The Deeper Reason That Trump Is Raging Against Brazil Right Now
Source: The New Republic
The Deeper Reason That Trump Is Raging Against Brazil Right Now
Andre Pagliarini
Sat, July 12, 2025 at 8:21 AM EDT
5 min read
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Right now, that nation is Brazil. Trump on Wednesday posted a letter on Truth Social addressed to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, threatening to slap 50 percent tariffs the country starting August 1 unless it ends the “witch hunt” against former President Jair Bolsonaro and reverses a Supreme Court ruling that U.S. social media companies can be held financially liable if users’ posts violate the country’s speech laws.
The personal angle here is familiar by now: Bolsonaro, a far-right extremist whose central political position prior to his surprise 2018 election was a dogged defense of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, is facing potential imprisonment for allegedly attempting a coup. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Trump sees in Bolsonaro a fellow traveler being persecuted by familiar foes—the courts, the opposing party, the “deep state.” The truth, of course, is that they both brought trouble on themselves with their reckless and illegal behavior; the only difference is that Bolsonaro may actually be held accountable, while Trump got away scot-free.
Trump surely doesn’t see it that way, and there is little doubt that his grievances against the U.S. judiciary, which has blocked some (but hardly all) of his most ambitious authoritarian moves this year, are feeding his desire to lash out against the Supreme Court in Brazil. But that is not the only consideration here. On July 6-7, leaders and representatives of BRICS countries—which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, but the coalition now counts 10 members—met in Rio de Janeiro for the seventeenth annual meeting. While careful to minimize any direct reference to the U.S., the group issued a shared declaration criticizing the “indiscriminate rising of tariffs,” a thinly veiled rebuke of Trump’s trade policy. In response, Trump threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on any country aligning with what he called “anti-American” BRICS policies.
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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/deeper-reason-trump-raging-against-122128145.html