Zach Beecham

He did a lot of similar stuff to what Trump has done in this term.

It's very interesting, right?

Back then, Bolsonaro was seen as the more aggressive of the two of them in terms of his attacks on democracies, right?

They were both in office at the same time for a little bit.

Now, Trump has become even more aggressive, but in a way, Bolsonaro presaged him, right?

Bolsonaro's term being the prelude to Trump II.

Interestingly, when Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election, he did two things, right?

One, he plotted a military coup, like an actual armed military coup, old school.

The only reason there wasn't a military coup is because two of the heads of the military, that is the heads of the Air Force and the Army, said no.

But then that wasn't it for him.

On January 8th, Bolsonaro supporters, seemingly with his pre-knowledge, launched a very January 6th-like attack in the capital of Brasilia.

It really did seem, and we know now based on evidence, that it was patterned off of what happened in January 6th in the United States.

Only the end goal was to kind of get the military to reverse its previous stance on a coup.

And that didn't happen, right?

And not only did it not happen, but subsequently, Bolsonaro was investigated, arrested, thrown in jail, and disqualified from running in the upcoming presidential election, which is in 2026 this year.

There's been a lot written, I think, about the investigation into January 8th and the subsequent impressive performance of the Brazilian legal system compared to the American one.

What I was more interested in is how it got to that point.

Namely, why is it that Brazil's institutions, its Congress and its Supreme Court, were so much more resistant than their American peers to sort of power grabs and attempts to rule as an imperial executive than the US ones were?

So why?

Yeah, so why?