While a member of Congress, Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo had a shrine to the NRA in his office. It included the insignia of the Gadsden flag and a framed text of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Right above this shrine, there were bobblehead dolls of George Washington, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. An Israeli flag sat on his desk. In 2024, it was reported that Bolsonaro kept a tiny plastic fetus at home. I don’t know if there’s anything more distinctly American than loving both guns and fetuses, positions that seem not to naturally go together in any other context.
Yet here is a major political figure in Brazil acting like a parody of a right-wing evangelical. When Eduardo’s father lost the 2022 election, his supporters even staged their own version of January 6. Since this is South America, they were two days late, and so did it on January 8 instead. Bolsonaro copied Trump in spending months trying to undermine confidence in the election. His supporters were a lot more lively than MAGA, though. They blocked highways and tried to bomb the Brasília airport, and after Lula took power, they broke into the National Congress, Supreme Federal Court, and presidential offices. Later, investigators revealed that there had been a plot hatched in the presidential palace to murder Lula, his incoming vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes.
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Bolsonaro got 27 years for the coup attempt. He is now serving his sentence at home due to health difficulties. Bolsonaro’s lawyers deny that he knew about or approved the assassination plot, although investigators uncovered detailed plans for the killings drawn up by members of his administration. The next Brazilian presidential election, which concluded Sunday, saw Lula going up against Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son (not the one with the plastic fetus) of the disgraced ex-president. As in the case of the United States in 2024, Brazil’s latest presidential election was a relitigation of a coup attempt that had taken place in the aftermath of a contested presidential election four years earlier.