Bolsonaro Sees ‘Big Trump’ as His Ticket Out of Brazilian Limbo
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s presence is everywhere in former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s orbit.
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“Jair — You are GREAT,” reads Trump’s seismograph-like autograph in a book that Bolsonaro shows off proudly in his office in Brasilia, pointing out the photographs in which he appears alongside the US president. A green cap is embossed with gold letters spelling out, “Make America and Brazil great again.” A video call with a supporter in North America is signed off, “I love Trump.”
To Bolsonaro, Trump’s return to the White House is a manifestation of the political faith that he invested in his fellow president. Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” sees vindication everywhere he looks — and regards Trump as his potential path to political redemption.
“I am very happy,” Bolsonaro, 69, said in a rare interview at the party’s headquarters in the Brazilian capital on Tuesday.
More specifically, he’s excited about what’s to come from the man he refers to as Trumpão — Big Trump — and Cenourão, or Big Carrot, in an affectionate reference to the American president’s permanent tan. He regards his fellow conservative leader as having a clear and realistic line of action that’s similar to Brazil under his presidency, including drilling in indigenous reserves and shunning oil from Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela.
“You can’t take a country like this out of the mud by being everyone’s friend,” he says.
That extends to deporting undocumented migrants, which includes thousands of Brazilians, his supporters among them — even when he lost the presidency to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2022, Bolsonaro took more votes among the US diaspora. His resolution to that dilemma is typically blunt: “It’s his law,” he said of Trump’s US. “If you don’t want to be deported, enter there legally.”
He’s now looking to Trump as a means of helping to untangle his own legal difficulties, and to breathe life back into his political ambitions.
Two years after Trump’s rise to the presidency in 2016 on an America First ticket, Bolsonaro pulled off the same feat in Brazil, their terms overlapping. The former army officer’s single-term presidency bequeathed a legacy of political polarization that still haunts Latin America’s largest economy, and found expression in a rampage by his supporters through Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023, days after Lula’s inauguration.
Bolsonaro is keen to draw out the parallels between himself and Trump. “A lot of what has happened in the US is also happening here,” he said in the interview lasting more than 90 minutes, the emptiness of one office wall interrupted only by a painting of Bolsonaro with the presidential sash, a giant map of Brazil on another.
“I was stabbed here, Trump was shot there,” he said. “He had Jan. 6, I had Jan. 8. I was very happy with the amnesty he gave to everyone [involved in the US rioting]. I hope we don’t have to elect a conservative in 2026 to get the same amnesty here.”
The similarities end there. Where Trump successfully built the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol into a rallying-point for his re-election, Bolsonaro is at risk of going to prison for Brazil’s alleged insurrection. “I sleep well but I’m already prepared to hear the bell ring at 6am: ‘It’s the Federal Police!’” he says.
Bolsonaro reaffirmed that he doesn’t want to flee the country or take refuge in any embassy to avoid arrest. The former president said he is persecuted and claims that his former personal aide, Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, accused him and his family “because he is being blackmailed.” He dismissed Cid’s allegations as “absurd.”
Bolsonaro denied that he tried to stage a coup but said that he discussed with allies the possibility of decreeing a state of siege, and backed out.
Bolsonaro already faces an eight-year ban on holding political office after Brazil’s electoral court barred him from running, saying that he had abused his power by using a meeting with foreign ambassadors to cast doubt on the country’s voting system. It’s a claim he still maintains, although he says that in Brazil if you doubt the “electronic ballot and vaccine, you are a criminal.”
His hope is that Trump and other leaders of the nationalist right like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Argentine President Javier Milei help him to reverse the situation before Brazil’s next presidential election, due in October 2026.
Bolsonaro is banking on an international mobilization of right-wing forces that puts pressure on Brazilian officials “to recognize that Brazil’s elections won’t be fair as there is no opposition” — a strategy not dissimilar to that adopted by Lula when he was about to be arrested for corruption. Lula ultimately went to jail but the case was later annulled, allowing him to run successfully for a third term.
“It doesn’t make sense for Lula to run in Brazil, or a candidate appointed by him, without opposition,” said Bolsonaro. “Today I am the opposition to Lula. Any other name runs the very serious risk of losing to him.” Holding elections without his name on the ballot, said Bolsonaro, would be “to deny democracy.”
One of his sons, the lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, has been working on the international front to give visibility to his appeal. The Trump-allied Conservative Political Action Conference is one target of the Bolsonaro clan.
Jair Bolsonaro is considering another bid to get the Supreme Court’s authorization to leave Brazil to attend CPAC in Washington in February. Bolsonaro’s latest request, to attend Trump’s inauguration, was denied.
Just how he expects Trump to intervene on his behalf is a secret discussed only in the Bolsonaro family. “I won’t publicly say what I am asking Trump to do, what I would like him to do,” he said.
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