EMILE MYBURGH: Trump, Bolsonaro and the rule of law

If your lawyer quotes Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Wonderland during your defence in court, you may not have had proper legal representation.

This could almost be a meme on a satirical lawyer’s Instagram account, but it is a verbatim quote from one of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s lawyers. He affectionately pronounced it “Hoomptchee Doomptchee” in Brazilian Portuguese during the trial, in which his client was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment for, among other charges, attempting to incite a coup to remain in power after he lost the 2022 presidential elections.

On November 22 things took a turn for the worse for the beleaguered Bolsonaro, who had been under house arrest while exhausting his appeals, when he was arrested in the early hours of the morning and taken into custody at the Federal Police headquarters in Brasilia.

The previous day his son, Flavio, called on his supporters to go protest outside the luxury condominium where Bolsonaro was under 24-hour police watch and all his visitors subject to approval by the Brazilian Supreme Court. Then Bolsonaro’s ankle monitor went quiet. It later transpired that he had tried to burn it off with soldering iron.

He blamed this on hallucinations caused by the medicines he had been taking for chronic hiccups. The police, fearing an imminent escape, did not waste time and late on the Friday night petitioned the Supreme Court to authorise Bolsonaro’s immediate detention in police holding cells.

The court approved the request in the early hours of Saturday morning, and a few hours later, at 6am, the police arrived at the Bolsonaro house and took him away. Other than the dwindling Bolsonaro supporters who held prayer vigils, most of Brazil celebrated.

A few thousand miles to the north, in Washington, US President Donald Trump was giving a press conference when a reporter asked him about the Bolsonaro detention. His reply: “I don’t know anything about it, I didn’t hear. Too bad.” He then moved on.

While Trump has worries of his own, like what is written (maybe about him) in the Epstein files, a string of modest Democrat victories, such as of Zohran Mamdani — a Muslim immigrant no less — as mayor of New York, this was still a remarkably nonchalant reaction to the fate of a bosom buddy and like-minded right-wing idealogue.

Trump tried to pressure the Brazilian government as much as he could to convince it to drop what he called the “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro. Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of Jair’s other sons, spent months lobbying the White House to impose sanctions on Brazil, which ultimately resulted in Trump imposing 50% import tariffs on Brazilian goods and Magnitsky Act sanctions on the judge who oversaw Bolsonaro’s prosecution.

Rather than assisting his dad, this backfired. It may even have resulted in the court imposing a harsher sentence on Bolsonaro, something courts do worldwide when a defendant fails to show remorse. After some diplomacy between current Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, and Trump, most of the tariffs were recently rescinded, possibly after Trump realised that they resulted in higher beef and coffee prices for ordinary Americans, his core base.

There certainly appears to be some chemistry between Lula and Trump at the moment, though given how capricious Trump can be, Lula should not view this as an enduring friendship. For the Bolsonaro clan this is probably the end of the road; they serve no more purpose for Trump. Other right-wing politicians in Brazil such as the current governor of the state of São Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas, are ready to take their place.

Meanwhile, Trump’s experiences with the law are showing signs of tension as well. His recent attempt to prosecute former FBI director James Comey and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, were dismissed by a federal court in Columbia, South Carolina. The reason was technical. The hasty appointment of an interim prosecutor by Trump to oversee the prosecution was ruled invalid, as were any prosecutorial actions she had taken.

This means Trump can (and probably will) reinstate the prosecution once the appointment is regularised. The decision said nothing about whether the prosecution against two people that Trump had excoriated publicly for years was malicious or whether there are any merits to the accusations.

But just like in Bolsonaro’s case, Trump had to reckon with the rule of law, something neither of them likes. These checks and balances in a constitutional democracy can be really inconvenient for authoritarian-minded leaders, hence their desire to attack the judges and courts.

It remains to be seen how the US Supreme Court will ultimately judge the Trump cases that land up before it. It has given Trump an easy ride so far, but the lower courts have increasingly voiced frustration. Judges who privately criticised the Trump administration or the — in their view, unintelligible — Supreme Court decisions defending his actions have faced calls for investigation and dismissal.

Trump has shown some signs of stress recently. Shouting “Quiet, Piggy!” to a reporter on Air Force One when she asked him about the Epstein files, and other eruptions, reveal someone who may finally have encountered something that a rant on social media cannot undo.

It was one of his staunchest former Republican supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who pushed relentlessly for the Epstein files to be fully made public. Trump resisted, but he had to relent when even his own base wanted to know what is written there.

With the fall of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the British commoner formerly known as Prince Andrew, not to mention quite a few other less prominent casualties such as Lawrence H Summers, former Harvard president and erstwhile US treasury secretary, the Epstein files may finally present Trump with an obstacle that shouting at and insulting journalists won’t make go away.

Greene has paid a price; she has resigned as house representative for Georgia (effective from January after she qualifies for a lifetime pension). No wonder Trump has no time for Bolsonaro at the moment. He has bigger things to worry about than a petty seditionist who, had he been an ordinary foreigner in the US, may well have ended up in ICE detention facing deportation without due process.

There is one silver lining for Bolsonaro, though. The Brazilian prison system allows conjugal visits, so his next 27 years in Brazil’s infamous Papuda prison may not be unbearable.