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| Protesters wear masks depicting President Donald Trump and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro in a demonstration Friday in downtown São Paulo, Brazil. (Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images) |
| About five decades ago, a U.S. president provoked a shift in his country’s relationship with Brazil. President Jimmy Carter decided to end what had amounted to unconditional American support for a string of anti-leftist Latin American dictatorships, including the military-backed regime entrenched in Brasília. Carter’s emphasis on human rights is credited by some Brazilian politicians for helping to create the space for Brazil’s transition to democracy by the mid-1980s — even as Carter’s treatment of autocratic U.S. allies was used as a cudgel against him during Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 election campaign. A half-century later, the tables are curiously turned. A U.S. president who is explicitly indifferent to the cause of global human rights has gone to bat for a political constituency in Brazil that is openly nostalgic for the days of military dictatorship. President Donald Trump is threatening to crater ties with the hemisphere’s second-most-populous nation in support of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right firebrand who faces trial for his alleged role in a violent coup plot that followed the 2022 election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. This month, Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian imports to the United States, slated to start in August. Even amid the bluster and theatrics of Trump’s global trade wars, his singling out of Brazil was conspicuous — the United States has a significant trade surplus in goods and services with the Latin American giant, making it an unusual target for Trump’s protectionism. But
the White House made no secret of its real agenda: the cessation of
judicial proceedings against Bolsonaro, as well as punitive action
against Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who
is overseeing the prosecution and also has applied Brazilian law to
crack down on online misinformation. That perceived censorship triggered
the ire of U.S. right-wingers and tech magnate Elon Musk, whose X platform was in Moraes’s crosshairs. Trump’s move came after a lobbying campaign carried out by Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of Bolsonaro’s sons, who has relocated to the United States and posted a video last week from White House grounds. Moraes, too, seems unbowed. On Friday, he signed a punitive order against Bolsonaro, accusing him of conspiring with his son to incite hostilities against Brazil and destabilize the country. Bolsonaro is barred from contact with foreign governments and has to wear an ankle bracelet. On the same day, the Trump administration enacted measures against Moraes, revoking visas to him and immediate family members. “Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement. It seems clear, my colleague Terrence McCoy reported, “that the diplomatic feud between the U.S. and Brazil is not heading toward a quick détente, as both nations dig in further.” U.S. diplomats in private are less certain about the merits of the case. “It’s difficult to conceive of an action that the Trump administration could take in the U.S.-Brazil relationship that would be more detrimental to U.S. credibility in the promotion of democracy than sanctioning a Supreme Court justice of a foreign country because we don’t like his judicial views,” a State Department official told my colleagues, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations. For Lula, whose left-wing allies face a tough 2026 election, the moment is a windfall. Polls show revived support for his administration in the face of Bolsonaro-provoked American bullying. The tariffs also harm the interests of business elites who are often the biggest boosters of Lula’s conservative opposition. The editorial board of Estado de São Paulo, a prominent conservative daily, declared last week that there were two sides to choose from, “Brazil’s or Bolsonaro’s. The two paths are diametrically opposed.” “What was meant as a show of strength by MAGA and its Brazilian franchise has turned into a political gift for Lula, who now gets to credibly present himself as a symbol of national resistance while leaving his opponents scrambling to choose between loyalty to Bolsonaro and the economic interests of their own base,” observed Brazil historian Andre Pagliarini. A senior Brazilian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly comment on proceedings, said Brazil’s democratic institutions and its independent judiciary were not bargaining chips to be brokered away in a Trumpist transaction. Bolsonaro and his allies “got what they worked for — a severe threat against the whole country and its economy — and now not only part of their voters, but especially their once-strong constituency within the financial and business communities, are turning against them,” the diplomat told me. “Santa Claus arrived early for President Lula, and the gift was sent by Trump through this clumsy attack on Brazil’s sovereignty in order to protect a wannabe dictator and a clear loser.” Lula didn’t pull punches, either. Noting the U.S. president’s role in stoking the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — which Bolsonaro’s supporters imitated two years later in a failed storming of federal buildings in Brasília — Lula commented on the apparent impunity afforded to Trump by the U.S. system. “If Trump was Brazilian and if he did what happened at Capitol Hill, he’d also be on trial in Brazil,” Lula told CNN. “And possibly he would have violated the Constitution. According to justice, he would also be arrested if he had done that here in Brazil.” | ||||||||||||||||