This is the article I was wanting to post - Taken directly from the New York Times
Opinion
Guest Essay
Brazil Just Succeeded Where America Failed
Sept. 12, 2025
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By Filipe Campante and Steven Levitsky
Mr. Campante is a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins.
Mr. Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard.
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, Mr.
Bolsonaro will become the first coup leader in Brazilian history to serve time
in prison.
These developments draw a sharp contrast with the United
States, where President Trump, who also attempted to overturn an election, was
sent not to prison but back to the White House. Mr. Trump, perhaps recognizing
the power of that contrast, called Mr. Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch hunt”
and described his conviction as “a terrible thing. Very terrible.”
But Mr. Trump didn’t just criticize Brazil’s effort to
defend its democracy; he also punished it. Citing the legal case against Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. 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.
Mr. Bolsonaro, a far-right politician elected in 2018,
borrowed heavily from Mr. Trump’s playbook. Behind in the polls as the 2022
election approached, Mr. 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, Mr.
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, Mr. Bolsonaro’s
attack on democracy went beyond Mr. Trump’s. Drawing on Brazil’s history of
military involvement in politics, Mr. 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 Mr. Bolsonaro and some of his military allies conspired to
overturn the election and block Mr. Lula’s inauguration. The conspiracy appears
to have included plans to assassinate Mr. 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 Mr. Trump
accountable for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Although the House
of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. 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 Mr. Trump for
his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, waiting nearly two years before
appointing a special counsel. Mr. 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 Mr. Trump. The Republican Party
nominated Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s second presidential term, 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 began what became known as the Fake News
Inquiry, in which it aggressively sought to crack down on what the justices
viewed as dangerous misinformation. Justice Moraes, who became president of the
Superior Electoral Tribunal (which is run by the Supreme Court) in 2022, led
the inquiry. Under Justice 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 Mr.
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 Mr. Lula’s victory.
After the events of Jan. 8, 2023, made it clear that Mr.
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 Mr. Bolsonaro from holding public office for
eight years, closing the door on a 2026 presidential bid. In February 2025, Mr.
Bolsonaro was indicted on charges of coup conspiracy, setting in motion the
trial that led to Thursday’s conviction.
Although Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Bolsonaro turned to
Mr. Trump. Mr. Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo lobbied the White House for months,
seeking U.S. intervention on his father’s behalf. Mr. Trump, who said Mr.
Bolsonaro’s case looked “very much like” what “they tried to do with me,” was
persuaded.
In attempting to bully Brazilian authorities into letting
Mr. 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 Mr. Bolsonaro’s
coup attempt were 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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A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 14,
2025, Section SR, Page 7 of the New York edition with the
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