How Trump-style authoritarians lose

0:00Noel King:Late last year, Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup to keep himself in office after he lost an election. Bolsonaro was often called the Trump of the tropics. He was a populist, a nationalist with anti-democratic impulses, an itchy trigger finger on Twitter and maybe most importantly, about half his country firmly behind him. During Bolsonaro's trial, Trump tried to downplay any comparison. He's not like a friend of mine. He's somebody that I know. Somebody! But he wasn't entirely successful. And he loves the country, and he fought hard for those people, and they want to put him in jail.

0:42And I think that's a witch hunt, and I think it's very unfortunate.

0:45Noel King:With Bolsonaro behind bars now, people who study democracy are asking whether what happened in his country holds any lessons for these United States. Coming up on Today Explained, we're going to Brazil. Support for this show comes from Toyota. Before the trophies, before the glory. Every world-class athlete began as a kid with someone who believed in them. From carpools to championships, Toyota helps you go further with the reliability and confidence to keep showing up. From early morning practices to the road games and rides home, every destination has a beginning. And from day one, Toyota is right there with you, celebrating the pursuit of greatness.

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2:15you're listening to today explained my name is zach beecham i'm a senior correspondent at vox where my primary interests are democracy the political right and the future of liberalism

2:26Noel King:you know little stuff little stuff you recently spent a week in brazil i spent a week in poland where it was eight degrees below zero so you got the better assignment and i hate you for that but But we both had the same assignment, right? Tell me what we're doing. So we have this big package that we're working on at Vox that I maneuvered such that I get to go to the nice weather place and Noel and Miles were banished to the frigid wasteland of my ancestral homeland of Eastern Europe. But no, it was great. The package is about primarily America after Trump, right? But not in the sense of like, what does the U.S.

3:03look like? in the sense of how do we think about democracy after we've experienced something that's objectively a real shock to our democratic system? How do we think about repairing it? How do we think about preventing the kind of authoritarian overreach that we saw from Trump from ever happening again? And so we wanted to investigate some countries that have had at least reasonable amounts of success at dealing with elected authoritarian governments. And Poland and Brazil are two of the most interesting examples. So that's why we went to those two.

3:31Noel King:All right, let's talk about what's been going on in Brazil. The Brazilian case is, I think, one of the most relevant parallels to understanding what happened in the U.S. They elected a president who's very much like Donald Trump. His name is Jair Bolsonaro. He was elected back in 2018, so much so like Trump that people would commonly call him the Trump of the tropics. Notorious prior to the election for homophobic, misogynist and racist comments, Bolsonaro rose to the rank of army captain during Brazil's military dictatorship. The truth will liberate this country, and it will turn us into a great nation.

4:08He did a lot of similar stuff to what Trump has done in this term. It's very interesting, right? Back then, Bolsonaro was seen as the more aggressive of the two of them in terms of his attacks on democracies, right? They were both in office at the same time for a little bit. Now, Trump has become even more aggressive, but in a way, Bolsonaro presaged him, right? Bolsonaro's term being the prelude to Trump too. Interestingly, when Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election, he did two things, right? One, he plotted a military coup, like an actual armed military coup, old school. The only reason there wasn't a military coup is because two of the heads of the military, that is the heads of the Air Force and the Army, said no.

4:52But then that wasn't it for him. On January 8th, Bolsonaro's supporters, seemingly with his pre-knowledge, launched a very January 6th-like attack in the capital of Brasilia.

5:09Jair Bolsonaro arriving to face questions at the federal police headquarters over accusations that he incited the rioters that sought the overthrow of his successor, Lula da Silva. It really did seem, and we know now based on evidence, that it was patterned off of what happened in January 6th in the United States. Only the end goal was to kind of get the military to reverse its previous stance on a coup. And that didn't happen, right? And not only did it not happen, but subsequently, Bolsonaro was investigated, arrested, thrown in jail, and disqualified from running in the upcoming presidential election, which is in 2026 this year.

5:49The Supreme Court has ordered Jair Bolsonaro to begin a prison sentence of more than 27 years for plotting a coup attempt. Trump said he's very unhappy with the verdict and called Bolsonaro an outstanding man. There's been a lot written, I think, about the investigation into January 8th and the subsequent, you know, impressive performance of the Brazilian legal system compared to the American one. What I was more interested in is how we got to that point, namely, why is it that Brazil's institutions, its Congress and its Supreme Court, were so much more resistant than their American peers to sort of power grabs and attempts to rule as an imperial executive than the U.S.

6:28ones were? So why? Yeah, so why? What happened? So in 2014, there was this absolutely massive corruption scandal in Brazil. Executives at Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, are accused of conspiring with the country's largest construction firms for much of the past decade to cream billions of dollars off contracts. It's gone hand in hand with Brazil's worst recession in decades. Corruption had long been a problem in Brazil, but this scandal exposed tremendous amounts of malfeasance from the highest levels of society, including top-level politicians. It's by one metric the largest political scandal in terms of dollars of any democracy ever in a world.

7:12It was bad. The wide scope of the corruption scandal, right, combined with the economic downturn, basically created a sense among Brazilians that the elite couldn't be trusted. They were corrupt. They were poor stewards of the economy. It's time to throw the bums out and replace them with someone new. So who emerged as the champion of this anti-incumbent sentiment? Well, it was Jair Bolsonaro. He was, I mean, to be blunt, he's a weirdo, right? Bolsonaro had been at the fringes of Brazilian politics for a long time. He'd been in Congress for quite a bit, but he never really passed any legislation because he was so strange that nobody really wanted to work with him.

7:51And by strange, I mean not just like personally unpleasant, but ideologically very extreme. So he's an open admirer of the military dictatorship. He once told a fellow female legislature that I wouldn't rape you because you weren't worth it. Oh, good Lord. He really is an extreme guy. Even things that it would be kind of shocking to hear Trump say, Bolsonaro said. I spoke in Brazil to Ana Clara Costa, who's a Brazilian journalist, who spent about two months, she said, on the campaign trail with him during this campaign. Maybe I can start a bit earlier than his victory. And, you know, I met her at a bookstore cafe in Rio.

8:34It's a nice part of the city. And she's sitting there recalling these moments when she looks at me and she just says. For me, he was insane. She genuinely couldn't understand why people liked this guy at first because he didn't understand anything that he was saying. His understanding of politics was so shallow, so ideological, so extreme. Conspiracy theories or things that were trending on Facebook at the time. But truly, it turns out that he ended up embodying the spirit of the times in Brazil and the sense of frustration with the establishment. I got this sense really clearly during another part of my Rio trip.

9:19So I went to the neighborhood that Bolsonaro was from because he was a congressman from Rio. Ran into a guy named Paolo, who's a longtime resident of this community and was actually Bolsonaro's neighbor. Bolsonaro is not what the people say in the media, for instance, say about. So what's the real Bolsonaro? What is he really like? Bolsonaro is a kind of, let's say, nationalist and patriotic people, but he really was worrying about the condition of the people in Brazil and the situation around Brazil. Paulo was really convinced that Brazil was beset by the demon of corruption. And he's not wrong about that, by the way.

9:59But his belief is that Bolsonaro was the only person who could stand credibly independent from that system.

10:05Noel King:And that sounds somewhat like what happened in the United States. You have frustration with the system, frustration with the elites, a sense that, you know, the people in the capital are not on your side. And then you've got this one guy who some people say, for me, he's insane. And other people say, no, he tells the truth. It reminds me a little bit of U.S. of A. where does the Brazilian narrative, if it does, diverge from the one here in the U.S.? Here's one big difference, one that was really foundational in determining why these two countries diverged. And it's that Brazil has a multi-party system.

10:38And not just like any multi-party system, there aren't just a handful of different parties. It is a super fragmented multi-party system, one of the most fragmented in the world, by which I mean it has one of the greatest numbers of parties represented in the National Congress of any country in the world. How many? Around 20, I believe, right now. It changes a lot, right? Between elections, legislators will jump between different ones. But I believe the current count's around 20. And this is a real difference between the United States, right? Because when you've got 20 parties, that means that no president can ever, ever have an outright majority in Congress.

11:20It's just basically mathematically impossible given the number of parties and the president only represents one party. So what do they do? Well, they end up making laws and passing laws in a very different way than in the US system where basically what you get right now is your party needs a congressional majority and then you pass bills on party-line votes. No, no. In Brazil, you have to wheel and deal. You have to give cabinet spots to other parties in order to get them into a legislative coalition with you. And even that's often not enough. You've got parties out of your coalition who you need votes from.

11:54And you kind of buy them off basically by promising legislators from specific states money for projects in their states. And then they go and they vote for you. And in exchange, they get deliverables for their constituents that ensure they can keep getting reelected over and over and over again. I was talking to a Brazilian journalist, another one, his name is Pedro Doria, and he was explaining that if Congress gives up power over lawmaking and over budgeting to the president, then they lose the ability to give themselves some of these pragmatic concrete goods that they need to get reelected, that the whole system really runs on.

12:36How do you get the votes in Congress? You give the money. so they can take it to their cities to build whatever, to buy ambulances and put street lightning or whatever projects those are. It's a very stable system, right? There's no interest in the parliament in a dictator. It's not just that these guys in Congress are doing, pork barrel stuff that might be inefficient, but is still within the bounds of legal policy. Some of them are just straight up corrupt. We know from all the corruption scandals of the 2010s that there is this real culture of corruption in the Brazilian elite, and there's a lot that goes on that we don't know about, and pretty credible allegations about it being concentrated to a significant degree among the dominant center-right bloc in Congress.

13:30And so these people have an extra incentive to protect legislative power. Because it's not just you want to keep getting reelected, it's that you want to keep using your position to make yourself rich. And if you lose authority over policymaking, you have fewer levers to pull to grant favors to people that might be exchanged for some private benefits. And ironically, the failure to get rid of corruption might end up being one of the reasons why its legislature in particular was so resilient to a would-be dictator. In a certain sense, our strength comes from the fact that our institutions are weaker.

14:20Noel King:Coming up next, what the USA can learn from Brazil. Why not? Zach's coming back.

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18:12Today! Today explained!

18:17Noel King:It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King back with Zach Beecham. All right. So, Zach, you were talking us through this reporting that you did on how Brazil prevented itself from losing its democracy. And what I think I heard you say is the big lesson for us in the United States is we just need our Congress to be more corrupt and to and to be more divided and to line up less behind President Trump and we will all be fine. Yes? Corruption? Porkfile politics? No to corruption. Qualified yes to fork-barrel politics. Corruption's bad. The lesson in Brazil is not that you should just have corruption. It's that it is very good when there are incentives for legislators to behave independently from the president, right?

19:02When they have motivations to protect their own prerogatives from a president who might try to take them. Now, it is a problem in Brazil that that's bound up with a kind of corrupt style of politics. Ideally, those two things would be disentangled. What I do want to extract from Brazil is this sort of general point about incentives, that we can change systems to give legislators more reason to act independently, better reasons to be jealous of their own power. And I think there's a few of them that are compatible with the American system that can be done easily. Think about partisan primaries.

19:39That's not a thing that other countries do, right? It's a really uniquely American system. And the end result of these primaries that everybody has to go through is that you are subject to the most ideologically disciplined faction of your party. And that's really not a great incentive. And so what we can do when we're thinking about reforms, one of them, is to get rid of congressional primary elections. Another one that I really like, and I think this one's obvious and doesn't really need any explanation, is the national ban on partisan gerrymandering.

20:12Noel King:That could happen anytime Congress wanted it to happen. There are proposals literally in Congress right now that are going nowhere because Republicans are stonewalling them. But here's a sort of more direct lesson from Brazil, and you'll see how it relates in a second. But it's to change the way executive orders work. So in the US, president issues executive orders and they just take effect and maybe there's some legal fighting about it, but that's it, right? There's no other input. In Brazil, their sort of rough equivalent of an executive order requires congressional input. It expires actually without full approval after a certain period of time from Congress.

20:48So we could do a version of that in the US. I've talked to a law professor about this. There is, it's kind of tortured, but you could do it legally. That would force executive orders to expire without affirmative congressional approval. Now, not only is that good just for giving Congress more power over the presidency, it's good because it would then force individual legislators to be accountable for executive actions if they approve them. Right now, you hear this from Republicans in Congress all the time. They'll say, oh, what Trump is doing, it's out of my hands. It's the president's decision.

21:17I don't have anything to do with that. But if they have to actually vote to approve those decisions and they won't take effect or won't continue to take effect without their approval, they can be held very literally accountable for those choices by voters. And that might shift the way that they act in certain cases.

21:34Noel King:A lot of what you're talking about, a lot of these fixes would take time. Is there anything, and time we may not have the luxury of time, is there anything that can be done now, today, tomorrow, next week? Yeah, look, this is a really pressing question because there isn't an obvious democratic playbook to counter the playbook that authoritarians around the world have developed for weakening democracy. You know, they concentrate power on the executive, weaken checks on their authority, start monkeying with the way that elections are administered, go after the free press. It's a pretty well-established playbook at this point.