On Thursday, the Brazilian Supreme Court did what the U.S. Senate and federal courts tragically failed to do: bring a former president who assaulted democracy to justice.
In a historic ruling, the Supreme Court voted 4 to 1 to convict ex-President Jair Bolsonaro of conspiring against democracy and attempting a coup in the wake of his 2022 election defeat. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison. Barring a successful appeal, which is unlikely, Bolsonaro will become the first coup leader in Brazilian history to serve time in prison.
These developments draw a sharp contrast to the United States, where President Trump, who also attempted to overturn an election, was sent not to prison but back to the White House. Trump, perhaps recognizing the power of that contrast, called Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch hunt” and described his conviction as “a terrible thing. Very terrible.”
But Trump didn’t just criticize Brazil’s effort to defend its democracy: he also punished it. Citing the legal case against Bolsonaro before it was even decided, the Trump administration levied a whopping 50 percent tariff on most Brazilian exports and imposed sanctions on several government officials and Supreme Court justices. Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the case, was singled out for especially harsh sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act.
This was an unprecedented step. The administration targeted a Supreme Court justice in a democratic country with sanctions that had previously been reserved for notorious human rights violators such as Abdulaziz al-Hawsawi, who was implicated in the 2018 murder of a Washington Post contributor, Jamal Khashoggi, and Chen Quanguo, an architect of the Chinese government’s persecution of its Uyghur minority. Following the Bolsonaro verdict on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on Trump’s policy (and his analogy), declaring that the United States would “respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”
In short, the Trump administration has sought to use tariffs and sanctions to bully Brazilians into subverting their legal system — and their democracy along with it. In effect, the U.S. administration is punishing Brazilians for doing something Americans should have done, but failed to: hold a former president accountable for attempting to overturn an election.
Contemporary democracies face mounting challenges from illiberal politicians and movements that win power in elections and then subvert the constitutional order. Elected leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Kais Saied in Tunisia politicized government agencies and deployed them to weaken opponents and entrench themselves in power.
A lesson from the 1920s and 1930s — the last time Western democracies faced such threats from within — is that illiberal forces don’t always play fair in elections. They are more willing than liberals to use demagoguery, misinformation and violence to win and retain power. As European liberals learned during that period, passivity in the face of such threats can be costly. Democracies cannot defend themselves. They must be defended. Even the best-designed constitutional checks are mere pieces of paper unless leaders exercise them.
Over the last decade, the United States and Brazil both confronted illiberal threats. The parallels are striking. Both countries elected presidents with authoritarian instincts who, after losing re-election, went after democratic institutions.
Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election and attempted to overturn the results in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
Bolsonaro, a far-right politician elected in 2018, borrowed heavily from Trump’s playbook. Behind in the polls as the 2022 election approached, Bolsonaro began to question the integrity of the electoral process. He repeatedly denounced the electoral authorities and attacked — and tried to eliminate — Brazil’s electronic voting system. He claimed the only way he could lose was through fraud, implying that an opposition victory would be illegitimate.
After narrowly losing to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro, predictably, refused to concede, and on Jan. 8, 2023, thousands of his supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace. Although the uprising paralleled the events of Jan. 6, Bolsonaro’s attack on democracy went beyond Trump’s. Drawing on Brazil’s history of military involvement in politics, Bolsonaro, a former army captain, had cultivated an alliance with elements of the armed forces. Lacking a strong party or legislative base, he leaned on the military for support.
Voluminous evidence uncovered by the Federal Police indicated that Bolsonaro and some of his military allies conspired to overturn the election and block Lula’s inauguration. The conspiracy appears to have included plans to assassinate Lula, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin and Justice Moraes. Fortunately, the army command, under pressure from the Biden administration, refused to go along with the coup attempt.
In both the United States and Brazil, then, elected presidents assaulted democratic institutions, seeking to maintain themselves in power after losing re-election. Both power grabs failed — initially.
But that’s where the two histories diverge. Americans did remarkably little to protect their democracy from the leader who had assaulted it. The country’s vaunted constitutional checks failed to hold Trump accountable for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Although the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump in January 2021, the Senate, which could have convicted him and barred him from running for president again, voted to acquit him. The Justice Department was slow to prosecute Trump for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, waiting nearly two years before appointing a Special Counsel. Trump was indicted in August 2023, but the Supreme Court, acting without a sense of urgency, allowed the case to be delayed. In July 2024, the court ruled that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity, derailing the government’s case against Trump. The Republican Party nominated Trump to run for re-election in 2024 despite his openly authoritarian behavior. When he won the election, the federal cases against him were dropped.
These institutional failures proved costly. The second Trump administration has been openly authoritarian, weaponizing government agencies and deploying them to punish critics, threaten rivals and bully the private sector, the media, law firms, universities and civil society groups. It has routinely skirted the law and at times defied the Constitution. Less than nine months into Trump’s second presidency, the United States has arguably already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.
Brazil followed a different path. Having lived under military dictatorship, Brazilian public officials perceived a threat to democracy from the beginning of Bolsonaro’s presidency. Many judges and congressional leaders saw a need to energetically defend their country’s democratic institutions. As Justice Moraes told one of us, “We realized that we could be Churchill or Chamberlain. I didn’t want to be Chamberlain.”
Viewing themselves as a bulwark against Bolsonaro’s authoritarianism, Brazilian justices pushed back forcefully. When evidence emerged that the Bolsonaro campaign had made widespread use of misinformation during the 2018 election, the court launched what became known as the Fake News Inquiry, in which it aggressively sought to crack down on what the justices viewed as dangerous misinformation. Moraes, who became president of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (which is run by the Supreme Court) in 2022, led the inquiry. Under Moraes, the court suspended the social media accounts of activists it found had engaged in anti-democratic online activity, ordered the removal of some online content it deemed threatening to democracy, searched the homes of pro-Bolsonaro businessmen who were alleged to have supported a coup, and even arrested a pro-Bolsonaro congressman who had called for dictatorship and the dissolution of the court. (He was released after nine months.) These measures were controversial in Brazil, and they are certainly somewhat at odds with America’s libertarian tradition, but they were broadly consistent with how Germany and other European democracies regulate anti-democratic speech.
On Election Day, the Superior Electoral Tribunal took several steps to ensure the integrity of the vote, including ordering the dismantling of illegal checkpoints established by pro-Bolsonaro police and announcing the results immediately after the vote count concluded so that Bolsonaro would not have time to contest them. Crucially, in another striking departure from what happened in the United States, prominent pro-Bolsonaro politicians, including top legislative leaders and right-wing governors, promptly recognized Lula’s victory.
After the events of Jan. 8, 2023 made it clear that Bolsonaro posed a threat to democracy, Brazilian courts moved aggressively to hold him to account — and prevent his return to power. In June 2023, the Superior Electoral Tribunal barred Bolsonaro from holding public office for eight years, closing the door on a 2026 presidential bid. In February 2025, Bolsonaro was indicted on charges of coup conspiracy, setting in motion the trial that led to Thursday’s conviction.
Although Bolsonaro’s supporters took to the streets to protest his prosecution, most of Brazil’s conservative politicians have largely accepted this process. Although many conservative politicians have criticized what they view as judicial overreach and some of them have endorsed proposals to impeach Supreme Court justices or provide amnesty to Bolsonaro and the imprisoned Jan. 8 rioters, the conservative-dominated Congress has conspicuously failed to pursue those measures. Indeed, most right-wing politicians appear content to see Bolsonaro sidelined in 2026. That would allow them to rally behind a more conventional standard-bearer (probably a right-wing governor) who, however conservative, would probably play by the rules of the democratic game.
Unlike the United States, then, Brazil’s institutions acted vigorously and, so far, effectively, to hold a former president accountable for trying to overturn an election. It is precisely the effectiveness of Brazil’s institutions that has placed the country in the cross hairs of the Trump administration. Having run out of options in Brazil, Bolsonaro turned to Trump. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, lobbied the White House for months, seeking U.S. intervention on his father’s behalf. Trump, who said Bolsonaro’s case looked “very much like” what “they tried to do with me,” was persuaded.
In attempting to bully Brazilian authorities into letting Bolsonaro escape justice, the Trump administration is abandoning nearly four decades of U.S. policy toward Latin America. After the end of the Cold War, U.S. administrations were fairly consistent in their defense of democracy in Latin America. The Biden administration’s efforts to block Bolsonaro’s coup attempt was a clear manifestation of that policy. Now, in a move that evokes some of America’s most anti-democratic Cold War interventions, the United States is trying to subvert one of Latin America’s most important democracies.
With all its flaws, Brazilian democracy is healthier today than America’s. Keenly aware of their country’s authoritarian past, Brazil’s judicial and political authorities did not take democracy for granted. Their U.S. counterparts, by contrast, fell down on the job. Rather than undermining Brazil’s effort to defend its democracy, Americans should learn from it.
Filipe Campante is a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins; Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard and the author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of “Tyranny of the Minority” and “How Democracies Die.”
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