How Trump-style authoritarians lose
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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.
How is Bolsonaro compared to Trump and what lessons can be drawn?
I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.
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.
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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What led to Jair Bolsonaro's imprisonment and its implications?
0:00–1:00
2
How is Bolsonaro compared to Trump and what lessons can be drawn?
1:00–15:06
3
What were the circumstances surrounding Bolsonaro's election and rise to power?
15:06–21:08
4
What was the significance of the January 8th attack in Brazil?
21:08–27:08