COMMENTARY The real reason President Trump is threatening tariffs in order to quash ex-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's coup plot trial? The case is a big reminder of Trump's own alleged sedition.
I doubt President Donald Trump knows the lyrics to one of the most famous songs about Brazil, “Aquarela do Brasil.” But if he did, it’s got a line that would surely spook him:
Abre a cortina do passado.
Open the curtain of the past.
Such Brasileiro reverie is haunting the Americano leader right now. That’s because the trial of his right-wing buddy, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — who stands accused of leading a coup plot to overturn the 2022 election he lost — is actually opening the drapes on Trump’s past.
So Trump’s working extra hard, and extra shamelessly, to shut down the Bolsonaro prosecution.
READ MORE: Bolsonaro's indictment makes Trump's coup-mongering look amateur
Should Bolsonaro be convicted, it’ll only remind the world of the seditious behavior Bolsonaro was imitating: Trump’s own alleged, indicted attempts to overthrow democracy — his bid to overturn the 2020 election he lost, culminating in the violent mob insurrection by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As part of his scheme to make Jan. 6 disappear, Trump needs Bolsonaro’s trial to go away. Which is why he’s threatening to slap an absurd 50% tariff on all imports from Brazil unless that country’s Supreme Court stops what he calls the “witch hunt” his Brazilian BFF is undergoing.
So far, both Brazil’s high court and its current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in 2022, are essentially telling Trump: Cai fora. Get lost.
As part of his scheme to make Jan. 6 disappear, Trump needs Bolsonaro’s trial to go away — so now the U.S., not Brazil, is playing Third World scofflaw.
And that’s good to know, because in this case, at least, the hemisphere’s historic roles have been reversed: Brazil, long the butt of banana-republic justice jokes, is filling the rule-of-law example, while Trump and the U.S. are playing the part of Third World scofflaw.
Whether or not Bolsonaro is found guilty, the sinister litany of charges against him makes the follow-through of his trial imperative.
Bolsonaro isn’t just accused of inciting his own horde to tear up federal buildings in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, in the wake of his 2022 re-election defeat.
He’s fingered for masterminding a plan to poison Lula, assassinate Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and have the military nullify the election — a summoning of Brazil’s brutal, 1964-85 military dictatorship, when Bolsonaro served as an army artillery officer.
Perhaps the most telling evidence against Bolsonaro: Brazil’s top military brass themselves have testified that they rejected his pleas to get their putsch on and install him as President over Lula.
Arsenic in the caipirinha?
As a staunch U.S. First Amendment adherent, I too have been critical of De Moraes and the Brazilian judiciary for their tendency to restrict free speech. That includes the Supreme Electoral Court’s decision in 2023 to ban Bolsonaro from politics until 2030 because, just before the 2022 election, he falsely told a group of foreign diplomats that his nation’s voting machines were ripe for fraud.
But slipping arsenic into a President-elect’s caipirinha (or whatever the Lula poisoning plot involved) ain’t free expression. And prosecuting a former President for that alleged conspiracy is not a witch hunt.
Trump, despite his blustering defense of Bolsonaro, knows that — just as he knows that the conspiracy prosecutions he himself faced, but which were dropped after he won the presidency again last year, were hardly frivolous acts of political persecution.
The federal and state indictments against Trump were also bursting with menacing details about his crusade to reverse the 2020 outcome. For example: the disgusting moment when, during the Jan. 6 uprising, Trump was told that the Capitol mob might kill then Vice President Mike Pence, who had allowed Trump’s defeat to be certified — and witnesses say Trump replied: “So what?”
As long as Bolsonaro’s trial continues, Trump’s alleged crimes, too, will continue to hang in the air for all to remember. And if Bolsonaro is convicted, Trump won’t be able to pardon him — the way he has brutishly pardoned or commuted the sentences of the almost 1,600 insurrectionists charged or convicted for Jan. 6.
And his 50% tariff threat? As my Miami Herald colleague Antonio Maria Delgado points out, that’ll likely hit Florida hard, since we import billions of dollars of Brazilian commodities like coffee and orange juice each year.
In other words: the Sunshine State would pay a dark price for Trump’s effort to keep the curtain on Brazil’s past — and his — shut.
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