Donald Trump, ‘world king’…Brazil’s Bolsonaro pays court
It was Boris Johnson who entertained the ambition as a young child of being “world king”. As it turns out, he only made it to prime minister of the United Kingdom, a middle power, and that too for not very long.
Instead, it is Donald Trump, who seems set on perfecting the habits and mien of ‘world king’, for all that there is no record of him seeking the title, nor the responsibilities that go with it.
Mr Trump has been grand, positively kingly, in his first week back as president of the United States. Never mind the imperious edicts he signed on his first (and second and third) day in office. Those were mostly meant for domestic consumption and effect. They will mostly have an impact on the United States.
But then, Mr Trump instructed OPEC to lower oil prices and central banks worldwide to subsequently lower interest rates. He suggested a move to “clean out that whole thing”, a dismissive phrase that might be uttered by an emperor to refer to the Palestinian territory of Gaza and its 2.1 million people. He expressed an imperial preference for Jordan and Egypt to take the people cleared out of Gaza. And he advanced grand plans for American territorial expansion, which include the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada. And Mars, the planet, not the confectionery.
But it is in Brazil that the Trump ‘world king’ effect is real. Or at least as real as a former president believes it to be. As The Economist’s Brazil correspondent Ana Lankes recently reported, the country’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is hoping some of Mr Trump’s stardust falls on him.
Mr Bolsonaro tried to mount a coup to hold on to power after he lost the 2022 presidential election. He’s facing legal proceedings and could well stand trial. If convicted, he could go to jail. And yet, as Ms Lankes writes, “Mr Bolsonaro’s movement has been reinvigorated” by Mr Trump’s return to power. “One of the few foreign leaders invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration”, Mr Bolsonaro sent wife Michelle and son Eduardo as his representatives because his passport is currently confiscated and he’s unable to travel abroad. The hope is that Mr Trump will somehow whisk the Bolsonaro team on to that magic carpet, which flies straight to a second term in presidential office.
But how? Ms Lankes quotes Silas Malafaia, a televangelist and close ally of Mr Bolsonaro: “Mr Trump could ‘bad-mouth Brazilian authorities’ and discourage investment in the country, thus worsening the electoral outlook for the ruling Workers’ Party (PT)”. The first buddy, Elon Musk, could use his social platform X to continue a bad-mouthed argument with PT as well as with Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court judge disliked by the Bolsonaro camp and Mr Musk.
Perhaps. But even if all of that came to pass, would Brazil really be swayed by Trump ‘world king’ and his first buddy?
It’s instructive to think of what happened to Mr Bolsonaro’s representatives at the Trump inauguration. Ms Lankes notes that in the end, Eduardo and Michelle were literally frozen out of the ceremony because it moved indoors to a smaller venue in the Capitol on account of extremely cold weather in Washington, D.C. on Jan 20.
A sign from the weather gods for kingly visions? Who knows.
Originally published at rashmee.com
