Jacob Ward's Warning | Trump and Bolsonaro: Same Crimes, Different Outcome
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How did Bolsonaro’s alleged coup plot lead to a historic trial in Brazil?
Being in Brazil right now, for an American, is like being in an alternative universe in which the president of the country plots to overthrow a lawful election And rather than winding up back in power, winds up on trial for that attempt. That's what's happening right now. So I'm going to walk you through a little history. Bear with me. It's a little complicated, but it's worth it because it shows us how differently things could have gone in the United States because that's what's happening here in Brazil. So Jair Bolsonaro, former president of the nation, is on trial right now for a coup. That's what they're calling it. Not a protest, not even an insurrection. They're calling it a coup attempt. He's the first president to be brought up on these charges since Brazil emerged from a military dictatorship in 1985.
And his trial starts right now. with 80 witnesses lined up to testify that he knew about and in some cases even plotted the overthrow of a duly elected government. Back in October of 2022, Ignacio Lula da Silva, the current president of Brazil, was elected and defeated Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, he's a Trump guy. He's a big enthusiast of Trump. He ran on a sort of populist message like Trump did, and in many ways seems to have taken some of his tactics, his choreography from Trump, considering the success that Trump has had. And in doing so, it's really, I mean, it's uncanny just how similar things are. During COVID, under Bolsonaro, there was incredible misinformation about COVID spread mostly by Bolsonaro and huge numbers of people amplifying it online, so much so that Brazil had one of the highest, you know, had just an incredible death rate, terrible, terrible death rate.
And That machinery continued as journalists began to turn up evidence of Bolsonaro possibly enriching himself and his family through his office.
What similarities did Bolsonaro’s playbook share with Donald Trump’s tactics?
That sounds familiar. Those sorts of investigations were met with incredible disinformation campaigns by organized groups online. amplifying all sorts of conspiracy theories and stuff against journalists, against investigators, against the federal judge, Alexander de Moreas, who's one of the big figures in this. I'm going to come to him more in a moment. And it got so bad that Moreas, this federal judge, actually insisted that Elon Musk bring X to heel. He canceled a bunch of accounts and insisted that they do a better job of fighting misinformation. But Musk more or less ignored him Until finally, Moreus banned X in this country because of the misinformation problem and even looked at the possibility of changing some political outcomes based on the incredible amount of misinformation that was out there.
It was, I mean, if you can imagine, right, in the United States, if the Supreme Court suddenly said, we're going to shut X down because it is such a source of misinformation. And eventually, Elon Musk did. sort of accept what the judge, Moraes, told him to do. And, you know, today X is much more tightly controlled than it was. So once Lula da Silva won in October 2022, Bolsonaro went on a big rampage of decrying the election as fraud, describing imaginary plots to hack the system and to that, you know, somehow it's all very similar stuff to what we heard in the United States, that the machines were corrupted and there was an influence campaign and all of this stuff, none of which has been shown to be true.
Because here's the other thing about Brazil is, as cartoonish as its misinformation system can be, and it's really crazy, the kinds of horrific sexual stuff and all kinds of creepy stuff that's brought against journalists and investigators and the rest of it, it's in some ways even worse than it is in the United States. But at the same time, there's a very powerful form of journalism here in which many, many investigative journalists are working all the time. There's a big... investigative news agency, a sort of fact-checking news agency that's based here in Rio called LUPA, which stands for the magnifying glass. And, you know, they do all kinds of amazing work fighting that disinformation and misinformation.
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