How Brazil’s Government Foiled Trump’s Effort to Save a Key Ally
This summer, the Trump family ally and former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in the January 8 protests by a modified Brazilian Supreme Court panel, handpicked to ensure that outcome by the country’s chief justice and chief censor, Alexandre de Moraes. Then, in November, before an official sentence could even be read, Moraes ordered the Federal Police to prematurely arrest and imprison the former president.
The imprisonment of Bolsonaro is merely one abuse in a series of authoritarian actions overseen by de Moraes, known in Brazil as Xandão (Big Alex), through which judicial, investigative, prosecutorial, and enforcement authority have each been consolidated within a single office to a degree not seen since Brazil’s rule under military dictatorship.
In his previous role as São Paulo’s secretary of public security, Moraes drew constant criticism from both human rights organizations and the Brazilian left, who labeled him a “fascist” and accused him of perpetrating “genocide” over the violent favela raids he oversaw. Now, many of those same political forces revere the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) judge for his relentless pursuit of right-wing protesters and for overseeing the jailing of the Brazilian left’s chief political adversary, effectively disqualifying him from future elections.
Since initiating prosecutions in 2022, Moraes has expanded the scope of his enforcement beyond individuals accused of physically participating in the January 8 unrest to include Brazilians targeted merely for political speech, online posts, and memes. In a near mirror image of the authoritarian censorship regime that has captured Western Europe, Moraes has used unilateral STF orders to authorize numerous preventive detentions, social media account suspensions, asset freezes, and passport seizures against people accused of disseminating what the court arbitrarily classifies as “anti-democratic” content.
Among those targeted was Filipe Martins, a former Bolsonaro adviser arrested in 2024 after Moraes alleged—based on a border-entry record supplied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Biden administration—that he had fled to the United States to evade prosecution, a document that was contradicted by CBP’s own internal data and airline records and later proven to be a forgery likely cooked up by the Biden government and Moraes himself. Despite the exposure of the record as fraudulent, Moraes has relied on it to justify Martins’s preventive detention and to impose continuing judicial restrictions after his release.
The expansion of those prosecutions has coincided with Moraes’s transformation of the STF into an active censorship authority. He has personally compelled social media platforms to remove posts, suspend accounts, and disclose user data, often under secret orders, causing the exodus of free speech websites like Rumble from the country and, in 2023, temporarily banning X in Brazil over that website’s refusal to censor the accounts Moraes arbitrarily demanded be removed from the internet.
This month, Moraes has once again drawn intense scrutiny following revelations involving Banco Master and its owner Daniel Vorcaro (now labeled online in Brazil as the “Brazilian Jeffrey Epstein”), which emerged as the top client of a law firm run by Moraes’s wife and children, signing contracts that earned the Moraes family as much as R$129 million (about $23.5 million in U.S. dollars) as he simultaneously consolidated his authority over the STF. Banco Master has been under investigation for allegedly falsifying accounting records, funneling money through affiliated companies, and masking heavy losses to create the appearance of financial stability.
When the criminal complaint against Banco Master reached the STF just a few weeks ago, Moraes’ ally on the court, Dias Toffoli, imposed sigilo máximo (maximum secrecy) over the proceedings, completely barring all public access to them, shielding his political ally and patron Daniel Vorcaro from further media scrutiny, behavior which has raised serious questions about corruption within the court.
When President Donald Trump this past summer, at the personal request of Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, levied sanctions against Moraes in response to that series of abuses, many on the Brazilian right believed that the U.S. government would be their saving grace. They were mistaken.
After the White House deployed Magnitsky Act sanctions on Moraes, the STF unilaterally barred Brazilian financial institutions from observing U.S. sanctions unless validated by the Brazilian government, and within weeks President Trump dropped them entirely. Capitulating to the Brazilian government even further, the administration removed a series of tariffs that were put in place earlier this year after Brazilian President Lula kindly asked him to do so on a phone call.
The New York Times accurately describes what happened with the appropriate headline: “Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” interpreting the failure as a “stark example of the limits” to the U.S. president’s ability to influence the internal politics of foreign governments.
The Brazil-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has published an investigative series on Moraes agreed, writing that:
At age 78, [Lula] just gained one of his most spectacular victories, handing a huge defeat to Trump, the US and its sanctions regime…Lula told the US to f— off with its sanctions. And Trump just did. Brazil created a new model to defeat US sanctions.
As Greenwald notes, Brazil’s major media outlets have only now begun scrutinizing Moraes’s abuses and conflicts of interest after his central objective, “jailing Jair Bolsonaro and weakening his movement,” has already been achieved. With Bolsonaro removed from electoral politics, the fractured right has turned to his eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, as a potential standard-bearer, although polling shows him trailing Lula by wide margins.
Trump’s retreat is perhaps best explained by a pattern long evident in his political instincts, most recently on display in his public embrace of New York City mayor-elect and supposed adversary Zohran Mamdani: “we love winners,” as Trump repeatedly puts it. By abandoning his own foreign policy and conceding to Lula despite obvious ideological differences, it is obvious that Trump views Lula as one of those winners.
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