COMMENTARY We thought former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was imitating President Trump's Jan. 6 thuggery — but it turns out he was allegedly, and quite chillingly, upstaging Trump the whole time.
I gotta hand it to former right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro: if the charges leveled against him by Brazil’s prosecutor-general this week are true, they make even U.S. President Donald Trump look like a half-hearted lightweight when it comes to overthrowing democracy.
It’s bad enough, of course, that Trump tried to subvert the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential contest he lost by bullying state election supervisors and inciting a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But that’s piker stuff compared to the coup plot Bolsonaro allegedly took part in to reverse the 2022 presidential vote he lost. The conspiracy included, per the indictment, a scheme to poison the candidate who did win — Brazil’s current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — and to assassinate Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
READ MORE: Is Bolsonaro's ban really the hemispheric example Brazil wants to set?
Bolsonaro, who’s already been banned from running for office in Brazil until 2030, denies the accusations. But still: parabéns, Senhor Presidente! Congratulations! Up to now, we thought Bolsonaro had merely sought to imitate Trump — as evidenced by the copycat mob he himself incited to ransack federal buildings in Brasília on Jan. 8, 2023 — when all along he’d allegedly set out to upstage Trump.
And — again, if the charges hold up — I can understand why: as a Brazilian reactionary, Bolsonaro and his movement have a reputation to live up to.
Bolsonaro never lets us forget he believes Brazil’s golden age was its brutal right-wing military dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985. Bolsonaro was an army artillery officer at the time — and as President, in 2019, he publicly praised the dictatorship’s torture chief, the late Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, as a “national hero.”
Trump — who's fond of the idea of using the military against "the enemy from within" — might now take inspiration from his Brazilian BFF Bolsonaro.
So if Bolsonaro were going to pull off a coup, it makes sense that he wouldn't just take Trump’s now seemingly amateur approach of getting legally certified votes overturned.
It adds up that he’d go full jackboot and have his opponent and an enemy jurist whacked — because, on Bolsonaro’s Planet Brazil, that’s historically how it gets done.
Granted, Trump’s thugs shouted for the hanging of then Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with the Jan. 6 putsch. But, cara!, I don’t remember poisoning Joe Biden or murdering a SCOTUS justice showing up in any of Trump’s Jan. 6 conspiracy indictments.
Military brass
Ironically, it was Brazilian military brass who helped build the case against Bolsonaro: his former Army and Air Force commanders have testified that he approached them with a plan for the armed forces to intervene after his 2022 loss and re-install him as President. They refused.
Despite that gratifying act of defiance, the indictment — which, doubly ironically, now must be approved for trial by a panel including De Moraes, the Supreme Court justice Bolsonaro allegedly conspired to kill — raises troubling questions not just about Bolsonaro’s Brazil but Trump’s America.
It’s no coincidence the morning after the Bolsonaro charges were announced this week, Trump’s media company filed a lawsuit against De Moraes accusing him of suppressing speech in Brazil and, by extension, on U.S. social media platforms. Regardless of whether the suit has merit — even moderates have criticized De Moraes for censorship — it was a loud show of Trump’s support for his amigo Bolsonaro.
More important, it's a reminder of Trump’s appalling pardon last month of the almost 1,600 insurrectionists charged or convicted in the Jan. 6 riot — including those who violently attacked Capitol police officers — which darkened the U.S.’s rule-of-law image around the world.
And it raises the equally chilling possibility that while we thought it was Bolsonaro who was aping Trump in the coup-monger department, it might just be Trump’s own reactionary movement now that takes its cue from Bolsonarismo.
I'm certainly not suggesting plots to poison Democrats or rub out U.S. judges are in the offing. But Trump himself said recently and recklessly that America’s biggest problem is “the enemy from within…sick people, radical leftist lunatics…and it should be very easily handled…by the military.”
Trump’s made it clear his idols aren’t democrats but despots — like Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, whose Ukraine atrocities Trump shockingly excused this week while disgracefully blaming Ukraine.
His devotion to Bolsonaro is just one more genuflection at the authoritarian altar America's self-styled "king" inhabits.
