• Trump Simultaneously Undermines American & Brazilian Democracy

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The United States & Brazil: A Study in Contrasts

Two leading international experts, Filipe Campante (professor of economics at Johns Hopkins) and Steven Levitsky (professor of government at Harvard) write in an opinion essay in The New York Times that the Brazilian Supreme Court “did what the U.S. Senate and federal courts [including the US Supreme Court] failed to do: bring a former president who assaulted democracy to justice (September 13-14).

Last Thursday, in a historic ruling, the Brazilian Supreme Court voted 4 to 1 to convict ex-President Jair Bolsonaro of conspiring against democracy and attempting a coup d’etat in the wake of his 2022 election defeat.

He was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

Barring a successful appeal, which is unlikely, Bolsonaro will become the first putsch leader in Brazilian history to serve time in prison.

Unfortunately, due to the craven attitude of then Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Donald J. Trump, the convicted felon, escaped this fate by the skin of his teeth.

The unintended consequences were that the ill-intentioned and megalomaniac Trump went on to cause untold havoc in both the domestic and external arenas of the reigning super-power.

Thus, the Brazilian developments draw a sharp contrast to the United States, where Trump, who also attempted to overturn a free-and-fair election was sent not to prison but back to the White House.

Trump, recognizing the power of that contrast, called Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch hunt” and described his conviction as “a terrible thing. Very terrible” (NYT).

Without doubt, this was a blatant interference in the domestic affairs of another sovereign nation.

Trump went even further: he not only criticized Brazil’s efforts to defend its democracy, he also punished it exorbitantly.

Explicitly citing the legal case against Bolsonaro before it was even decided, the Trump administration levied an unprecedented 50 % percent tariff on most of Brazilian exports to the U.S. [like on strategic friend India unexpectedly] and imposed sanctions on several government officials and Supreme Court justices.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the case, was singled out for especially harsh sanctions.

Campante and Levitsky consider this an unprecedented step.

They write that the Trump administration has sought to use tariffs and sanctions to bully Brazilians into subverting their own legal system – and concurrently their democracy itself.

“In effect, the U.S. administration is punishing Brazilians for doing something Americans should have done, but failed to: hold a former president accountable for attempting to overturn an election.

Many contemporary democracies face mounting challenges from illiberal politicians and movements that win power in elections and then subvert the constitutional order.

Elected leaders like Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary politicized government agencies and deployed them to weaken opponents and entrench themselves in power.

This is also Trump’s playbook.

According to Campante and Levitsky, the lesson learnt is that illiberal forces don’t always play fair in elections.

They are more willing than liberals to use demagoguery, misinformation and violence to win and retain power.

This is what Trump and his cohorts did after losing to Joe Biden after his first term.

Experience has shown that passivity in the face of such threats can be very costly.

Campante and Levitsky maintain that democracies cannot defend themselves of their own accord. They must be defended.

For even the best-designed constitutional checks and balances are mere pieces of paper unless concerned citizens and civic society exercise them.

Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election and even attempted to overturn the valid results in a campaign that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the storming of the Capitol [housing both chambers of Congress].

Brazilian President Contradicts Trump Directly

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva has confronted Trump directly in an opinion piece in The New York Times (September 15).

Lula writes that by resorting to unilateral action against individual foreign states is to prescribe the wrong remedy for the economic malaise in the United States.

Multilateralism offers fairer and more balanced solutions.

Lula makes the point that the excessive tariff increase imposed on Brazil [as on other countries] is not only misguided but illogical.

The lack of economic rationale behind these measures makes it clear that Trump’s motivation is political [as was the glaring case with India. Trump had the audacity to upend three decades of various U.S. presidents’ careful strategy of wooing India and building it up as a rival to confront a rising China. Trump was extremely irritated with Narendra Modi for not accepting that he played a major role in stopping the brief Indo-Pakistani flare-up and diminishing his chances of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump is in any case absolutely not deserving of this great honour, having failed miserably for not willing or able to terminate the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In the one case, he is Putin’s lap dog, in the other, he plays second fiddle to Netanyahu].

Trump is so arrogant and wholly consumed by his own supreme ignorance, that the turmoil in world affairs is unlikely to subside any time soon.

The writer can be reached at:

shashimalla125@gmail.com