President Trump jokes about selling his endorsement for ‘millions’
President Trump joked about whether selling his political endorsement was legal or not during the Shield of Americas event in Miami, Florida.
DORAL, Fla. – Donald Trump scanned the room of Latin American leaders and saw political allies staring back: candidates he publicly endorsed and MAGA-friendly governments he liked.
He saw Chilean President-elect José Antonio Kast, a Trump-backed conservative who’d won his race in a landslide, and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who’d cut a $4.7 million deal with the U.S. to house deportees suspected of gang activity.
Argentinian President Javier Milei, whom he’d endorsed and offered a $20 billion bailout, and Honduran President Nasry Asfura, who’d eked out a victory with Trump’s support.
“They are losing and they beg me for an endorsement. I give them an endorsement. They win by 30 points,” Trump told the group at the inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit. “If I could sell that, is there a way?”
A first among American presidents, Trump has been endorsing candidates and favoring Latin American governments that align with his vision for the United States. He revived a 19th century doctrine as a framework for U.S. intervention in Latin America, used the strength of the American military and threatened to withhold aid dollars as a way to extend America’s influence over the region.
The goal: reinvigorate American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
He excluded all but his loyalists from this March 7 launch of the rebranded Shield of Americas, a coalition that has effectively replaced a Clinton-era summit that hosted leaders from across the region with different political leanings. The new U.S.-led alliance focuses on use of lethal military force to take out alleged drug smugglers.
In the last year, Trump has exerted his influence in Ecuador to conduct military strikes on alleged drug traffickers and waged a war on Venezuela that allowed the U.S. to seize the country’s oil. He endorsed conservative leaders in Chile, Honduras and Colombia, whose newest president was inaugurated Aug. 7. It remains to be seen how Trump’s influence could affect the October presidential election in Brazil, the largest player in Latin America.
“This is not the kind of conservative governments in Latin America that would’ve felt a kinship with George H. W. Bush,” said William LeoGrande, a professor at American University who specializes in Latin American politics. “They’re pretty far right wing. And also some of them, of course, are truly outsiders, just like Donald Trump.”
The spread of the MAGA movement has presented Trump with an opportunity to support like-minded candidates in Latin America, a senior White House official said of Trump’s endorsements. Trump is pitching it as a way to address migration and the flow of drugs from Latin America.
“I think for Trump, it’s satisfying to feel and think that he has a kind of a power to shape politics in an entire part of the world,” said Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “As with many things, it’s sort of something he thinks that the United States paid lip service to before, but probably didn’t respect in reality.”
Foreign endorsements: the new American soft power
Endorsing in foreign elections has long been considered a no-no for American presidents. Barack Obama’s administration made a point of keeping foreign leaders away from the White House too close to their elections.
But by the end of his presidency, he found himself all but endorsing ideologically aligned German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a fourth term during a late 2016 visit to Berlin.
“If I were here, and I were German, and I had a vote, I might support her,” Obama said. “I don’t know whether that hurts or helps.”
What Trump is doing in Latin America is different because of the United States’ history of direct intervention, said Ricardo Zuniga, a career diplomat who was senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.
Trump is offering full-throated endorsements on social media for particular candidates and threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if voters elected a different person.
“That level of activism, that’s quite unusual,” Zuniga said. “And when President Obama mentioned the Merkel case, that was seen at the time as somehow breaking with convention, and it was pretty controversial at the time.”
American soft power has long been used by U.S. presidents to guide the policies of other nations. It has frequently taken the form of Oval Office meetings, humanitarian assistance and strongly-worded warnings against election meddling from the State Department.
Trump has taken his own, unique approach: gutting foreign assistance and threatening military force.
He repeatedly threatened Colombia with military action, sanctioned its former president, Gustavo Petro, and accused the leftist leader of drug trafficking. Trump later endorsed conservative Abelardo de la Espriella, who was inaugurated on Aug. 7.
In early March, Trump convened elected and military leaders from about a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere to form what American officials dubbed the Shield of the Americas. The purported goal was to enhance security throughout the Americas, including against drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
But the inaugural event in Doral, Florida, largely included countries whose leaders were ideologically aligned with Trump. It notably did not include the region’s largest countries, Brazil and Mexico, whose leaders had defied him.
Compare that to the 1994 Summit of the Americas, in Miami, which had a much broader agenda and included every country in the Americas except Cuba, said Richard Feinberg, a former diplomat who helped plan the summit while working in the Clinton administration.
That first summit, which took place more than three decades ago, covered economics, democratization and security issues, in addition to combatting drug trafficking and transnational criminal organizations
Trump has used his relationships to provoke action.
Leading up to the shield’s March 7 event, the United States partnered with Ecuador to carry out a strike against alleged drug traffickers. USA TODAY found that one of the highly publicized operations of a bombing campaign in the Amazon targeted a dairy farm on Ecuador’s border with Colombia, not a drug trafficking compound, as American and Ecuadoran officials announced.
At the start of Trump’s second term, the administration contracted with El Salvador to imprison deportees in a mega-prison, accusing hundreds of Venezuelan nationals of being part of Tren de Aragua. Most men imprisoned had no criminal history. Trump in 2025 brought Bukele to the White House to celebrate the partnership.
In Colombia, de la Espriella, the country’s new president and a Trump ally, has promised to help Trump with a crackdown on organized crime, including continuing strikes against suspected drug-running vessels. He also has proposed constructing several mega-prisons, like Bukele.
But months after the creation of Trump’s Shield of the Americas in early March, it’s unclear what the shield has actually done, said Feinberg, a distinguished professor at University of California, San Diego.
“There was no indication of U.S. pledges of increased assistance. There was no new programs announced,” Feinberg said. “I haven’t seen anything since. This idea of fighting the bad guys in Latin America, it’s not exactly new.”
One of the most visible signs of cooperation among Shield countries was a joint statement in June, supporting Colombia’s electoral process.
“It’s clearly still at its nascent stage,” said Jason Marczak, vice president and senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council.
Thinking beyond Europe and Asia
Other U.S. presidents prized Europe and NATO. Trump has gone about forming his own coalitions.
“Trump has prioritized the Western Hemisphere. Biden was animated by trying to restore closeness with Europe,” said Cale Brown, director of Strategic Communications on the National Security Council in Trump’s first term.
Biden focused on arming Ukraine to defend itself against Russia, rejoining the Iran nuclear deal and tackling climate change through the Paris Agreement. Trump told Europe it needed to solve its own problems.
The Shield endeavor aligns with the Trump administration’s announcement late last year that it planned to resurrect the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which generally warned European nations against colonizing Latin America. It’s also a warning to China and Russia against expanding their investments in the region.
Feinberg said Trump’s target audience was his domestic political base, and the language around the strategy was meant to show strength.
“If they were actually thinking about an audience in Latin America, they wouldn’t talk that way because it’s very unpopular,” Feinberg said. “It comes across as arrogant and threatening.”
Make Latin America Great Again?
Trump’s biggest gamble has been working outside of traditional left-right leaders to bring Latin America in line with his vision, using a carrot-and-stick approach. He’s empowered Marco Rubio, who’s Cuban-American, to carry out his plans.
The Trump administration has been focused on choking Cuba into submission, negotiating with ex-dictator Raul Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, on a potential economic and political deal.
Leftist Venezuela has become a protectorate of the U.S. since the Trump administration snatched the country’s former leader, Nicolás Maduro, and backed his second-in-command, Delcy Rodriguez, to take over as interim president.
“Now, I love Venezuela,” Trump said at an Aug. 5 rally in Nevada. “We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela. And we’re getting along great with them,” he said. “It’s the old-fashioned way: to the victor, belong the spoils.”
When Trump describes Venezuela policy like that, it hurts the United States’ credibility, Zuniga said.
“Then you’re seen as blocking pro-democracy political players and endorsing an extension of the prior dictatorship. That’s one where an endorsement can really hurt us over the long term,” he added.
Even White House allies questioned whether Trump’s political interference in Latin America had been all that effective.
“In Venezuela, his endorsement of a specific leader has directly undermined his earlier success with Absolute Resolve, as well as undermined his long-term stated goals for the country,” argued Carrie Filipetti, the deputy assistant secretary for Cuba and Venezuela in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department in Trump’s first term.
Filipetti noted that Rodriguez has the support of about 6% of the population. She has empowered people like Diosdado Cabello, an alleged drug lord who serves as the minister of interior, justice and peace, she said, and U.S. businesses have been slow to invest in the country because they are concerned that there’s no rule of law.
In Honduras, Trump threatened that there would “be hell to pay” if Asfura, whom he endorsed, lost an election count.
His endorsement gave the conservative a bump – possibly because it’s a small country that’s closely tied to the United States, said Freeman, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“There’s a lot of asymmetry in that relationship, and they could be materially hurt by having a fallout with the White House,” he said.
Trump has not made endorsements in every election in the western hemisphere in which a MAGA-aligned candidate was running. He did not back a candidate in Peru’s election, and held off on endorsing de la Espriella, a Republican who holds dual Colombian and U.S. citizenship, until a second round of voting in June.
The biggest test of Trump’s influence will be Brazil.
He has yet to endorse a candidate in Brazil’s election, in which ally and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, is competing for the presidency in a close race with sitting leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a thorn in the side of the administration. Trump has clashed with Lula’s government over Brazil’s prosecution of the elder Bolsonaro, who was convicted of plotting an attempted coup.
Lula has been aided in the polls by the perception that he’s helping defend Brazil against hostile U.S. policy, said Zuniga, who was U.S. consul general in Sao Paulo, Brazil during the first Trump administration. “It’s going to be a very close election,” Zuniga said.
Flavio Bolsonaro visited the White House at the end of May. He told reporters he hadn’t asked for Trump’s endorsement. He did, however, post a photo of himself on Instagram in the Oval Office with Trump.
Trump’s approval still matters.