the time suspects could be detained without charges. By the end of the year, homicides in El Salvador had plummeted by almost 60%, and as of this year, nearly 80,000 suspected gang members have been arrested. “There’s a spiritual war and there’s a physical war,” Bukele commented. “Our impressive victory was because we won the spiritual war.”

Referring to the successful anti-gang crackdown as a “miracle,” Bukele attributed the endeavor’s success to prayer. “I can tell you the official formula and the real formula,” Bukele said. “So the official formula is that we did a plan ... that was comprised of phases. So we rolled out the first phase and then the next one, then the next one. And then gangs started attacking back, so we had to roll out everything at once.” This official formula necessitated increasing the size of El Salvador’s military and ensuring soldiers were armed and trained properly to fight the gangs.

The unofficial formula, Bukele said, was prayer. When launching the anti-gang crackdown, Bukele says he told his cabinet and government officials, “We are looking into an impossible mission here, so we pray.” He recalled that he would pray daily for wisdom, victory, and the protection of his people. “It’s a miracle,” Bukele said. “Because [we] didn’t have competition. I mean, they were satanic. I think that made it easier.”

‘The Greatest Campaign Ever’

The Salvadoran president also offered advice to embattled former U.S. President Donald Trump. When asked what advice he has for a fellow “formally democratically elected leader who is facing jail time,” Bukele replied, “If there was a way to stop the candidacy … then he’s probably in trouble. But if there’s no way to stop him from competing in the election, all the things that they do to him will just give him more votes.” He continued, “Either you stop the candidacy, or you let him be. But just, you know, hitting him with [criminal charges] — you’re making the greatest campaign ever.”

Bukele himself has been targeted with “lawfare” campaigns in El Salvador. In 2017, he was forced out of the left-wing establishment party Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) after criticizing the party’s corrupt leadership. He founded his own party, Nuevas Ideas, but the Supreme Electoral Court refused to register the party prior to the presidential elections in 2019. Bukele instead joined the conservative-leaning Grand Alliance for National Unity party, winning the presidential election with 53% of the vote. “It was very hard to win and then … we won,” Bukele recalled on Wednesday.

“We, in 2019 — the system was totally rigged, I mean they canceled our party,” Bukele related. “We were running with a party and they canceled it, they annulled our party. So I stayed party-less, so we went to a small party and said, ‘You don’t have any candidates, you are very small, do you want to win the election?’”

“Even when I was president, even being already in the presidency, they tried to impeach me,” Bukele said of the opposition-controlled legislature during his first term. “They said — there’s an article in the constitution that says Congress can fire the president if he is not fit to lead — so they said I wasn’t fit to lead and they tried to impeach me because of that.”

On Saturday, Bukele was inaugurated for his second term as president after having won reelection with a staggering 85% of the vote. The Salvadoran constitution does not allow a sitting president to run for reelection, but the nation’s highest court approved Bukele’s reelection bid provided that he resigned from office six months prior to the election, which he did.