This Expat Politician Actually Wants Trump to Meddle in His Country

Trump’s personal involvement is unlikely but hardly impossible. He has been friendly with Bolsonaro, but has said almost nothing about Brazil since taking office. Now, however, the former president’s 40-year-old son is taking a big step to try to rekindle the bond between his father and Trump. On Tuesday, Eduardo stunned his supporters and Brazilian political observers by announcing that he’s taking an indefinite unpaid leave from office to remain in the United States, where he’s been since late February, to plead his dad’s case full-time. He is well positioned to make such entreaties. Since his father’s election, Eduardo has become a fixture of the MAGA political-industrial complex. He has appeared regularly at CPAC, spoken several times with Tucker Carlson, cavorted with Steve Bannon and Mike Lindell, and hobnobbed at Mar-a-Lago—including with Trump himself. All along, he has spread self-serving fictions about Brazil’s political situation to an uninformed MAGA base.

There is a real affinity for the Trumps among the Bolsonaros, but the stakes of Eduardo’s efforts are not just personal. A week after Lula’s inauguration on January 1, 2023, Bolsonaro supporters staged a riot in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, a destructive green-and-yellow reprise of the January 6, 2021, insurrection carried out by Trump die-hards. Authorities acted swiftly, arresting almost 1,500 people on the spot. Bolsonaro and his allies have since decried the unflinching institutional response as authoritarian. They insist that Brazil is no longer a democracy and that Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, who has boldly confronted myriad extremist threats to the constitutional order, is a tyrant. (Moraes also faced down Elon Musk last year, forcing X to comply with Brazilian laws. In response, Musk called him “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge.”) Eduardo is hoping to leverage hostility toward Moraes in Brazil and beyond, including among influential MAGA figures, to absolve his father. He is, in short, actively soliciting foreign interference in his country’s internal affairs.

Members of Lula’s Workers’ Party have characterized Eduardo’s machinations as something close to treason. “It is obvious that if he returned to Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, at our request, would confiscate his passport and he would not be able to return to the United States to continue his coup plotting,” Congressman Rogério Correia declared. “That is why he preferred to stay there, afraid of losing his passport. And, look, he is preparing his father’s escape. He is there preparing his escape and his father’s escape for their continued coup.”