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.
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