Earlier this year, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, left Congress and relocated to the United States. Since then, he’s been lobbying for U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene on behalf of his father, who is on trial for attempting to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election. After months of cozying up to power players in Washington, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Eduardo Bolsonaro finally got what he wished for.
Last week, Trump announced a sweeping 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian exports to the United States beginning Aug. 1. In a letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing leader who defeated Jair Bolsonaro three years ago, Trump directly linked the tariffs to Bolsonaro’s legal troubles and attempts by Brazil’s Supreme Court to force U.S. social media companies to comply with the country’s digital safety laws. In an echo of his own timeworn defense against his various indictments, Trump called Bolsonaro’s trial a “Witch Hunt” and said charges should be dropped “IMMEDIATELY!”
Earlier this year, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, left Congress and relocated to the United States. Since then, he’s been lobbying for U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene on behalf of his father, who is on trial for attempting to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election. After months of cozying up to power players in Washington, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Eduardo Bolsonaro finally got what he wished for.
Last week, Trump announced a sweeping 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian exports to the United States beginning Aug. 1. In a letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing leader who defeated Jair Bolsonaro three years ago, Trump directly linked the tariffs to Bolsonaro’s legal troubles and attempts by Brazil’s Supreme Court to force U.S. social media companies to comply with the country’s digital safety laws. In an echo of his own timeworn defense against his various indictments, Trump called Bolsonaro’s trial a “Witch Hunt” and said charges should be dropped “IMMEDIATELY!”
While Trump managed to turn his legal liabilities into political currency, it is unlikely that he will be able to export that dynamic to the Brazilian context. Indeed, the early indications are that his capricious decision to single out Brazil for purely punitive tariffs has been disastrous for Bolsonaro’s Brazilian supporters.
What was meant as a show of strength by MAGA and its Brazilian franchise has turned into a political gift for Lula, who now gets to credibly present himself as a symbol of national resistance while leaving his opponents scrambling to choose between loyalty to Bolsonaro and the economic interests of their own base.
To begin with, it’s probably too late for Bolsonaro. While he remains popular among many conservatives, Bolsonaro has already been barred from seeking office for the foreseeable future. Lately, he appears chastened, a far cry from the glowering reactionary leader who celebrated Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship and constantly bucked institutional constraints. The evidence against the former president, who led the storming of his nation’s capital in 2023, is so damning that even his allies reportedly expect a conviction later this year.
Trump’s second justification for his surprise move was a defense of “the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans.” These rights have supposedly been besieged by Brazil’s efforts to compel social media companies operating on its soil to follow domestic regulations pertaining to the spread of disinformation and online hate speech. But Trump is too late in embracing this tired narrative as well. Months ago, Brazil’s policing of certain posts on online platforms caused a furor among Brazil’s reactionaries and Silicon Valley zealots. Elon Musk himself advocated forcefully for X, formerly known as Twitter, picking a fight with Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. But Musk has long since backed downthe issue fading to the back of the transnational right-wing hive mind like so many scandals du jour.
So why is Trump acting now? We can only speculate given that, as Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad put itthe new tariffs make very little economic sense. One possibility is that he simply wants an excuse to brandish his tariff stick again. Though Brazilian exports to the United States account for less than 2 percent of the country’s GDP, it exports more than twice as much to China. Brazil’s democratic institutions, as Paul Krugman arguesthus have little plausible incentive to bend to accommodate the personal whims of the U.S. president.
Alternatively, Trump’s outburst could also be linked to the BRICS summit that just concluded in Rio de Janeiro. At the beginning of the summit, Trump threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on any country aligning with what he called “anti-American” BRICS policies—part of a broader pattern of portraying cooperative diplomacy within global south countries as a direct affront to Washington’s political and economic dominance. Consequently, BRICS leaders, who represent a coalition of emerging economies, emphasized their commitment to a multipolar global order and criticized the “indiscriminate rising of tariffs,” a thinly veiled rebuke of U.S. trade policy. Putting a finer point on it, Lula declared during the meeting that the world did not need or want an “emperor” shaping global trade according to his individual interests.
Faced with signs of a shifting global order, Trump appears eager to reassert American primacy through blunt-force protectionism. However, his latest move may backfire.
Attempting to bully Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation and the fourth-biggest democracy on Earth, is a shot across the bow for all BRICS nations. It risks pushing Brazil—ironically, the most prominent BRICS member to oppose expanding the bloc last year to include U.S. antagonists like Iran and Venezuela—further into the camp of U.S. rivals like Russia and China.
In addition to being bad policy from Washington’s perspective, Trump’s move is extremely bad politics for Brazilian conservatives. Lula has appeared increasingly adrift in the second half of his third term, struggling with a fractious Congress and record-low approval ratings. Some of his allies and advisors have even questioned his run for reelection. Suddenly, however, thanks to Trump, he has a galvanizing new message to unify Brazilians of every stripe: Brazil is a sovereign nation that will not be pushed around.
“Doesn’t anyone on his team have the sense to explain to him not to insult another country like that?” Lula said last week, expressing special offense at the fact that Trump announced the new tariffs on social media with no formal notice. “It is unacceptable for foreign interests to override Brazilian sovereignty,” he added. Trump has inadvertently made Lula into a bulwark against neocolonialism, a role the aging firebrand will be more than happy to play.
On top of everything else, Trump and his Brazilian followers are also likely to bear the blame for any economic headwinds Brazil might face between now and the 2026 Brazilian elections. If growth numbers dip in the coming months, Lula will be able to point to the damaging effects of Trump’s heavy-handed interventionism. Thus, if Trump does not back down on his tariff threat before Aug. 1, ambitious right-wing politicians plotting their post-Bolsonaro political futures will be forced into the awkward position of either defending a policy that will materially hurt Brazilians or performing rhetorical gymnastics to somehow pin it on Lula.
Bolsonaro and his sons seem happy to let their country suffer for the sin of not renewing their grip on power. But it is hard to believe Trump was actually advised to take this course of action by anyone who knows anything about Latin America in general and Brazil in particular.
