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https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/bolsonaro-trump-comeback-brazil-fd5c8e26
BRASÍLIA—Jair Bolsonaro, former president of Brazil, wants to return to power and said he believes U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will help make that happen, possibly by using economic sanctions against the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Banned from running for office until 2030 and facing criminal charges for allegedly plotting a coup, Bolsonaro said he sees Trump’s election as a game-changer for his future and politicians on the right in Latin America. Leftists have recently won presidential elections in Mexico and Uruguay and govern most large countries in the region.
“Trump is back, and it’s a sign we’ll be back too,” Bolsonaro said in an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal from his party headquarters in the capital, Brasília.
Flanked by two congressmen allies in a tightly secured office plastered with photos of recent rallies, Bolsonaro said he and his lawmaker son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, had been in close contact with the incoming U.S. administration since the Nov. 5 election. “I was up the whole night rooting for the big orange guy,” he said, using the affectionate Portuguese term for Trump, “Laranjão.”
Da Silva’s leftist government, which considers Bolsonaro an authoritarian figure, declined to comment on the former president’s assertions. A spokesperson for Trump’s incoming administration didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Bolsonaro, who was president of the world’s fourth-most populous democracy from 2019 through 2022, has been one of Trump’s closest foreign allies. Sharing similar views on the culture wars and scorn for the political left and the media, the two men deepened ties when their presidencies overlapped in 2019 and 2020. The two presented a united front against Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Still wildly popular with swaths of Brazil’s social conservatives, as well as parts of the business community, Bolsonaro would narrowly win an election against da Silva if the vote was carried out today, according to a survey this week by Brazil’s Paraná Pesquisas polling institute. Bolsonaro would get 37.6% of the vote, while the leftist would receive 33.6%, it found.
Bolsonaro has also sought to firm up regional and global ties on the right with leaders such as Argentine President Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, he said, even awarding them with his infamous weighty “Bolsonaro Club” medal. It sports a slogan in Portuguese that roughly translates as “immortal, virile, and not to be screwed with.”
After police seized Bolsonaro’s passport earlier this year, his son Eduardo, a friend of former Trump aide Steve Bannon, acted as a go-between, Bolsonaro said, joining Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort for the U.S. presidential election.
“It’s time for MAAGA—Make All Americas Great Again,” said Bolsonaro, proudly displaying a book published last year that Trump gave him with the inscription “Jair—You are GREAT.”
Bolsonaro, dubbed the Trump of the Tropics by Brazil’s press, has never needed his U.S. counterpart more, though it’s unclear how much assistance he could receive and in what form, if any.
Brazilian police last week accused Bolsonaro and 36 of his allies of plotting a coup to stop da Silva from taking office after Bolsonaro narrowly lost the 2022 election. The allegations include plans to assassinate the leftist leader. The charges stem from a Jan. 8, 2023, uprising in which several thousand Bolsonaro supporters stormed the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court in Brasília before police fended them off.
Brazil’s electoral court also has effectively banned him from running in the next presidential election in 2026. The court ruled last year that he had undermined confidence in the country’s electoral system by accusing da Silva of stealing the 2022 election, without presenting sufficient evidence.
Bolsonaro denies any wrongdoing, saying he is the victim of a witch hunt by da Silva and left-leaning judges.
“They don’t just want me in jail, they want me dead,” said Bolsonaro, who is 69 years old. He lifted his shirt to show a giant scar across his disfigured belly, the result of a near-fatal stabbing on the campaign trail in 2018. A judge later ruled the attacker was mentally ill.
Since his first presidential campaign in 2018, Bolsonaro has cast himself as a political underdog. In the interview, he broke down in tears as he spoke about his mother’s struggle to care for him and his five siblings while working as a maid on a farm. Like Trump, he has sought to brand himself via a stream of merchandise, recently launching his own aftershave. Bolsonaro beer is next, he said.
Bolsonaro plans to register his candidacy ahead of the 2026 vote despite the ban, he said, banking on pressure from Trump on Brazil’s judges to delay enforcement of the 2023 ruling just long enough for him to run. The former Brazilian army officer suggested that Trump could level economic sanctions against da Silva’s government to help him.
“As long as the electoral court doesn’t turn down my registration, it’s valid,” Bolsonaro said. “They can just put it off as long as possible…until the election is over.”
By coincidence, a Bolsonaro-nominated Supreme Court judge, Kassio Nunes Marques, is scheduled to preside over Brazil’s electoral court in 2026. Marques voted against the decision last year to ban Bolsonaro from office.
“I’m not obsessed with power, it’s actually rather tiring at my age,” Bolsonaro said. “There are also people more intelligent than me…but no one has thicker skin, nor the experience I have.”
Questioned about the nature of possible U.S. sanctions under Trump, Bolsonaro spoke of Washington’s oil sanctions on Venezuela. In his first term, Trump employed a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions and direct support for Venezuela’s opposition in a failed effort to unseat Maduro.
“Trump has also been very concerned about Venezuela and discussed with me ways in which we can return it to democracy,” said Bolsonaro.
Brazil’s right has also lobbied Trump to withdraw the U.S. visa of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has led sweeping criminal investigations into Bolsonaro and his allies—a request that is viewed favorably by parts of the incoming U.S. administration, according to people close to the situation.
Elon Musk, a close Trump ally, is already one of de Moraes’s biggest critics after the judge shut down Musk’s X social-media platform in Brazil for more than a month this year after it refused to block right-wing accounts accused of spreading hate speech. Musk, like Bolsonaro, has called de Moraes a “dictator.”
A spokesperson for de Moraes declined to comment.
U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R., Fla.) called the Brazilian judge “the vanguard of an international assault on freedom of speech,” holding up a photo of de Moraes when she introduced a bill with Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) in September that would deny U.S. entry to any foreign authority found to have threatened freedom of speech.
