Boredom and a sense of uniquely American invincibility
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Brazil had a period where democracy ended, and they didn’t like that.
More so Brazil has more experience that Americans don’t have.
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>For years now, politics in Brazil have been the fun-house-mirror version of those in the United States. The dynamic was never plainer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally charged the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 co-conspirators, with crimes connected to a sprawling plan to overthrow the nation’s democracy and hang on to power after losing an election in October of 2022.
>That the charges against Bolsonaro sound familiar to Americans is no coincidence. Bolsonaro consulted with figures in Donald Trump’s orbit in pursuit of his election-denial strategy. But the indictment against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader went much further than Trump did, allegedly bringing high-ranking military officers into a coup plot and signing off on a plan to have prominent political opponents murdered.
>In this, as in so many things, Bolsonaro comes across as a cruder, more thuggish version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, shrewdly, to try to retain his electoral viability after his January 6 defeat; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He attempted so violent a power grab that the institutional immune system tasked with protecting Brazil’s democracy was shocked into overdrive.
>The distortion in the mirror is most pronounced with regard to this institutional response. While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030. Interestingly, that decision wasn’t even handed down as a consequence of the attempted coup itself, but of Bolsonaro’s abuse of official acts to promote himself as a candidate, as well as his insistence on casting doubt, without evidence, on the fairness of the election.
>The U.S. might have done the same thing. In December 2023, Colorado’s secretary of state refused to allow Trump’s name on the state’s primary ballot, following the state supreme court’s judgment that his role in the events of January 6, 2021, rendered him ineligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the move, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.
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Boredom and a sense of uniquely American invincibility
Brazil had a period where democracy ended, and they didn’t like that.
More so Brazil has more experience that Americans don’t have.
>For years now, politics in Brazil have been the fun-house-mirror version of those in the United States. The dynamic was never plainer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally charged the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 co-conspirators, with crimes connected to a sprawling plan to overthrow the nation’s democracy and hang on to power after losing an election in October of 2022.
>That the charges against Bolsonaro sound familiar to Americans is no coincidence. Bolsonaro consulted with figures in Donald Trump’s orbit in pursuit of his election-denial strategy. But the indictment against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader went much further than Trump did, allegedly bringing high-ranking military officers into a coup plot and signing off on a plan to have prominent political opponents murdered.
>In this, as in so many things, Bolsonaro comes across as a cruder, more thuggish version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, shrewdly, to try to retain his electoral viability after his January 6 defeat; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He attempted so violent a power grab that the institutional immune system tasked with protecting Brazil’s democracy was shocked into overdrive.
>The distortion in the mirror is most pronounced with regard to this institutional response. While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030. Interestingly, that decision wasn’t even handed down as a consequence of the attempted coup itself, but of Bolsonaro’s abuse of official acts to promote himself as a candidate, as well as his insistence on casting doubt, without evidence, on the fairness of the election.
>The U.S. might have done the same thing. In December 2023, Colorado’s secretary of state refused to allow Trump’s name on the state’s primary ballot, following the state supreme court’s judgment that his role in the events of January 6, 2021, rendered him ineligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the move, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.