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Democratic Brazil, autocratic America

Their system is working as Bolsonaro is brought to justice. Ours is failing.

Yesterday, as President Trump moved ever closer to attempting a presidential coup d’état, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced by that nation’s Supreme Court to 27 years and three months for plotting a failed coup in 2022 to overturn Brazil’s election that returned Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to lawful power.

The plot, unearthed by extensive investigations, included declaring a state of emergency, dissolving the Supreme Court, annulling the election result, giving sweeping powers to the military, and assassinating Lula. None of this was pulled off.

The ironies abound. In Brazil, a nation with a fragile democracy that has had at least 15 coups and attempted coups since 1889, the system worked. In the United States, the world’s oldest continuous large democracy, the system failed.

As recently as the 1980s, Brazil was ruled by a vicious military dictatorship that came to power in a U.S.-backed coup against Brazil’s leftist president João Goulart. But the military was eventually ousted, and for four decades, Brazil’s democracy has taken root.

In the U.S., by contrast, Trump and his allies attempted to stage a coup to prevent a lawful transition to the winner of the 2020 election, Joe Biden. Trump’s thugs, with his encouragement, invaded the Capitol. It was only because of the integrity of Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, despite extreme pressure from Trump, that the effort to block the certification of the electors failed.

Trump, like Bolsonaro, should never have been allowed to run for president again. But the dithering of Biden’s pathetic attorney general, Merrick Garland, allowed Trump to run the clock; and then the U.S. Supreme Court, captive to Trump and in appalling contrast to Brazil’s, compounded the damage by ruling that Trump basically had a free pass for prior crimes committed while president.

Republicans in Congress are now planning a new “investigation” to whitewash the Capitol Invasion of January 6, 2021. This will be no mean feat, since the invasion played out on live TV and menaced many of these same legislators.

Trump has done everything in his power to save his pal Bolsonaro. Yesterday, he told reporters that he was “very unhappy about it. I know President Bolsonaro … I think it’s a terrible thing, very terrible. I actually think it’s very bad for Brazil.”

Trump has imposed 50 percent tariffs against Brazilian exports to the U.S. He made it clear that this was not a trade measure, since the U.S. actually runs a $13 billion annual surplus with Brazil. Rather, this is retaliation against the prosecution of Bolsonaro. That explicit admission is likely to be a key piece of evidence when the Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s usurpation of Congress’s clear authority over tariffs is constitutional.

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 gives the president the power to declare economic emergencies in limited circumstances. Trump used this law to simply take over ad hoc power to impose tariffs against the entire world, which is a preposterous stretch. But in the case of Brazil, Trump has never even tried to claim an economic emergency.

We are now living with the consequences of the decision to neglect the rule of law and allow Trump to return to office. He has spent the past 48 hours trying to use the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk as a pretext for a general repression of all Democrats and a “complete crackdown on the left.” Trump declared: “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Brazil was spared a second term for a president like this. Trump’s America only descends further into political hell.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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