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.

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. Bukele also 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.

Bukele has had a rocky road to leadership. 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 before 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.

“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.