YIKES: El Salvador’s President Says US Now Less Safe than a Third World Country

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, the innovative leader of the country that used to be the murder capital of the world, the man who defeated MS-13 in his country, pushed the policies such as Bitcoin adoption that could mean El Salvador becomes a world leader in innovation in the future, and who crushed crime in El Salvador, driving the murder rate down by 75% with proactive, tough on crime policies, recently sat down with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson for an interview on “Tucker Carlson Today.”

What he said should shock and dismay Americans: according to the crime-crushing Bukele, America is now such a fallen country wracked by crime that it is “unrecognizable” and is one that he would not feel safe living in, particularly in the large cities that have turned into crime hellholes under leftist “leadership.”

Speaking about that to Tucker, Bukele, as Fox News Digital reports, said that the destruction of America’s once great cities is not only “by design” but is being affected by “enemies” within the American political system. In Bukele’s words:

“The demise of the U.S. has to come from within. No external enemy can cause this much damage. When you’re watching internal operations here you can see cities that were pristinely beautiful 30 years ago [and] are a wasteland right now.”

In other words, it’s not China or Russia that are to blame for Baltimore seeming like Mogadishu on the Chesapeake or New York City seeming much more like a crime capital on some alien world than the center of world commerce. Rather, it’s the soft on crime Democrats and their backers that are to blame.

Continuing, Bukele said that even though he’s from a third-world country in Central America, a land once wracked by crime, he’d feel unsafe in America’s major cities. In his words:

“I mean, I’m from El Salvador, a third-world country in Central America, and I myself see cities here and say I wouldn’t live here. That would be unthinkable three decades ago, that a Salvadoran wouldn’t want to live in a U.S. main city.”

And why’s that happening? Why have our cities turned from monuments to human achievement to crime-ridden hellholes? In Bukele’s view, it’s intentional:

“When you look how the cities are eroding so fast, this has to be by design. I mean who would make so many stupid decisions? They’re literally giving some people drugs in some us cities, or they say we’re going to give you money if you don’t work. They make all these laws that make no sense. If they have high crime, they say okay I have a solution, let’s defund the police.

“They make these decisions openly. It’s not even [a] secret and we all know what will be the consequences of it. The defunding of the police, allowing shoplifting, giving drugs to drug addicts, giving money to people to stop work[ing], what will be the consequences? You’ll destroy society, you’ll destroy the city, you’ll destroy the economy…and it’s already happening.”

“You would think how could they be so dumb. Of course, they’re not. They’re very smart. It’s by design. There’s no other logical explanation.”