It was a scene that, in hindsight, appears downright reckless: On Sept. 6, 2018, a leading Brazilian presidential candidate was carried aloft by a throng of supporters in the streets of Juiz de Fora, a city in the country’s second-largest state of Minas Gerais. Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who served in Brazil’s congress for almost 30 years before deciding to seek the presidency, was close enough to the crowd for one man to slide a knife into his stomach. Bolsonaro would recover, but he was sidelined for the rest of the campaign.
It was a scene that, in hindsight, appears downright reckless: On Sept. 6, 2018, a leading Brazilian presidential candidate was carried aloft by a throng of supporters in the streets of Juiz de Fora, a city in the country’s second-largest state of Minas Gerais. Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who served in Brazil’s congress for almost 30 years before deciding to seek the presidency, was close enough to the crowd for one man to slide a knife into his stomach. Bolsonaro would recover, but he was sidelined for the rest of the campaign.
Following the attack, Bolsonaro’s opponents—who had been highlighting the threat that the reactionary extremist posed to democracy in Latin America’s largest nation—toned down their rhetoric. He skipped the final presidential debate ahead of the first round of voting and did not go toe-to-toe with Fernando Haddad of the center-left Workers’ Party before the Oct. 28 runoff.
The head of Bolsonaro’s party insisted it would not exploit the attack for political gain, but references to Bolsonaro as something close to a martyr became frequent among the candidate’s allies in the final weeks of the campaign. Bolsonaro would go on to win the election comfortably. In raw political terms, the attempt on Bolsonaro’s life was a gift to his campaign.
Bolsonaro’s stabbing has been much discussed in the wake of the shooting that nearly killed former U.S. President Donald Trump last Saturday during a rally in Pennsylvania. Both incidents occurred during public events where the leaders were interacting closely with supporters, highlighting vulnerabilities in their security arrangements. Bolsonaro and Trump are also ideological bedfellows whose political identities are based as much on personal and familial venality as on concrete policy proposals. They each maintained ardent support in the face of recent political defeats and are hoping to mount political comebacks in the months and years ahead.
There are other fundamental similarities between the two men. Both have explicit authoritarian inclinations and have trafficked openly in sexism, racism, and violent rhetoric. They have sown discord and undermined democracy while stirring up a fervent and devoted base of right-wing, evangelical support. Trump incited his followers to contest the results of the 2020 election. Bolsonaro did nothing to stop close allies from plotting a coup attempt after the 2022 race, which he lost after spending months sowing doubts about Brazil’s electronic voting machines.
Bolsonaro was quick to express his solidarity with Trump after the shooting, calling him “the greatest world leader right now” and adding that he hopes to see him in Washington for his inauguration next January.
Bolsonaro led opinion presidential polls even before his stabbing, and it is likely he would have won the race even if the attack had not occurred. Many Brazilians in 2018 were frustrated by years of scandals in the Workers’ Party that included the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff and since annulled conviction against former—and current—President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But attack undoubtedly strengthened Bolsonaro’s standing by diminishing the salience of his record for voters and the media, allowing his political movement to falsely lay claim to a moral high ground rather than substantively discussing issues.
Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro’s state university, correctly predicted after the stabbing that “Bolsonaro will use the attack to argue his opponents are desperate, that they had no other way to stop him.” Overall, the assassination attempt served to abet Brazil’s far right and harm the country’s democracy. Bolsonaro became the first apologist of Brazil’s brutal 21-year military rule to reach the presidency since the end of the dictatorship in 1985. His movement remains strong even after Lula won a nail-biting victory in 2022.
As in the case of Trump, Bolsonaro’s assassination attempt spawned a host of enduring conspiracy theories. Critics and some political opponents of the then-candidate questioned the circumstances surrounding the attack, suggesting that it was staged to boost his electoral chances. Some close to Bolsonaro—and Bolsonaro himself—have speculated that it was a nefarious left-wing plot to take his life, as the assailant had previously been affiliated with the Party of Socialism and Liberty, a small left-wing party. Investigations by Brazilian authorities, however, pointed to the attacker’s personal motivations and mental health issues rather than any organized conspiracy.
Rather than providing a chance for national reconciliation, Bolsonaro’s stabbing only fed Brazil’s polarization, bolstering a deeply divisive candidate who was unchastened by trauma once in power. Already ahead in most polls, Bolsonaro’s position markedly improved after being laid low. It remains to be seen whether public sympathy will also produce a similar bump for Trump in the weeks ahead and whether he will be at all changed by his near-death experience.
Although it is easy to find parallels between the two episodes, there are also important differences—particularly as it relates to the path forward for those concerned about the prospect of a second Trump administration.
For one, it seemed a small leap for Bolsonaro’s supporters to peg the stabbing on his progressive opposition because of the attacker’s left-wing affiliation. Trump’s would-be assassin, on the other hand, was a registered Republican who at one point reportedly displayed yard signs at his home in support of the former president, according to neighbors. (This noteworthy detail has not kept Trump supporters from pinning the blame on U.S. President Joe Biden and “the left.”)
Another key difference is the fact that Bolsonaro was stabbed while seeking the presidency for the first time, whereas Trump has already served one four-year term when he was shot. Bolsonaro was largely unknown to most Brazilian voters in 2018. They might have been aware of his past incendiary remarks, but not the broader arc of his career. The stabbing presented Bolsonaro in a new light—as victim rather than would-be authoritarian ruler. It is unclear if Trump has similar room to grow in the polls among a U.S. electorate that is deeply familiar with and divided over his 2017 to 2021 tenure in office.
Finally, Bolsonaro was stabbed almost exactly one month before voters went to the polls. By comparison, the almost four months left before the U.S. election is longer than the entire formal two-month campaigning period in Brazil. Bolsonaro’s platform was spared considerable scrutiny following the stabbing, as he was not forced to defend his extremist views or his record of inflammatory rhetoric before voters went to the polls. On the other hand, Trump appeared in public just two days after the shooting to accept his party’s presidential nomination. Among other campaign events, Trump is set to debate Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, again in September.
It goes without saying that a civilized society should not accept political violence or violent appeals from leaders. Bolsonaro’s stabbing was a deeply unsettling act, as was the shooting at the Trump rally, which killed a supporter of the former president. But one lesson from Brazil is that leaders must also push back against the preemptive curtailment of legitimate political debate in the wake of these tragedies.
Biden clearly understands the tightrope he must walk. As he said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Sunday, “Look, how do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody? Look, I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there’ll be a bloodbath if he loses,” a reference to comments Trump made in March.
Trump, not Biden, is the one who has made violent rhetoric a routine feature of U.S. politics. The same is true of Bolsonaro. There is no equivalent elsewhere on the Brazilian political spectrum to Bolsonaro’s celebration of state violence. As just one example, the former president has confirmed links to individuals involved in the 2018 murder of left-wing Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco. Similarly, nothing Biden has said or done in the realm of domestic U.S. political debate comes close to Trump’s alleged receptivity to his supporters’ calls to hang his own vice president in early 2021.
Whereas some of Bolsonaro’s opponents shifted their messaging after his stabbing, the broad anti-Trump coalition must not be cowed. Voters deserve a full reckoning over his legacy and his vision for the future.
In Brazil, Bolsonaro’s stabbing contributed to his almost messianic hold on a significant part of the electorate that includes pro-dictatorship militants, working-class evangelicals, and middle and upper-class voters disgruntled by over a decade of center-left governance. Over the years, when the former president has found himself in hot water, medical complications from the stabbing reappeared to rekindle a modicum of public sympathy and remind his devotees of the supposed nefariousness of the left. In February, Bolsonaro showed he can still turn out tens of thousands of supporters in the streets with a mass rally in São Paulo.
Trump has already cannily moved to incorporate the attack on his life into his own political narrative. Any self-respecting opposition, however, should use this moment as an opportunity to present voters with an alternative vision for the future. The Bolsonarist political project that prevailed in 2018 in Brazil was, and remains, at its heart a cult of intimidation and fear. It was defeated four years later by a broad-based agenda that embraced pluralism and promised hope, solidarity, and a renewed commitment to collective prosperity.
There is still a lot of time until election day in the United States. Americans opposed to Trump should steer clear of fatalism and conspiracy theories, even if the former president’s acolytes don’t. Baseless paranoia yielded nothing for the anti-Bolsonaro coalition. Instead, those who don’t want to see Trump back in the White House should redouble their opposition to political violence and articulate a policy vision that can chase away the dark right-wing fever dreams that fetishize brute force.
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