Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro congratulated a Brazilian-American woman on Sunday who asked former President Donald Trump to protect America from the fate of her native country, stating in an online post, “this struggle is all of ours.”
Trump made a campaign stop on Sunday at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, working the fries and handing out food at the drive-thru window. The appearance served both to honor the work of America’s working class and to highlight Trump’s denial of claims by Vice President Kamala Harris, his rival in November’s presidential election, that she worked at McDonald’s when she was young.
Trump spent much of the occasion mocking Harris, claiming he had now worked at McDonald’s more than she had.
“I listen to Kamala, she said, ‘it was so hot. It was so hot, it was such a tough job,” Trump joked, stating he liked the job and may come back again.
Trump also had brief conversations with customers at the drive-thru window. One customer identified herself as Brazilian and urged Trump to protect the United States.
“Please don’t let the United States become Brazil, my native Brazil,” the woman pleaded. Trump replied that he would make America “better than ever.”
“Congratulations to this Brazilian,” Bolsonaro wrote on social media, sharing the video and her quote.
“THIS STURGGLE IS ALL OF OURS,” he added.
The woman addressing Trump appeared to be referring to the steep erosion in basic civil liberties in Brazil in the past decade, larger the result of outsized Supreme Court action to silence conservative ideas. Brazil’s top court, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), is far more powerful than America’s, able to order violent police raids of individuals for allegedly unacceptable speech and other non-crimes. Under socialist current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who also served as president from 2003 to 2011, the court has been dominated by censorship-happy leftists. Eight of the 11 judges on the STF currently were appointed by leftists. The most prominent judge, Minister Alexandre de Moraes, launched a persecution campaign against alleged “fake news” during Bolsonaro’s tenure, from 2018 to 2022.
In 2020, de Moraes ordered a series of violent raids against Youtube commentators, journalists, comedians, and others who had allegedly spread “fake news,” nearly all of them Bolsonaro supporters. Conservatives denounced the action as illegal and abusive, but de Moraes has since insisted on continuing to persecute dissidents under Lula, emboldened by the leftist regime.
One of the highest-profile victims of de Moraes’ persecution is former Congressman Daniel Silveira, who was arrested while still serving in Congress in 2021. The STF, which ordered the arrest, claimed that Silveira had threatened violence against the court in a critical rant against the court posted to Youtube. Bolsonaro pardoned Silveira, noting that political commentary is not inherently violent and Brazil presumably has constitutional safeguards for free speech, but the STF overturned it.
Silveira has been in prison since 2023 and was moved to an agricultural labor camp in October.
In another recent case, Bruno Aiub, a podcaster commonly known as “Monark,” was arrested and sentenced to over a year in prison for referring to Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) Minister Flavio Dino as a “fatty.” Dino, a longtime member of the Communist Party of Brazil before being appointed to the STF, is also among the most censorship-prone members of the court.
Bolsonaro himself has been the target of STF repression. The court has banned him from leaving Brazil and from running for office for eight years. The same court allowed Lula to run in the 2022 presidential election despite multiple convictions on corruption charges – and despite Brazil, unlike the United States, having a law that bans individuals convicted of corruption infractions from holding public office.
Trump and Bolsonaro served as presidents of their respective countries at the same time and vocally supported each other’s presidencies. Trump urged Brazilians to vote for Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential race, declaring him “a fantastic leader, a fantastic man, [and] one of the great presidents of any country in the world.”
Bolsonaro has also endorsed Trump for president and praised their relationship while in office as “exceptional.” The two have also bonded over surviving assassination attempts. During his presidential campaign in 2018, a socialist stabbed Bolsonaro in the abdomen, causing life-long damage that has required regular hospital visits for over half a decade. Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, suffering a bullet wound to his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“He was saved, you understand? Just as I was,” Bolsonaro told reporters after the assassination attempt, referring to Trump. “The doctors say I was a miracle. I survived in 2018 given the gravity of the injury and he was saved by a matter of a few centimeters. And I understand that to be something that comes from above.”
In contrast, Bolsonaro’s final years, overlapping with incumbent President Joe Biden, strained the typically friendly relationship between Washington and Brasilia. As a presidential candidate in 2020, Biden threatened to tank the Brazilian economy during a debate in an answer to an unrelated question, claiming that Bolsonaro would be forced to accept billions of dollars from unknown American funding to protect the Amazon Rainforest or see his national economy destroyed. Bolsonaro replied by hinting that he was willing to go to war with the United States.
“There was recently a great candidate to head of state who said that if I don’t shut down the Amazon fires he is going to put up commercial barriers,” Bolsonaro said at the time. “How are we going to face that? Diplomacy alone is not enough. When the saliva runs out, you need gunpowder, otherwise it doesn’t work. We have the gunpower. They need to know we have it. That’s the world.”
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