The defeated president had spent months falsely crying election fraud. His allies in right-wing media relentlessly spread conspiracy theories, hammering at the nation’s confidence in its own democracy. It came to a head one day in early January, as thousands of the president’s supporters stormed the seat of government, trampling police, breaking windows and doors and parading triumphantly through the halls of the Capitol.
The violent mob attack in Brazil’s capital city on Sunday wasn’t merely a coincidental echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the U.S. Capitol. In real ways, it was inspired by the U.S. attack, patterned after it and even instigated with the help of some of the same Donald Trump allies who helped light the fuse here.
Exactly two years and two days after Trump and his mob attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in Washington, thousands of Brazilian protesters loyal to defeated ex-President Jair Bolsonaro attacked Brazil’s Congress and other government buildings. The rioters wrought extensive damage. Hundreds were arrested.
Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro had already left office (and the country) before the attack. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in the Oct. 30 election, was sworn in Jan. 1. But the attackers, like their American counterparts, were intent on using violence to reverse the election.
Other parallels abound. Trump, long a fan of autocrats and fellow autocrat-wannabes, was a supporter of Bolsonaro, a right-winger known for anti-democratic rhetoric. Bolsonaro spent months before the election telling his supporters that any outcome other than his reelection would be fraudulent, a play right out of Trump’s playbook. Bolsonaro, like Trump, refused to attend his successor’s inauguration, further entrenching his followers in their refusal to accept the election results.
The effort to destabilize Brazil’s democracy didn’t just mirror Jan. 6; it was driven by the same poisonous populism — and even some of the same people. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon used social media to spread false conspiracy theories about fraud in Brazil’s election, just as he did regarding the U.S. election before the insurrection. Ali Alexander, another Trumpist who helped spur the insurrection, called on the Brazilian mob to “Do whatever is necessary!” to put Bolsonaro back in power — followed by a sick quip supporting “impromptu Capitol tours.”
“Dear Brazil, please watch those vote counts at 3 a.m.,” Mark Finchem, the Trumpist election denier who would later lose the race for Arizona secretary of state, said on social media in early October.
Trump himself has been notably silent about Brazil’s riot — just as he was damnably silent through most of the violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection. But the message should be clear anyway: that Trump’s toxic brand of American would-be autocracy is now apparently being exported to other, more wobbly democracies is all the more reason to finally purge it from politics here.
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