Trump, Bukele, and the lure of gold

The Monday Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele was a sickening spectacle. Both men, having been elected to preside over nominally democratic nations, have referred to themselves as dictators, and they radiated that aura of complacent invulnerability. 

As Kilmar Ábrego García’s fate remained uncertain, journalists demanded answers on the 29-year-old father of three who was illegally deported to El Salvador’s infamous Cecot mega-prison, Trump and Bukele denied responsibility, made light of additional deportations, and casually slandered Ábrego García, who is not, and never has been, accused of being a terrorist. 

Since he came back to the White House, Trump has used gilt on the Oval Office with the same light hand that he uses the caps lock key, which is to say, it’s everywhere. Gold trinkets line every inch of the Oval Office while gold-framed artwork ascends the walls. Trump has put gold accenting on the room’s decorative moulding, shipped-in gold cherubs from Mar-a-Lago, filled the mantelpiece with gold urns, and even added what I can only call gold filigree doodads to the walls and fireplace. He even uses a gold seal on the button on his desk to call an aide with a Diet Coke.

Trump’s fondness for the tawdry has long inspired ridicule – Washington Post critic-at-large Robin Givhan wrote that the newly redone Oval Office “now evokes insecurity and petulance” – but as with so many of Trump’s clown-like tendencies, there is an actual menace to the glittering sheen.

Those gaudy antique ornament urns were gilded in ormolu, Givhan writes, a mercury technique that was so poisonous that those who used it rarely lived longer than 40. And whereas the French government prohibited ormolu in 1830, gold mining continues to be a huge polluter, contributing 38% of global anthropogenic mercury emissions, plus profuse amounts of cyanide and arsenic, with serious impacts on human and environmental health. Researchers estimate that over 100 million individuals across the globe experience chronic mercury poisoning, either as miners themselves or because they reside in a mining-affected community.

That is no surprise to the citizens of El Salvador, who in 2017 made history as the first nation on earth to outlaw the mining of metals. The prohibition came after decades of mobilization by environmental and Indigenous groups pushing back against the global corporations that have long sucked mineral resources out of Latin America without leaving much but poisoned rivers and poor communities behind. The European demand for the western hemisphere’s precious metals drove centuries of massacre of Indigenous peoples and massive environmental devastation; vast wealth was drawn out, but seldom was it distributed to the local populations.

Bukele came to power in El Salvador in 2019 promising a whole new type of mining – of cryptocurrency, not metals. But the 2023 prosecution of five leading activists who pushed for the ban on decades-old, trumped-up charges raised suspicions, now confirmed, that he was planning a change of heart.

In late 2024, Bukele opposed the ban, stating that El Salvador had unseen gold deposits valued at $3tn. The “world’s coolest dictator” soon had his desire made real by a submissive congress, and El Salvador’s historic ban no longer exists. Although Bukele asserts that future gold mining will be mercury-free and “sustainable”, environmental campaigners are preparing to battle to preserve El Salvador’s waterways.

Whether that $3tn of gold ever turns up is far from certain. It takes the generation of a little more than four metric tons of waste, most of which is poisonous, to extract one gram of gold.

Gold mining is as ruinous as coal mining, and unlike coal, cannot warm a house or power a power plant. But that’s the beauty of gold. The human passion for its shine has never been a matter of necessity, but desire. The brutality and displacement, pain and loss that have attended the pursuit of gold have not yet succeeded in turning our gaze from its luster. In that sense, it’s an ideal symbol for Trump – flashy, unnecessary, dripping with blood.