Brazil Stopped Its Trump. It’s Pathetic that We Couldn’t Stop Ours.
The incumbent president lost the election and then tried to overturn the results, concluding with his supporters invading government buildings in the nation’s capitol. A few months later, he was barred from seeking elective office. Prosecutors filed charges against him fairly quickly, and he was later sentenced to 27 years in prison.
A democratic nation actually can overcome deep polarization and division and punish politicians who undermine democracy. Just not the United States, even though our leaders have spent decades beating their chests about the wonders of American democracy. The Brazilian Supreme Court’s recent conviction of Jair Bolsonaro on five charges related to his attempt to overturn the 2022 election results there and stay in power is a great illustration that democratic principles and processes can work. It should make America even more ashamed that we allowed Donald Trump to go essentially unpunished for his post-election actions in 2020 and eventually become president again.
“The argument that ultimately prevailed in the United States–that presidents require extraordinary legal deference to avoid politicized accountability–stands in stark contrast to established practices in democracies,” Stanford University political scientist Adam Bonica wrote earlier this year, after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from office. “Consider the global record since just 2010: At least 31 national leaders in democracies have been convicted of serious crimes or formally banned from holding office.”
The events in the United States in 2020-21 and Brazil in 2022-23 were not exactly the same. And the country’s political systems have significant differences. But the broad outlines are similar enough: a right-wing president who undermined democratic norms in office narrowly lost the election, falsely claimed that he was defeated, and then sought to remain in power anyway.
What happened after those presidents were forced out of office was much different. In Brazil, the business community and other elite institutions mobilized against Bolsonaro. The country’s Superior Electoral Court (it oversees electoral justice in Brazil; there is not really an American equivalent) banned him from seeking office until 2030. Prosecutors filed charges against him in February 2025, about two years after the coup attempt. The case immediately went up to the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, where four of the five justices then sentenced him to the 27-year jail sentence last week.
And what happened in Brazil is not unusual. As Bonica writes, “This isn’t an anomaly; it’s standard democratic practice. Leaders have faced justice for offenses ranging from bribery and corruption to election interference and treason—resulting in real consequences from prison terms to lifetime bans.”
You can see the contrast with the United States. Senate Republicans blocked a conviction of Trump in February 2021 that would have barred him from future election office. The Justice Department under Merrick Garland at first focused on prosecuting lower-level people involved with January 6, as opposed to the former president. Federal charges were first filed against Trump for his election interference in August 2023, almost three years after his conduct. By that time, he was running for president again, making it easier for him to claim that the charges were partisan and creating the potential of the legal process ending because he won the election. (And that’s what happened.)
But just as big a problem as the slow formal legal process were the informal mistakes that Americans made. Democratic Party leadership including Joe Biden, along with the media and other nonpartisan elite institutions, were eager to move on from January 6 and desperate to show that they were above partisanship. They leaned too far toward the view that in a democracy, one side should not punish its political enemies, while ignoring the perspective that democracy cannot stand if politicians violate democratic principles without sanctions. Biden and Garland didn’t seem to understand that prosecuting Trump was not Democrats prosecuting Republicans but rather pro-democracy politicians prosecuting an anti-democratic politician to protect democracy.
Republicans obviously deserve blame too, particularly the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that defined much of what Trump did after the 2020 election as official acts of the president and therefore not subject to prosecution.
It’s worth noting that the United States was particularly ill-equipped to punish an anti-democratic president because we, unlike most other democracies, have a deeply entrenched system of only two major parties. So the party whose leader could face sanctions for anti-democratic behavior has very strong incentives to stand by that leader, no matter what he has done. By defending Trump, Republicans like Supreme Court Justice John Roberts are also defending the brand and ideology of a party they have invested their professional lives in.
In contrast, Brazil’s current president, left-leaning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Bolsonaro may be the country’s leading political figures today and represent two major parties, but it’s not the same decades-long battle between just two parties as in the United States. “The Brazilian right is fragmented (at least four parties claim a conservative identity in the Brazilian Congress) and not particularly beholden to Bolsonaro,” Bard College Latin American politics professor Omar G. Encarnación wrote in a recent essay in Time.
Of course all is not perfect in Brazil. Bolsonaro can still appeal the charges. He has a large, passionate support base that believes he was falsely convicted and has protested his conviction. Even though Bolsonaro himself can’t run, his wife, one of his sons, or another of his proteges is likely to be a candidate in next year’s presidential election, further dividing the country.
And the Brazilian government will face a major barrier in marginalizing Bolsonaro: Trump. The American president is both an ally of Bolsonaro and likely understands that it looks bad for him if another right-wing leader gets 27 years in prison for trying to overturn election results. So the Trump administration is planning to punish Brazil for convicting Bolsonaro with various sanctions, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called the charges against the former president a “witch hunt.”
This is another shame for America. Our inactions from 2021-2024 are not only crippling American democracy but also weakening a key democracy thousands of miles away.
But while the contrast between the U.S. and Brazil is depressing, there is a hopeful part of the story. As Bonica argues, democracies across the world can and are prosecuting anti-democratic leaders. America each day keeps proving it is not the exceptional (in a good way) nation it has long claimed to be. In fact, we’re increasingly exceptional in a pretty grim way. We can now strive to be unexceptional—joining the many countries who keep undemocratic leaders out of power. We didn’t stop Trump, but hopefully he will leave office and we will never again elect an autocrat.