As president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro was often called the Trump of the Tropics, an association the Bolsonaro family actively cultivated. From the moment he was elected in 2018, he loudly celebrated the United States — in his first year in office, he even saluted the U.S. flag — but he saved his most intense loyalty for one American. When he met President Trump at the United Nations in 2019, he told him: “I love you.”
Before assuming power, Bolsonaro was an anti-democratic ideologue and former military man with a decades-long career in politics; Trump was a real estate developer and a media personality. But over the six years that Bolsonaro drove the news cycles in Latin America’s largest nation, he gave journalists a long list of reasons to equate the two men. Both made a show of praising authoritarian leaders, past and present, and liked to style themselves as defenders of law and order while acting as if the rules didn’t apply to them. Both formed an alliance with the religious right late in their careers and enlisted their sons to help push their respective agendas. Both frequently took to Twitter to attack their enemies, troll traditional media and rile up their supporters. And both retreated to Florida when things got tough.
For decades, the Brazilian right had looked to the United States, and when Donald Trump began to transform the rules of political discourse, it took note. “We learned to have the courage to speak up,” says Damares Alves, an evangelical pastor who served as Bolsonaro’s minister of human rights, families and women. “We began to be more incisive on the question of abortion. We learned we could be more direct about the question of arming the population. We realized we could take a tougher stand against the left-wing transformation taking place across our continent.”
As president, Bolsonaro seemed eager to import as much of the MAGA movement to Brazil as possible. So when Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest a “stolen” election, many Brazilians worried that Bolsonaro supporters might try something similar. That’s exactly what happened. On Jan. 1, 2023, when Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of the left-wing Workers’ Party, took office, Bolsonaro skipped the ceremony, holing up instead in the Orlando suburbs, at the home of a mixed-martial-arts fighter. For weeks, Bolsonaristas had been camping out around the country, under banners calling for an “intervention.” In an echo of Jan. 6, they chose Jan. 8 to occupy and attack government buildings in the capital, Brasília, even though the transition had already taken place and the buildings were largely empty. Military police officers arrested more than 1,000 people, and Lula quickly reasserted control of the country.
Bolsonaro, like Trump, now faces a host of criminal charges for trying to impede democratic elections. Trump has been convicted in one case, but only Bolsonaro has been deemed ineligible to run for president. In June 2023, Brazil’s electoral court ruled that his attacks on the voting system disqualified him from running for any political office until 2030. He is now facing hundreds of other court cases. In February of this year, authorities confiscated his passport after arresting several former aides accused of plotting a coup, making another escape to Florida impossible. Bolsonaro took refuge for two nights in the Hungarian Embassy in Brasília, perhaps hoping to leverage his relationship with Prime Minister Viktor Orban (one of many friends he shares with Trump) if flight became necessary.
While Bolsonaro is barred from the political arena — at least for now — the movement that he unleashed is very much alive. Bolsonaristas did well in the election that he lost, demonstrating that the movement was bigger than the man, and they now have real power at federal and state levels. Because congressional politics in Brazil are byzantine — there are 23 parties in Congress, and members can shift allegiances quickly — it would be difficult for Lula to govern even if Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party were not the largest party in the legislature. As things stand, the Bolsonaristas routinely complicate things for Lula, as they try to pull the country back to the far right.
In 2023, Bolsonaro’s allies began working to create a kind of Bolsonarismo sem Bolsonaro, or Bolsonaro-style politics without Bolsonaro. In interviews in the capital late last year, a rough philosophical and tactical division emerged. One group wants to show that it is moderating its positions and committed to responsibly governing the country; another is doubling down on the kind of fiery rhetoric that drives engagement online and reproduces tropes familiar to observers of right-wing media in the United States.
“We are seeing an attack on fundamental values, not only in Brazil but in the United States,” Bia Kicis, a Bolsonarista congresswoman, told me from her office in Brasília. “It is being carried out without the need for a single tank. We are being attacked from the inside, by progressivism and globalism.” These forces, she went on, are responsible for real violence. “Back when Trump was a candidate, there was talk of a possible third war. But there was no war — until Trump left office, and now war is affecting the whole world,” she said, referring to Ukraine. “Why? Because China and Russia know that the United States has a weak leader.”
Today both types of Bolsonaristas — those still bent on provocation and those keeping their heads down — remain focused on the United States. They are hopeful that changing international conditions will place their movement on surer footing: first to survive the judicial onslaught that threatens many of them, and then to retake power. After the anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei won the presidential election in neighboring Argentina, Bolsonaro attended his inauguration in December. But the really big prize, the dream of so many on the Brazilian right, is to see the Bolsonarista movement represented, next year, at the second inauguration of President Trump.
Bolsonaro rose to power as an aggressively anti-establishment figure. The right-wing legislators elected alongside him in 2018 were drawn from outside the political arena — often far outside. Among them were police officers and military personnel, in keeping with Bolsonaro’s traditional base, but also a former porn star, a distant heir to the Portuguese royal family and a slew of internet personalities with no experience in government. By 2022, 88 percent of major Brazilian influencers, according to one study by a Brazilian social scientist, were Bolsonaristas. The YouTube life coach or Instagram fitness star who amasses a following and ultimately power by embracing radical politics may be Bolsonarismo’s defining figure.
Kicis, the congresswoman, started out as a YouTuber and is a case in point. Before she began making right-wing videos, she tuned in to content produced in the United States — by the millennial pundit Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Caller, as well as to Fox News — and she still does, often drawing on the “anti-woke” agenda of the American far right. “Take Black Lives Matter,” she said to me. “If a white person dies, or if a Black person commits a murder, then there is no coverage or concern.”
The most prominent of this new crop of politicians is 28-year-old Nikolas Ferreira. In 2022, he won more votes than anyone else running for Brazil’s equivalent to the House of Representatives. Until then, he was best known as a TikTok influencer who railed against transgender rights. Since taking office in February 2023, he has stayed the course. On Women’s Day that March, he donned a blond wig, declaring that he “felt like” a woman named Nikole and therefore had a right to speak. The Congressional Ethics Commission opened an inquiry into his statements but ultimately decided against any serious penalty. (Brazil has two representatives in Congress who are trans.)
Ferreira greeted me warmly when we met last winter, complimenting my Portuguese and then joking about the amount of slang in the language. This is standard preinterview banter in Brazil, but the atmosphere was slightly unusual. We were in a podcast studio that the Liberal Party had installed deep under the Capitol, and a posse of five young men in suits were crowded around us, grinning and laughing at Ferreira’s every quip.
“What if I feel like a dog? What if I feel like a lamp?” he said, delighting in skewering the concept of gender identity. “The idea that I become what I feel is very dangerous.” This is one element of the “woke agenda,” Ferreira said, that has been developed in the United States and is now being imported to Brazil. But, he said, there was a backlash underway.
“If Trump wins again, that will be a great guide for us here in Brazil,” he said. “It will strengthen the right in Brazil and in Latin America.” Along with Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s third son, Ferreira participates in Conservative Political Action Conference events, both in the United States and in its five-year-old Brazilian version. Coming up as an influencer, Ferreira learned from Charlie Kirk and his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, and from the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has taken particular aim at identity politics and gender-neutral pronouns, as well as from Ben Shapiro.
Ferreira, like Kicis, said that Biden had interfered with Brazilian democracy. After Trump’s exit from office, the new U.S. administration made it clear, both privately and publicly, that it would not back a coup attempt. But when I asked him if the 2022 Brazilian elections were legitimate, Ferreira stopped talking. Then, slowly, he responded: “I think we should be able to question anything here in Brazil, and right now we are not able to do that,” he said. “So, I excuse myself from answering that question. In reality, this could cause problems for me as a congressman. Am I allowed to question the elections? I don’t know.”
As we spoke, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who wore a “Trump 2020” hat while visiting Washington shortly after his father’s election, entered the room. Eduardo, who is 40, spent time in Maine and Colorado, flipping burgers and snowboarding, before becoming a Brazilian congressman, and he is the most ideologically committed of Jair’s four adult sons. He was booked to use the studio next, and he waited patiently, looking straight ahead. As I left, Ferreira let fly one last joke. “If you want to talk to a golpista,” he said, using the word for someone who plots a coup, “Eduardo is right there!”
It is common on the Brazilian right to ridicule the idea that there was any coup attempt in the country. As proof, they point to the tragicomic nature of Jan. 8: Those people, crying and praying in Brasília and immediately imprisoned, were never going to overthrow the government, they say. But Eduardo Bolsonaro did not seem to be joking when he said, in 2018, that “all you need to shut down the Supreme Court is one corporal and one soldier.”
The day after I saw him in the studio, Eduardo spoke at the congressional inquiry into Jan. 8. The hearings had been dragging on since May 2023. Paradoxically, the inquiry arose in part out of right-wing accusations that the new government was hiding something, but as authorities dug deeper, it caused more and more problems for the former ruling family. On the agenda that day was the investigation into one of Jair Bolsonaro’s associates, who was accused of selling jewels given to Brazil by the Saudis. Eliziane Gama, a senator and the special rapporteur for the investigations into Jan. 8, sat up front, overseeing the proceedings. Soon, it was Eduardo’s turn to speak. “We have already become Venezuela,” he said, denouncing the investigations as authoritarian. He went on: “This is a one-way ticket to East Germany without stopping in Cuba. It’s the Stasi.”
Ferreira was supposed to be in the room, too. Instead, he was outside, speaking to a gaggle of teenagers who wanted to take pictures with him. This happens all the time, and he had a speech prepared. “Soon you will be heading off to university, if you choose,” he said. “And there you will find a terrible environment, unfortunately. There will be people there trying to break you down, day by day, attacking your beliefs. Staying firm in your principles will always bear fruit.”
By most accounts, it was an esoteric reactionary philosopher named Olavo de Carvalho who first forged the ideological links with U.S. right-wing political culture that became foundational for Brazil’s “new right.” After Brazil’s U.S.-backed dictatorship ended in the 1980s, widely denounced for torturing and disappearing its political opponents, few politicians called themselves “conservative” or “right-wing.” Bolsonaro, who always lamented democratization and praised the military regime, was an exception, but he was largely ignored. This was the era of the “direita envergonhada,” or “embarrassed right,” that de Carvalho helped bring to an end.
De Carvalho, who was briefly a Communist and worked for a time as an astrologer, moved to the United States in 2005 and began posting furiously on blogs and social networks. He gained a following on Orkut, an early Google-owned social network that was popular in Brazil, and took aim at what he considered pro-leftist political correctness in his native country. Vast swaths of the Brazilian right credit de Carvalho with giving them their ideological formation.
“I began to wake up, I began to learn how strong the left was in Brazil and understand the cultural and political project they were implementing when I became a student of professor Olavo de Carvalho,” Caroline de Toni, a congresswoman elected in 2018, told me. De Toni, who is 37, did not mean that she studied directly under him, but that she followed him online and bought his DVDs on political philosophy. She credits de Carvalho with persuading Brazilians that everyone in the political establishment was a leftist. “When Bolsonaro emerged as a leader, I think that he was walking a path that was paved by Professor Olavo.”
De Carvalho wrote more than a dozen dense books, often drawing on the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to develop the theory that leftists had quietly established hegemony over cultural life in Brazil. Online, however, he engaged in an intentional “shock politics” in his social media posts — making crude references to human anatomy or claiming that Pepsi is flavored with aborted fetuses — as a way to mock the authority of traditional cultural gatekeepers. He settled near Richmond, Va., where he lived until his death in 2022.
After taking up residence in the United States, de Carvalho became increasingly preoccupied with building a proudly right-wing Christian nation. “He begins to sound more like Steve Bannon, until he ultimately does meet with Bannon,” says Camila Rocha, a political scientist and the author of “Menos Marx, Mais Mises” (“Less Marx, More Mises”), a well-regarded 2021 book about the rise of radical free-market and libertarian think tanks in Brazil.
Those think tanks, in turn, forged a crucial link between the new Brazilian right and the United States. Right-wing students in Brazil received funding from the Atlas Network, a powerful libertarian nonprofit based in Arlington, Va. Some of those students formed the Movimento Brasil Livre (Free Brazil Movement), which helped lead a right-wing protest movement demanding the removal of President Dilma Rousseff. A former Marxist guerrilla, Rousseff was the center-left Workers’ Party candidate in 2010 and 2014. Her impeachment in 2016, on charges that she manipulated the budget, was widely regarded by the left as a parliamentary “coup” and gave rise to a wildly unpopular pro-business government drawn from the ranks of the center right. Rousseff’s removal badly weakened many of Brazil’s traditional political actors, leaving a power vacuum the extreme right could rush to fill.
Until then, Bolsonaro, a congressman representing Rio de Janeiro, appealed mainly to a narrow slice of voters intensely concerned with law and order. But after dedicating his vote in favor of impeachment to the colonel who led the unit that tortured Rousseff in the 1970s, he became the symbol of a holy war against the Brazilian political establishment. Bolsonaro had always railed against the L.G.B.T.Q. community; he once said he would rather have a dead son than a gay son. He actively courted evangelicals, a growing constituency, and touted his alliance with free-market ideologues. An assassination attempt during his presidential campaign left him with a debilitating stab wound, but it also gave supporters the impression that Jair Messias Bolsonaro might be a martyr as well as the “messiah” suggested by his middle name.
Bolsonaro saw his longtime enemies swept away by an ongoing anticorruption crusade, known as Lava Jato, or “Car Wash.” Starting in 2014, the Car Wash task force, made up of federal prosecutors, investigated ever-higher echelons of the political class for graft. It coordinated closely with the U.S. Justice Department and received enthusiastic support from the protest movement. In 2017, the investigation’s chief judge, Sergio Moro, found Lula guilty of corruption and money-laundering and sentenced him to prison; the conviction would eventually clear the way for Bolsonaro’s victory. Moro then joined the new Bolsonaro administration. In 2019, The Intercept began to publish a set of leaked conversations among Lava Jato task force members that revealed profound ethical and judicial violations at its heart, allegations that were later confirmed by several legal investigations. Lula’s convictions were subsequently annulled in a ruling upheld by the Brazilian Supreme Court, which also found that Moro failed to act impartially. (The Justice Department declined to answer a set of written questions about the extent of its collaboration with Lava Jato.)
As president, Bolsonaro maintained the posture of an outsider attacking the system. For as long as he had been in politics, he had promised he would destroy or transform Brazilian democracy. In 2021, Bolsonaro called his followers to the streets for a series of demonstrations in September widely understood as a show of force for some kind of auto-golpe, or coup from the top to hold onto power. But by the beginning of 2022, the next presidential election year, he seemed to lack the support to mount a successful coup and create a sustainable authoritarian government.
With paths to a more traditional golpe apparently blocked, Bolsonaro once more turned to the Trumpian script and spent that year casting doubt on the reliability of the Brazilian electoral system. At the same time, he used the power of the state to spend money at a rate that led many to accuse him of vote-buying.
When he lost, many of the Bolsonaristas who followed U.S. politics closely thought Jan. 6 served as a model of exactly what not to do. Other self-described patriotas saw things differently. The group that marched on Brasília on Jan. 8 was, according to Jonas Medeiros, a Brazilian sociologist, “the extremist fringe of an extreme fringe of an extreme movement.”
Senator Gama, the special rapporteur for the investigations into Jan. 8, told me last August that the final and most visible coup attempt was far from the only one. “There was the blocking of the roads just after the vote,” she said. “On Dec. 12, 2022, there was an attempt to invade the headquarters of the Federal Police. On Dec. 24, there was an attempt to blow up a car at the Brasília airport.”
Congressional investigators also heard testimony that a Bolsonarista congresswoman, Carla Zambelli, hired a hacker to try to break into the electoral system in 2022. (Zambelli denies any involvement.) After he was unable to do so, the hacker said, he created a fake arrest warrant for the Supreme Court minister, Alexandre de Morães, reviled by the far right for the way he enforced campaign regulations. The hacker testified that Bolsonaro knew about the plans to commit these digital crimes. “Bolsonaro gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with the ballot system,” he told the commission. “I could, according to him, commit a crime, and he would give me a pardon afterward.”
Many Bolsonaristas now want to be seen as taking a different tack. “When Bolsonaro was ascendant, it was very hard for a lot of people on the right to resist joining a movement that offered a path to power, and a lot of people became somehow kidnapped by that dynamic,” says Fábio Ostermann, a founding member of the Free Brazil Movement who traveled to the United States for professional training as a Koch summer fellow. Ostermann is proud that, unlike most of Brazil’s free-market liberals, he never joined the Bolsonarista movement. “There is now an opportunity for us to reposition,” he said last winter. “A page has been turned. If no one came out to the streets when Bolsonaro lost his political rights, it is because people are profoundly disappointed with him.”
Whether or not they go as far as Ostermann, many are now keen to distance themselves from what came before. Alves, the minister of human rights, families and women under Bolsonaro, wants it to be clear that she values governance and coalition-building over provocation and digital arson. She says she hopes to put women at the forefront of Brazil’s conservative movement, despite her poor reputation among feminists for being anti-abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. Her office was stuffed with flowers that she said had been delivered by women’s groups from all around the country. “We have to remind people that being conservative doesn’t mean fighting all the time,” she said. “In the last few years people came to believe that being conservative meant you constantly go on the attack and dunk on people on social networks.” I asked if the Brazilian president was one of the people responsible for this reputation. “He was provoked constantly,” she responded, diplomatically.
Brazil’s congressional inquiry into Jan. 8 came to a close in October and recommended the indictment of Bolsonaro as the grande autor intelectual, or mastermind, of the attacks on Brazilian democracy. In March, the Supreme Court revealed that former members of the military high command told investigators that Bolsonaro called them into meetings to discuss a possible coup after his election loss, an accusation Bolsonaro has always denied. After it was revealed that investigators got the top brass to talk, the legal heat on Bolsonaristas only increased.
Few have felt it quite as much as Senator Marcos do Val. When I met him in Brasília, he stopped me before I could pose any questions. “Before we start, I just want to confirm that this interview won’t be published in Brazil,” he said. “It will only come out in the United States, right?”
A quick look around his office revealed a deep interest in right-wing politics in the United States. On one wall hung framed handcuffs and the Blue Lives Matter version of the American flag. Visitors to his floor of the Senate building are treated to a wall-size photograph of the senator ripping open his dress shirt to reveal tactical weaponry and the word “SWAT” in giant white letters. Even more than most other Bolsonarista lawmakers, do Val has made an association with the United States part of his personal brand. But that is not why he is concerned with where he might appear in print.
Do Val is currently under investigation by federal authorities, and his social media profiles were shut down by court order at the time. Last year, he told a journalist that President Bolsonaro directed him to secretly record the head of Brazil’s electoral court, so that they could discredit the voting process and carry out a coup d’état. After the interview came out, he said that wasn’t what actually happened. Under scrutiny from the media and investigators, he finally settled on the story that another Bolsonarista lawmaker presented the idea, and Bolsonaro just listened.
Before entering politics, do Val offered training courses to police officers in both Brazil and the United States. He has long used the SWAT image in his social media profiles; it fit into the broader political movement as he understood it and was likely to win him votes. “People here knew about SWAT because of that TV show in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. He took a sip of cold water from a glass with a bullet lodged in its side and put it back down next to an open Bible. “The theme went: ‘If society needs help, they call the cops. If cops need help, they call SWAT.’ So, it took on a kind of mystical quality.”
Now do Val is trying to position himself on the more moderate side of the conservative camp. He spent most of our interview insisting that democracy must be preserved and that good police training saves lives (even those of criminals). He hoped reason would prevail in the United States and in Brazil.
If he has plans to watch American TV this year, it won’t be old cop shows. Like almost everyone else on the Brazilian right, he will be watching the U.S. presidential election.
In July, outside a cavernous convention center in the upscale oceanfront city Balnéario de Camboriú, Brazilians wearing green “Make Brazil Great Again” hats or draped in Brazilian and Israeli flags lined up in the cold to attend the fifth edition of Brazil’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Here, they could buy books by Olavo de Carvalho, Elon Musk T-shirts and wine bearing the Bolsonaro family name.
Addressing a crowd of thousands, Bolsonaro reflected briefly on Jan. 8 — “I felt that something bad was coming” — then railed against the Lula government. But he showed little of the righteous fury that marked so much of his political rise. His wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, looked more prepared for the spotlight, even though the latest criminal investigations potentially taint her as well. Just before the conference began, Bolsonaro was indicted on multiple charges stemming from the sale of the Saudi jewels. When one reporter asked Michelle about the case, he was chased out of the convention center by angry attendees.
Onstage, Michelle celebrated the growing strength of the global right, “thanks to events like CPAC,” and the power of women in the movement. “Our politics is feminine, not feminist,” she said to wild cheers. A show of hands revealed that about half of the audience planned to run as Bolsonaristas in municipal elections across the country this October, part of a strategy to build local power ahead of national elections in 2026.
Over a long weekend, CPAC attendees listened to a parade of right-wing figures, including a congresswoman from Portugal’s far-right Chega party and the Dutch member of the European Parliament who praised Bolsonaro and Trump over Lula and Biden. The secretary of public security in São Paulo, where Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas is touted as a possible successor to Bolsonaro, showed off photos of gang members recently “neutralized” by his police forces. President Javier Milei of Argentina risked a major diplomatic rift with Lula’s government by skipping an official regional meeting to attend CPAC. He jumped around stage like a rock star, attacked the left and then signed off with his now-famous expletive-laden “long live liberty.” Many of the speakers said they were invited personally by Eduardo Bolsonaro or Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, and a fervent Trump supporter.
Over the weekend, it became clear that Bolsonaristas now see U.S. nonprofits and the Brazilian courts as mortal threats. Congressman Filipe Barros displayed graphs that he claimed showed how funding made its way from George Soros or the Ford Foundation to Brazil and asserted that foreign NGOs interfered in the 2022 election. The crowd erupted in applause as Gustavo Villatoro, the minister of justice and public security in Nayib Bukele’s proudly authoritarian government in El Salvador, said, “We sent the Supreme Court to hell.” Speaker after speaker complained of censorship and judicial persecution.
Ultimately, there were two overarching messages: First, authorities must offer amnesty to the Brazilians imprisoned during the Jan. 8 insurrection. And second, Jair Bolsonaro is still the leader of Brazil’s conservative movement. Smiling and playful, as always, Nikolas Ferreira ended his speech with, “For the 2026 presidential elections, I offer three options: Jair, Messias and Bolsonaro.”
At the end of the weekend, Schlapp took the stage with Eduardo Bolsonaro, in front of a giant graphic calling for “amnesty” for the Brazilians imprisoned on Jan. 8. To get a rise from the crowd, Schlapp teased that Donald Trump “might be watching.” Eduardo Bolsonaro said that Trump’s return could mean “consequences” for the authorities currently persecuting the right in Brazil. “With Trump’s election, we can see a major turnaround. And we will, God willing.” He passed the microphone to Schlapp. “Donald Trump’s gonna win,” Schlapp said. “And when he wins, America is gonna start to lead again. America will lead by allowing Brazil to decide what Brazil wants. And the people who love freedom in America want nothing more than for President Bolsonaro to be back here taking the helm.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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