Brazil Stopped Its Trump. It's Pathetic that We Couldn't Stop Ours.
Brazil barred Bolsonaro from running again and is sending him to jail. Other countries have done it, too. Why is the United States a unique failure? 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.
more... https://newrepublic.com/article/200428/brazil-bolsonaro-trump-coup-constitution
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