MAGA Americans weren’t the only ones pinning their hopes on Donald Trump’s election last year. Leading right-wing reactionaries around the world believed that his return to power would buoy their own fortunes, as well—and perhaps none felt this as strongly as Brazil’s Bolsonaro family. After Trump’s victory, Jair Bolsonaro, the embattled former president, hailed “the triumph of the people’s will over the arrogant designs of an elite who disdain our values, beliefs, and traditions,” adding that “its impact will resonate across the globe … empowering the rise of the right and conservative movements in countless other nations.” But with Bolsonaro in deep legal trouble and deemed a flight risk by the authorities, it was his son Eduardo who got a front-row seat to that “triumph”: The Brazilian congressman was at Mar-a-Lago on election night, celebrating with the Trump family.
It’s no secret what Eduardo wants from Trump. His father, whose 2018 election stunned the political establishment, is barred from seeking any elected office until 2030 for using government channels to sow distrust in the country’s voting system. Worse, he could soon be facing a lengthy prison sentence for his role in plotting a conspiracy to violently overrule the results of the 2022 election, which he lost to the left-wing elder statesman Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Increasingly desperate as the walls close in, Bolsonaro and his allies haven’t been subtle: They want Trump to directly intercede on their behalf. The day after Trump’s election, Eduardo tweeted a list of grievances that his dad and Trump share (“defamed,” “attempted assassination,” “indicted”) and concluded: “2024: Trump elected. 2026: Bolsonaro (loading…).”
Trump’s personal involvement is unlikely but hardly impossible. He has been friendly with Bolsonaro, but has said almost nothing about Brazil since taking office. Now, however, the former president’s 40-year-old son is taking a big step to try to rekindle the bond between his father and Trump. On Tuesday, Eduardo stunned his supporters and Brazilian political observers by announcing that he’s taking an indefinite unpaid leave from office to remain in the United States, where he’s been since late February, to plead his dad’s case full-time. He is well positioned to make such entreaties. Since his father’s election, Eduardo has become a fixture of the MAGA political-industrial complex. He has appeared regularly at CPAC, spoken several times with Tucker Carlson, cavorted with Steve Bannon and Mike Lindell, and hobnobbed at Mar-a-Lago—including with Trump himself. All along, he has spread self-serving fictions about Brazil’s political situation to an uninformed MAGA base.
There is a real affinity for the Trumps among the Bolsonaros, but the stakes of Eduardo’s efforts are not just personal. A week after Lula’s inauguration on January 1, 2023, Bolsonaro supporters staged a riot in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, a destructive green-and-yellow reprise of the January 6, 2021, insurrection carried out by Trump die-hards. Authorities acted swiftly, arresting almost 1,500 people on the spot. Bolsonaro and his allies have since decried the unflinching institutional response as authoritarian. They insist that Brazil is no longer a democracy and that Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, who has boldly confronted myriad extremist threats to the constitutional order, is a tyrant. (Moraes also faced down Elon Musk last year, forcing X to comply with Brazilian laws. In response, Musk called him “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge.”) Eduardo is hoping to leverage hostility toward Moraes in Brazil and beyond, including among influential MAGA figures, to absolve his father. He is, in short, actively soliciting foreign interference in his country’s internal affairs.
Members of Lula’s Workers’ Party have characterized Eduardo’s machinations as something close to treason. “It is obvious that if he returned to Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, at our request, would confiscate his passport and he would not be able to return to the United States to continue his coup plotting,” Congressman Rogério Correia declared. “That is why he preferred to stay there, afraid of losing his passport. And, look, he is preparing his father’s escape. He is there preparing his escape and his father’s escape for their continued coup.”
In a statement explaining his decision to temporarily leave Congress, Eduardo asserted that he aims “to bring justice and create an environment to grant amnesty to the hostages of January 8th and to the other persecuted people who were part of the Bolsonaro government, who are paying the price for the cruelty of a psychopath [Moraes] who dreams of arresting Jair Bolsonaro.” Indeed, the Bolsonaro line has been to emphasize their abiding concern for people they consider to be political prisoners—namely, those arrested at the scene of the crime in Brasília on January 8. But the amnesty bill put forth by a key Bolsonaro ally in Congress doesn’t apply simply to those caught in the act. The language of the proposed law is broad enough, according to multiple legal experts, to benefit the former president himself. “I have no doubt that our enemies’ plan is to incarcerate [Bolsonaro] to assassinate him in prison or leave him there in perpetuity, just as would have happened with Donald Trump, if he had not been reelected now, in 2024,” Eduardo added in his statement.
Putting aside the hysterical melodrama, it is worth wondering whether the Trump administration will come to Bolsonaro’s aid, and what the effect would be if it did. Last Sunday, Bolsonaro held a rally in Rio de Janeiro that was intended as a show of political strength. The former president expected a million people to show up. Fewer than 20,000 did. Despite the potential waning of his father’s political clout, Eduardo is not crazy to think his far-fetched appeals might break through in the U.S. Last year, Bolsonaro allies earned a friendly hearing in Congress. Republican members of Congress have targeted Moraes directly, and Trump’s media group sued the Brazilian jurist over claims of censorship.
In an interview after announcing his decision to leave Brazil, the congressman pointedly refused to say when he would return home—he noted he might never see his father again—and said that he is weighing his options for how to legally remain in the U.S. “You no longer have weapons within Brazil to fight against Alexandre de Moraes’s arbitrary actions,” he said, insisting that he could do more to advance his voters’ main concerns from outside the country. He said he is likely to request political asylum “because I can’t rule out the possibility that Moraes might double down and try to extradite me or request my preventive detention here abroad.” He also said, however, that he is not requesting any special treatment from the Trump administration. Eduardo had reportedly told members of the administration he intended to stay in the U.S., to which there was no objection. There was also, evidently, no welcome mat.
The Trump administration has been cracking down in unprecedented ways on the political free expression of foreigners in the U.S. How it receives a potential asylum request from Eduardo will be a telling signal of how the government wants to be seen by embattled allies abroad. Will the United States open its arms to well-connected reactionary partners claiming persecution on the flimsiest grounds while attacking and casting out vulnerable dissenters without due process? Or will it hunker down, focusing on domestic political ends to the exclusion of fostering a global reactionary movement, as Steve Bannon attempted to do the last time Trump was in office?
Considering that Brazilians will go to the polls next year to vote for a president, the way Trump responds to the entreaties of that country’s far right will be a major test not only of U.S.-Brazil relations but of the lengths that the Trump administration will go to help authoritarian movements abroad over the next four years. From the Brazilian point of view, the stakes could not be clearer: With the elder Bolsonaro on the verge of being locked up and polls showing Lula leading most conservative opponents next year despite a dip in his popularity, the Brazilian far right is desperate for a deus ex machina in a bright red hat.
