Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attend a demonstration, on Brazilian Independence Day on Sept. 7, 2025.Amanda Perobelli/Reuters
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict. He was Fulbright Distinguished Professor of International Politics at the University of Sao Paulo in 2014-2015.
When Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, once a low-ranking military officer and minor member of parliament, saw how much Donald Trump could get away with politically, Mr. Bolsonaro tried to copy that vituperative model. He was increasingly outrageous in his presidential pontifications, letting loggers and cattle farmers deforest the Amazon (drought followed). He scrubbed Brazil’s previous environmental and climate change mitigation efforts.
In 2023, after losing a close presidential election in 2022 to then-former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, he allegedly incited a mob to storm the Supreme Court and parliament in Brasilia, emulating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his own loss in 2020 in 2021. Now Mr. Bolsonaro is on trial, accused of attempting in several treasonous ways to deny Mr. da Silva presidential office.
The evidence is overwhelming. On Jan. 8, 2023, thousands of protesters egged on by Mr. Bolsonaro marched down a central avenue in Brasilia. They smashed windows in the presidential palace and Congress, entered the Federal Supreme Court and burned the official chief justice’s chair, and did other damage in the building. This was the culmination of a long campaign by Mr. Bolsonaro and his associates to discredit Brazil’s electoral system. The outgoing president, scheming to remain in power à la Trump, is accused by the police of plotting with military leaders to annul the 2022 election, assassinate Mr. da Silva, and orchestrate a coup.
Opinion: How Brazil’s democracy stepped back from the cliff
A chief aide to Mr. Bolonsaro has testified that his boss indeed sought in many ways over several weeks to overthrow Mr. da Silva’s government. Mr. Bolsonaro wanted Brazil’s military chiefs to back his usurpation of Mr. da Silva’s rightful victory. But only the commander of the navy agreed to join the plot. The army and air force chiefs refused.
Mr. Bolsonaro expressed admiration and nostalgia for Brazil’s two decades under military rule (1964 to 1985). He has never been comfortable with the rule of law as recreated in Brazil, especially during Mr. da Silva’s earlier prosperous presidential terms (2003 to 2010). Mr. Bolsonaro became, deliberately and wittingly, a Trump disciple. And now Mr. Trump seeks to help Mr. Bolsonaro by attempting to bully Mr. da Silva’s government and, especially, Brazil’s Supreme Court, into going easy on Mr. Bolsonaro.
Mr. Trump has now succeeded in alienating Brazil, one of the biggest democracies in the world, just as he has picked destructive trade battles with India and Canada. Not only have Mr. Trump’s ridiculously high tariffs angered those countries and their leaders without any likelihood of beneficial result, the punitive tariffs demonstrate Mr. Trump’s pique and attempts to dictate rather than collaborate.
Only 12 per cent of Brazil’s exports are sent to the U.S. More than 28 per cent go to China, a relationship that will now grow. Thus, increasing the costs to American consumers of Brazilian coffee (30 per cent of all coffee imports to the U.S. come from Brazil) and beef harms American consumers more than Brazilian exporters. Ground beef prices are almost certain to rise in the U.S., as will coffee costs.
Brazil’s 212 million people purchase American consumer goods, aircraft, motor vehicles, oil pumping equipment and more – a total in recent years of more than US$57-billion. But Mr. Trump has limited those selling opportunities. China wins.
Mr. Trump’s actions have given Mr. da Silva an electoral boost a year before next year’s presidential contest. Whereas most local poll watchers previously believed Mr. da Silva’s re-election was problematical (he is 79 years old), Mr. Trump has now greatly assisted Mr. da Silva’s prospects.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes sits down for the verdict and sentencing phase of a trial for those charged in an alleged coup plot to keep Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro in office after his 2022 election defeat, in Brasilia, on Sept. 2, 2025.Eraldo Peres/The Associated Press
The large and all-powerful Brazilian Supreme Court has become the country’s main democratic bulwark. Because it is a court of both first and last resort, it hears an unimaginable number of cases (115,000 each year) and permits each of its 11 justices, including Alexandre de Moraes, to decide cases directly.
The Brazilian Supreme Court seeks to preserve democracy. Although the U.S. Supreme Court, once regarded as the main safeguard of constitutional law across the globe, now uses dubious rulings on its shadow docket (and without hearings) to let Mr. Trump run roughshod over the rule of law, the Brazilian Supreme Court attempts successfully to curb local upsurges of despotism. Justice Moraes holds Mr. Bolsonaro under house arrest and has restricted what media can say about the case. He is determined to eradicate any subversion of Brazilian democracy. Rather than giving “immunity” to presidents who want to rule supreme, Brazil’s Supreme Court clamps down hard on anyone subverting democracy.
The judicial power that Justice Moraes exercises would not be permitted constitutionally in the U.S. or Canada, but it may paradoxically keep South America’s largest democracy from becoming the banana republic that the U. S. increasingly resembles.