Zach Beecham

You're listening to Today Explained.

My name is Zach Beacham.

I'm a senior correspondent at Vox, where my primary interests are democracy, the political right, and the future of liberalism.

You know, little stuff.

So we have this big package that we're working on at Vox that I maneuvered such that I get to go to the nice weather place and Noelle and Miles were banished to the frigid wasteland of my ancestral homeland of Eastern Europe.

But no, it was great.

The package is about primarily America after Trump.

Right.

But not in the sense of like, what does the US look like in the sense of how do we think about democracy after we've experienced something that is objectively a real shock to our democratic system?

How do we think about repairing it?

How do we think about preventing the kind of authoritarian overreach that we saw from Trump from ever happening again?

And so we wanted to investigate some countries that have had at least reasonable amounts of success at dealing with

elected authoritarian governments.

And Poland and Brazil are two of the most interesting examples.

So that's why we went to those two.

The Brazilian case is, I think, one of the most relevant parallels to understanding what happened in the U.S.

They elected a president who's very much like Donald Trump.

His name is Jerry Bolsonaro.

He was elected back in 2018.

So much so like Trump that people would commonly call him the Trump of the tropics.