Chapter 1: What led to Jair Bolsonaro's imprisonment and its implications?
Late last year, Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup to keep himself in office after he lost an election. Bolsonaro was often called the Trump of the tropics. He was a populist, a nationalist with anti-democratic impulses, an itchy trigger finger on Twitter, and maybe most importantly, about half his country firmly behind him.
During Bolsonaro's trial, Trump tried to downplay any comparison.
He's not like a friend of mine. He's somebody that I know.
But he wasn't entirely successful.
And he loves the country and he fought hard for those people and they want to put him in jail. And I think that's a witch hunt and I think it's very unfortunate.
With Bolsonaro behind bars now, people who study democracy are asking whether what happened in his country holds any lessons for these United States. Coming up on Today Explained, we're going to Brazil.
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Chapter 2: How is Bolsonaro compared to Trump and what lessons can be drawn?
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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.
Little stuff. You recently spent a week in Brazil. I spent a week in Poland, where it was eight degrees below zero. So you got the better assignment, and I hate you for that. But we both had the same assignment, right? Tell me what we're doing.
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.
All right, let's talk about what's been going on in Brazil.
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.
Notorious prior to the election for homophobic, misogynist and racist comments, Bolsonaro rose to the rank of army captain during Brazil's military dictatorship. The truth will liberate this country. and it will turn us into a great nation.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances surrounding Bolsonaro's election and rise to power?
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the January 8th attack in Brazil?
Yeah, look, this is a really pressing question because there isn't an obvious democratic playbook to counter the playbook that authoritarians around the world have developed for weakening democracy. You know, they concentrate power on the executive, weaken checks on their authority, start monkeying with the way that elections are administered, go after the free press.
It's a pretty well-established playbook at this point.
Venezuela in crisis. On just its second day in session, Venezuela's constitutional assembly votes to oust the nation's chief prosecutor. In a national referendum, the Kremlin secured a change to term limit rules. It would allow Putin to potentially stay in power until 2036.
They came out in their thousands to voice their anger at what they say is the latest silencing of Hungary's press.
And we don't have a sort of set of rules that work for democratic oppositions who, small d here, who want to be stopping that from attacking democracy. So I've been doing a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. And as part of that, I convened a bunch of experts on democracy from around the world to try and talk about the specific question.
We sat down, we spent a day locked in a conference room discussing lessons from Brazil and other places. And one of the big takeaways that I got is that the conventional wisdom about fighting for democracy is wrong. The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't talk about democracy. People don't care about it. It's too abstract. And the voters are going to tune out.
And so you get this postmortem of Kamala Harris's 2024 bid where it's like, well, the problem is that she stopped talking about affordability and started talking about democracy. Yeah.
Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him.
I just think that's completely wrong. Just completely wrong. And so there are a few examples, right? Brazil is one of them. Another similar case is South Korea in 2024. There, the president declared martial law in December. And like within hours, like probably minutes, really, there had been a mass of protesters in Seoul who were blocking security services that had been deployed outside Congress.
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