FAfter Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and after the bloody January 6 riot that provoked Trump, the 45th president of the United States immediately lost many of his ties to world leaders he once called “friends “. However, Brazilian far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who has modeled himself on Trump’s image, tried to keep the joke alive.
This is something that former President Trump, months after he officially left the White House, has not forgotten and has expressed a certain interest in returning the favor.
This summer, according to two people with knowledge of the issue, Trump told confidants that he was open to publicly supporting Bolsonaro’s re-election, potentially at a mega-rally in Brazil where he and Bolsonaro could appear together side by side. to defend themselves from what everyone considers to be undesirable election results. Bolsonaro, who is expected to fail decisively in his candidacy for re-election next year, has preemptively spread unfounded claims of electoral “fraud,” a strategy reminiscent of Trump’s failed coup in the United States.
Whether or not Trump ends up visiting his Brazilian counterpart soon (the U.S. government issued a “level four” advice for those interested in visiting Brazil), the links between the world of Bolsonaro and Trumpland remain firmly intact. .
President Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who acts as a member of the Brazilian parliament and has been described in the US press as Donald Trump Jr. of Brazil, recently met with Trump, according to a post on the account of Instagram of the Brazilian legislator. Last month, young Bolsonaro posted photos of himself at Trump Tower, next to the former president. Bolsonaro, whose daughter posed next to the former president with an autographed MAGA ball cap, said he “took the opportunity to invite [Trump] come to our country when you think it convenient, maybe in a CPAC-Brazil ”.
Apparently, Trump did not reach the Brazilian version of the annual U.S. Conservative summit, although Donald Trump Jr. spoke at the conference via video. CPAC Brazil 2021, which was hosted in the Brazilian capital Brasilia earlier this month, is one of several foreign derivations of the state conference, driven by the American Conservative Union. The ACU is headed by Trump-aligned lobbyist Matt Schlapp, who is also a friend of the Bolsonaro political dynasty.
It was on the eve of that trip that a delegation of U.S. conservatives, including former Trump adviser and chief spokesman Jason Miller, was briefly detained by Brazilian law enforcement as they tried to leave the country on Tuesday. The incident occurred on the day of Brazil’s independence, as Bolsonaro urged his supporters to defend his administration by flooding the streets of Brasilia as well as other major cities.
A day before he was arrested, Miller appeared on the podcast of former Trump aide Steve Bannon to praise Bolsonaro, whom he described as a “very impressive man.”
“In many ways, President Bolsonaro has the same superpowers as President Trump,” Miller said.
Gettr, Miller’s attempt on a pro-Trump social media platform, has proven especially popular among President Bolsonaro’s Brazilian conservative supporters, according to a recent report from Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. As part of this study, the researchers examined the frequency of flag emojis in Gettr user profiles: Brazilian flags, set at 11,350 profiles, were only second to American flags, which were in 20,650 accounts. The flag metric is an inaccurate measure of the national demographics of Gettr’s approximately 1.5 million followers, although it points to a vocal and large community of pro-Bolsonaro users in the social media app. Their presence in these figures, Stanford researchers wrote, is probably due at least in part to the support for Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, which announced it would join the platform in July.
The struggling Brazilian president has returned the favor, courting Miller with a high-level meeting during the trip to Brazil. Miller met with a barefoot Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo, according to images posted on Twitter by fellow attendee Matthew Tyrmand, a board member of the Project Veritas group, pro-Trump conservative activist James O’Keefe. During the meeting, Bolsonaro and his son lifted a Veritas Project T-shirt.
“It wants to be a kind of South American branch of Trumpism, if you will,” said Gustavo Ribeiro, the founder of the Brazilian news website The Brazilian Report.
Bolsonaro’s critics had accused him of using the protests to stage a coup or his own version of an attack on government institutions on 6 January. As protesters broke into several police barricades the night before, pro-Bolsonaro rallies were hampered by poor attendance and increased law enforcement presence.
Eduardo Bolsonaro has become an emissary between his father and the American far right. In 2019, young Bolsonaro joined a kind of international populist movement founded by Bannon, as a representative for South America.
Andre Pagliarini, an associate professor at Hampden-Sydney College who studies the modern political history of Brazil, said the Bolsonaros are affiliated with Trump associates like Bannon in an attempt to get closer to Trump.
“It’s the persistent Trump dust that’s still left in Bannon that attracts them,” Pagliarini said.
Eduardo Bolsonaro has even courted Trump’s lesser-known allies internationally in the United States such as MyPillow’s CEO and Trump’s staunch ally, Mike Lindell. In August, Bolsonaro spoke at Lindell’s ill-fated “cyber symposium” event, a baffling attempt to prove the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Prior to his speech, Bolsonaro handed Lindell a red “MAGIC” hat that he said came from the former U.S. president, accused twice.
“Bolsonaro will win unless he’s stolen by the machines,” guess what? Bannon said while young Bolsonaro was on stage.
“The machines!” Lindell agreed.
For his part, the tycoon of the trumpet cushion has not yet delved into Bolsonaro. Lindell told The Daily Beast Thursday night that he currently has no plans to sink money or resources into anything related to Brazil, because he is working to launch new fronts in his audit crusade in “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Alabama, Colorado. ”
Bolsonaro is expected to lose his re-election campaign in 2022 to former Brazilian left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Faced with this projected defeat, Bolsonaro brings to Brazil the unfounded accusations of Trump and the Republican Party of massive electoral fraud, part of an effort to win even if he loses.
“Here’s a network of denialism established in the United States after Trump loses that he can connect,” Pagliarini said.
According to Ribeiro, Bolsonaro has already adapted the war struggles between American culture and war for Brazil, embracing the struggles for arms control and the alleged hydroxychlorinated COVID-19.
Bolsonaro was also one of the first promoters of ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that has been adopted as an untested treatment of COVID-19 by anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
“We don’t have a second amendment here, but they still use arguments very similar to the ones Republicans would use in the United States on the freedom to bear arms,” Ribeiro said.
Some pro-Trump media have adopted Bolsonaro as a figure Bannon has called the “Trump of the tropics.” QAnon’s social media channels enthusiastically followed the Brazilian protests, turning them into ordinary Brazilians demanding their freedom from the liberal elites. The right-wing bloc The Gateway Pundit argued that pro-Bolsonaro protesters and Trump supporters were part of a single global battle against so-called “corruption.”
It’s not the first time meetings between Bolsonaro and Trumpworld have reached headlines. In March 2020, a meeting between Trump and Bolsonaro in Mar-a-Lago became a major coronavirus spot in the United States after several Bolsonaro aides tested positive for the virus.
“Trump has praised Bolsonaro’s style many times when he was in office and loves how Bolsonaro goes after his country’s media and ‘political correctness,'” said a source close to Trump who has spoken to him several times. about Bolsonaro. “But the [former] The president has assured me that he looks “better” than Bolsonaro … at least twice when I spoke to him. “