THANKS TO TRUMP

By Cliff Welch

São Paulo, 25 July 2025

Thanks to Trump President Lula’s favorability numbers went up. Thanks to Trump the criminal prosecution of former president Jair Messias Bolsonaro surged on. Thanks to Trump U.S. prices for coffee, sugar, oranges and orange juice, beef, honey and travel are set to increase in August. Thanks to Trump Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, facing a backlash due to his alliance with Trump, abandoned his seat in congress, slightly weakening his father’s support in the Brazilian parliament. Thanks to Trump and his decision to use tariffs to try to force the government of Brazil to undermine its own justice system by undermining its case against Bolsonaro, almost everything Trump did not want to happen, has happened.

As many may recall, on January 8, 2023, several thousand angry Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s most iconic government symbols and structures in the nation’s capital, Brasília, in a display of outrage over Lula’s inauguration a week earlier. Inspired by the January 6, 2021 insurrection in support of Trump, the copycat action attacked not only parliament, but also the presidential palace and supreme court. It was meant to provoke a military intervention. While some officers were prepared to intervene, constitutional order was preserved by the chain of command. Lula ordered police and military commanders to contain the mob and the situation was brought under control, with many rioters arrested. Subsequent investigations led to hundreds of prosecutions and damaging evidence of a coup d’état plot, orchestrated by Bolsonaro himself.[1]

The attack on the capital was not the only parallel with recent events in the United States. Bolsonaro had been identified by Steve Bannon as a nationalist leader worthy of Trump’s support. Soon after his inauguration in 2019, Bolsonaro proudly accepted the moniker “Trump of the Tropics” and gleefully joined Trump’s fan-base at Mar Lago galas. In addition to nationalism, both leaders claimed to revere the armed forces, identifying with ideas of authority that flirted with fascism and expounded hatred for anyone or anything slightly left of center as Marxist, communist and treacherous. Bolsonaro and his family remained loyal to Trump after he lost his 2020 reelection bid, aping him in challenging not only the U.S. election results but also the Brazilian election process, claiming that it’s remarkable scale and efficiency exposed it to manipulation, making it unreliable.

While parallels in these histories are remarkable, the divergencies are stunning. While Trump paid no price for continually undermining the 2020 election results, election procedures in general, for causing severe damage to the reputation of perfectly reliable systems, and for creating a threatening environment for election officials, that caused severe trama to the lives of many election workers, Bolsonaro faced serious consequences for his actions in Brazil. Even before the recent trials regarding an alleged coup attempt, Bolsonaro was judged guilty of abusing his political power and access to media. In June, 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE, in its Brazilian acronym) suspended his political rights for raising questions about the reliability of the national electronic voting system in a public forum. Eleven months earlier, in a televised meeting with ambassadors from diverse countries, Bolsonaro disseminated conspiracy theories about hacker manipulation of the voting system, claimed election results could not be audited, that international observers could not guarantee the legitimacy of elections, and that the only way to secure an election would be by involving the military in the process. When an opposition party sued Bolsonaro for electoral crimes, the case was tried before the TSE. Found guilty, Bolsonaro and his running mate were barred from participation in electoral politics until 2030.[2]

Perhaps the greatest divergence is the case against Bolsonaro that helped cause Trump to threaten to impose a 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian products exported to the United States, with a threatened start date of August 1. Actually, Bolsonaro faces two groups of criminal charges. The first was formalized on March 26, 2025 and is expected be decided by Brazil’s supreme court shortly. In this case, Bolsonaro is alleged to have planned a coup d’etat and threatened the violent abolition of a democratic state governed by the rule of law; and to have participated in a criminal organization, wherein he contributed to the deterioration and damage of Brazil and its patrimony.

These charges arose from a lengthy investigation, initiated after the apparent insurrection attempt on January 8. The Federal Police, similar to the FBI in the US, carried out the investigation. Much like Trump, Bolsonaro’s own words contributed to the suspicion that rioters’ attack on the government was not spontaneous. Even before Bolsonaro lost his re-election bid, he declared to his supporters that he would only leave office “imprisoned, dead or victorious.” He continued, “Tell the scoundrels that I’ll never be imprisoned, that my life belongs to God and that victory belongs to all of us.” A little more than a month after his defeat in the second round of the election on October 30, 2022, Bolsonaro called together the commanders of the three military branches at the presidential mansion, the Alvorada. Documents, recordings and the testimony of participants in the December 2022 meeting demonstrated that Bolsonaro proposed plans for a coup d’etat. Representatives of the Army and Air Force reportedly resisted the plot, while the Navy demonstrated support. The police reported that participants discussed the assassination of Lula, his running mate Geraldo Alckmim and the Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes.[3]

By the start of the trial, Moraes had been placed in charge of the law’s case against Bolsonaro. Brazil’s solicitor general, Paulo Gonet presented the government’s case against the conspiracy, arguing that,

A organização tinha por líderes o próprio Presidente da República e o seu candidato a Vice-Presidente, o General Braga Neto. Todos aceitaram, estimularam e realizaram atos tipificados na legislação penal de atentado contra a existência e independência dos poderes e o Estado de Direito democrático.[4]

Although Trump, unlike Bolsonaro, was never threatened with charges of plotting a coup, the Justice Department’s Special Council Jack Smith initiated a prosecution against the then-former president for instigating the January 6 insurrection. An early special congressional investigation presented a related argument, flooding the airwaves with the scenes and sounds of the violent MAGA movement militants that attacked congress on January 6 in order to block lawmakers from certifying the election of Joe Biden.

The successful inauguration of Lula in 2023 certainly helped to establish institutional continuity for a just process for judging Bolsonaro. But Lula and the executive branch he controls have not been the protagonists of the prosecution. In the civil, or Roman, law tradition that orients the Brazilian justice system, judges double as prosecutors – in fact, they are referred to as ministers, not judges – and most of the resulting progression of the cases against Bolsonaro have been initiated by ministers of the country’s highest courts.

Such is the case of the second set of crimes that Bolsonaro now faces. This case was started by Moraes two days after Trump threatened tariffs against Brazil, Moraes accused Bolsonaro of aiding and abetting Trump in proposing the tariffs in order to force Brazil to drop its first case against Bolsonaro. It is alleged that Bolsonaro has been communicating with his son Eduardo, who moved to Florida in March, in order to secure Trump’s support for his father’s and to orchestrate, through social media, the mobilization of Bolsonaro’s followers. To Bolsonaro’s efforts to undermine the justice system, Moraes has since banned Bolsonaro from communicating with his son, from using social media or talking to the press, and has curbed his freedom of movement by binding a monitoring bracelet to his ankle.

Brazil’s divergent response to these two authoritarian leaders can be explained, in part, by the dramatically different recent histories of the two countries. Although memories of the military dictatorship the ruled Brazil from April 1, 1964 until March 15, 1985 are mixed, the historical record condemning the regime is solid. It was a political and economic failure, despite contrary views, including that of Bolsonaro – who was an Army officer toward the end of the regime – and argued that military rule would have been more successful had the military adopted a hardline and killed another 30,000 dissenters, most of them young men and women.[5] In the United States, the long history of relative political stability – exemplified by the longevity of a 237 year old constitution – may be one reason Trump’s drive toward the unitary executive has not yet been seen as posing a danger to the nation.

The situation in Brazil changes daily and Trump may not impose tariffs or may change the deadline. But thanks to Trump Lula, who is contemplating a final bid for the presidency, has seen his popularity increase and his world stature as a model statesman improve as well. The Financial Times of London has characterized Lula as a leading defender of democracy, while interpreting Trump as a “promotor of autocracies.”[6] Although sales to the United States only account for 2 percent of Brazil GDP, many thousands of jobs are at stake in Brazil. Tariffs would have an especially deleterious impact on the primary sector, which is a sector generally supportive of Bolsonaro. Lula’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, says he is working on two tracks. One is to secure a deal with Trump, while the other is to find new consumers for Brazil’s commodities and business class jet planes. For the time being, Lula’s calls to nationalism in the face of US aggression have almost all Brazilians but the Bolsonaro clan singing the same tune as MC Japão[7]:

…Donald Trump,

Pare com isso/Stop this nonsense

Com implicância com outros países/With implications for other countries

Você se acha, dono do mundo/You must think your own the world

Mas não é/But you’re not
Mas não é/But you’re not

Donald Trump
Velho descarado/Shameless old man
Baixa as taxas de imposto/Lower the tariffs…

[1] LACERDA, Nara. “Atentado de 8 de janeiro já é fato histórico, mas ainda precisa ser enfrentado pelo país.” Brasil de Fato, 7/01/2024. LINK on 25 July 2025.

[2] “Inelegibilidade de Jair Bolsonaro.” Wikipédia: a enciclopédia livre. LINK on 23 July 2025.

[3] MIAZZO, Leonardo. “Do incentivo a golpistas à tornozeleira: o inferno de Bolsonao em quase mil dias.” Carta Capital, 18/07/2025. LINK  on 23 July 2025.

[4] SERPA, Verônica. “STF rejeita solicitações preliminares de defesa de Bolsonaro em 1º dia de julgamento; decisão foi unânime,” Alma Preta, 25/03/2025. LINK  on 23 July 2025.

[5] FARINELLI, Victor. “Bolsonaro já cumpriu o que prometeu: temos 30 mil mortos.” OperaMundi, 2 de junho 2020. LINK  on 23 July 2025

[6] ALVIM, Mariana.”Jornal britânico chama Trump de ‘Imperador do Brasil’ e diz que ele ajuda mais Lula que Bolsonaro.” BBC Brasil, 23/07/2025. LINK on 23 July 2025.

[7] MC Japão. “Donald Trump.” LINK  on 15 July 2025. (Thanks to Maya Welch for introducing us to the Rap.)