The Brazilian playbook for defending democracy

Brazil’s former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison late last year for plotting a coup. The details may sound familiar: Jair Bolsonaro lost an election. He claimed it was stolen from him and rallied supporters to storm the nation’s capital, Brasilia. The insurrection even took place in early January (2023).

However, the parallels between Bolsonaro and President Donald Trump go back a lot further than the coup attempt. Bolsonaro rode a wave of voter discontent to the Brazilian presidency in 2018. He was a populist and a nationalist with anti-democratic impulses, an itchy trigger finger on Twitter, and, maybe most importantly, about half his country firmly behind him.

He even got himself nicknamed “The Trump of the Tropics.”

But when the dust settled, after Bolsonaro’s failed coup attempt, the two presidents’ paths diverged. Bolsonaro was indicted, tried and convicted for inciting his followers and attempting to overthrow the rightfully elected government.

He’s in prison and barred from running for office for decades to come.

In the United States, meanwhile, Trump is back in office.

To find out why one former president is behind bars while the other is back in power, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp traveled to Brazil.

As Beauchamp tells Today, Explained host Noel King, he was interested in “why Brazil’s institutions, its Congress and its Supreme Court were so much more resistant than their American peers to power grabs and attempts to rule as an imperial executive than the US ones were.”

The answer is complex but full of lessons for the US. For more, listen to our episode that traces the rise — and fall — of Bolsonaro, and hear what America may be able to borrow from Brazil’s chaotic political system.

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This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.