Brazil Stopped Its Trump. It’s Pathetic that We Couldn’t Stop Ours.
The Republicans obviously deserve the blame, in particular the decision of the Supreme Court in 2024 which defined a large part of what Trump did after the 2020 elections as official acts of the president and therefore not subject to prosecution.
It should be noted that the United States was particularly poorly equipped to punish an anti-democratic president because we, unlike most other democracies, have a deeply rooted system of only two major parties. Thus, the party whose leader could face sanctions for anti-democratic behavior has very strong incentives to support this leader, whatever he did. By defending Trump, Republicans like the Supreme Court Judge John Roberts also defend the brand and the ideology of a party in which they have invested their professional life.
On the other hand, the current president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, and Bolsonaro, are perhaps the main political figures of the country today and represent two major parties, but it is not the same battle of several decades between two parties as in the United States. “Brazilian law is fragmented (at least four parts claim a conservative identity at the Brazilian Congress) and not particularly indebted to Bolsonaro,” wrote the Latin American political professor of the Bard, Omar G. Encarnación Time.
