Bolsonaro faces 27 years for plotting a coup. Trump, despite similar actions, still tightens his grip on US democracy.
If US President Donald Trump were a religious man, he might have said “There but for the grace of God go I” when he heard that former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Bolsonaro’s crime was to have plotted a coup to take back the presidency he lost in the 2022 election.
Trump is acutely aware of the similarities between Bolsonaro’s case and his own bumbling, half-hearted attempt to incite a coup on 6 January, 2021.
Both men were voted out after a single term, both immediately declared that the election had been “stolen” by the opposition and both then chickened out of a coup.
Trump feels the parallels so keenly that he condemned the Bolsonaro trial, claiming it was a “witch-hunt”.
Although the US has a positive trade balance with Brazil, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on imports from it as an explicit punishment for putting his friend and ally on trial.
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Trump must be feeling close to all-powerful right now.
Only eight months into his second term after a triumphant comeback election, he is nearing the point where he can sweep the whole 238-year-old constitutional apparatus of the United States aside and rule by decree.
Indeed, to a large extent he already rules by decree, with both the Supreme Court and the two Houses of Congress subservient to his will.
But he has not done anything irrevocable yet, so why has Brazil’s democracy survived while America’s is in great peril?
The Brazilian coup plans were serious and extensive.
Four top military officers were involved and assassins from the special forces were to kill a Supreme Court judge and the president-elect, Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva as a pretext for a military take-over.
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But it didn’t happen because the army and air force heads refused to go along. The assassins were called off literally at the last moment.
A mob of Bolsonaristas eventually showed up in Brasilia and stormed the Congress and the Supreme Court, but it was all over by then, so they just vandalised the buildings.
The siege of the US Congress the previous January was a less organised affair.
Trump’s most extreme supporters had been planning a protest in Washington on the day when then vice-president Mike Pence was supposed to ratify the election results.
A mob of extreme Trump backers broke into the Capitol and might have murdered Pence if they had caught him, but this shambles was never going to end as a successful coup.
Compared to the Brazilian events, it was much less serious – yet look which country is in deep trouble now. What went wrong in the United States?
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Basically, Brazil brought the guilty men to book right away. The United States waited too long and Trump got away with it.
If Congress had acted promptly, the impeachment would have been successful and Trump could never have run again.
That is not to say another hard-right populist could not have won the election in 2024, but it would have been a lot less likely.
The law-abiding Republican Party might have taken back control and the extremists on both sides might have been rejected. But maybe not, because polarisation is deeply entrenched in the US.
An overwhelming majority of Republican voters still believe that Trump really won the 2020 election.
By contrast, only 36% of Brazilians doubt that Bolsonaro was part of the coup plot, even though the voters are almost equally split between him and Lula.
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There is an election due in Brazil next year and if Bolsonaro’s party wins the presidency, he would swiftly be amnestied.
Nothing is certain, but for the moment Trump’s assault on Brazil’s sovereignty is pushing public opinion in Lula’s favour. Meanwhile, in the US, the scene darkens.
