Forms of Life

Dispatches from the Present

Reality Check
Clement Gelly | São Paulo, Brazil | September 25, 2025

“It seemed like an off-season Carnaval,” the newscaster narrates for Brazil’s UOL News, over scenes of a street party with dancing, trumpets and drums. “But it was a celebration of Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s conviction.”

This was September 11, 2025, the night Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court found Bolsonaro, along with seven others, guilty of an attempted coup in 2023. Parties took place across the country: in Rio, in Salvador and in São Paulo, where I live. The celebrations had a feeling of measured pride: here and there among the trumpets you could even spot a Brazilian flag, a symbol now mostly associated with the right. At least for now, the checks and balances of democratic governance have functioned well, and held to account those who would overthrow them. This feeling is heightened by the stark political contrast with the U.S., perhaps best captured by the headline of a New York Times op-ed that has been frequently reposted on Instagram in Portuguese: “Brazil Just Succeeded Where America Failed.”

The clarity and forcefulness of Bolsonaro’s conviction, unlike the muddled aftermath of January 6th, was no doubt informed by Brazil’s 21 years of military dictatorship, which began in 1964 with a U.S.-backed coup. (Under the appropriately titled “Operation Brother Sam,” U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon organized to send aircraft carriers to support the military in their takeover.) The regime practiced aggressive censorship, arbitrary detention and extrajudicial killings; conservative estimates suggest some 20,000 Brazilians were tortured.

All of this is within living memory for many Brazilians. The long shadow of terror and trauma cast by these events was recently memorialized in the Oscar-winning I’m Still Here, which focuses on the disappearance of Rubens Paiva, one of hundreds of recorded disappearances (though the real number is likely much higher). I watched the film in a São Paulo theater where three-quarters of the audience looked old enough to have lived through the dictatorship, and many were crying by the end.

As an American, I’ve found it remarkable how this historical context is invoked quite openly in mainstream Brazilian coverage of my own country’s political situation. “What we’re seeing,” said political scientist Carlos Poggio, is “a constant and clear concentration of power for Trump.”

I was listening to the daily news podcast Café da Manhã in the shower while the hosts addressed Trump’s decision to send both Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles. The matter-of-factness of this statement caught me off guard, there in my small porcelain box, especially in a podcast analogous to the Daily in its prestige and reach. It wasn’t radically different from assertions we might find in the news in the U.S., but what felt different was how obvious it was to everyone. Neither the guest nor the hosts nor, presumably, the listeners needed to qualify or question or equivocate about it.

“In the United States, this is an unfamiliar situation,” Poggio continued. “In Latin America, we’re used to this kind of politics. In Latin America, we have caudillos; we have weak political parties and institutions, and we have personalist politics.” In other words, for Latin Americans, this is a familiar and lived reality, not a speculative and ambiguous terror. In the past few weeks, I’ve watched political scientist Lourival Sant’Anna say on CNN Brasil, commenting on the occupation of Washington, D.C., that Trump was “instilling a climate of fear so that he could make himself the country’s savior … in order to concentrate power,” while on UOL News the journalist Ricardo Kotscho observed about the same events that Trump “wants to be more than a dictator of the United States.”

What’s more telling than the statements themselves is how they are delivered: soberly and dispassionately, so straightforward that the news hosts simply nod along and ask follow-up questions. On UOL, Kotscho circled back at the end of the interview to ask political scientist and fellow guest Denilde Holzhacker, “Summing up, can Trump be called a dictator, or still just a proto-dictator?” Holzhacker’s casual response: “I think he still has some ways to go… but certainly the increasing centralization and authoritarianism have been a hallmark of the Trump administration.”

Brazil by no means has a perfect democracy itself, nor is local coverage presenting things that way. The very night of Bolsonaro’s conviction, commentators on Brazil’s SBT News were already discussing the continued threats to Brazilian democracy, now even more heightened by the conviction: Trump might plan more sanctions to attack Brazil, which could even culminate in a military intervention, they speculated. And even though this coup attempt was punished appropriately, Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies is currently trying to pass a law that would offer preventative amnesty to any of its members who commit a crime. Historically Brazil has often granted amnesty for political crimes; the bill, as well as more targeted efforts to grant amnesty to Bolsonaro, has spurred protests nationwide.

Yet these points of weakness, all discussed in that same analytical, dispassionate tone, underscore the clarity that comes from defending a democracy after you’ve already lived through its disappearance. For Americans, it’s almost impossible for us to see the threat as real, or immediate.

Our pundits seem to veer off course at the crucial moment, just before reaching the logical conclusion to their analyses. Eugene Daniels on MSNBC’s The Weekend talking about the occupation of D.C.: “Sometimes it feels like that’s the point, right? To chill the city, to make people not feel as safe and fun in their city because”—Donald Trump can stay in power unelected?—“that leads to crime in Donald Trump’s head.” Alyssa Farah Griffin on CNN: “the caution I give Republicans and people who may love everything that Donald Trump is doing, is: once you let that toothpaste out of the tube”—you can’t easily dismantle the consolidation of power?—“the left is going to be able to use that same expansion of power on policies you don’t like when they take back the White House.”

When they do put their finger on it, they seem unable to process the reality of the situation. Ezra Klein starts the August 27th episode of the Ezra Klein Show with dramatic music riffing on the idea of optical illusions: Are we seeing a president fulfilling his campaign promises that he was democratically elected to execute or are we seeing authoritarianism? He can’t quite figure it out—as if it can’t be both. In his New York Times column, Jamelle Bouie shows off his French theory: “It is as if the administration is building a simulacrum of authoritarianism, albeit one meant to bring the real thing into being.” Watching from afar, and with a robust Brazilian synopsis of how this movie has played out before, the proceedings take on a strange dramatic irony—the protagonist walking backwards into the villain we can already see waiting around the corner.

“How would this latest thing that Trump has done read if it were happening in, say, Albania or Peru or Uganda?” asked Radley Balko on Klein’s podcast. “I mean, we would say: It seems pretty clear there’s an authoritarian takeover going on.” Balko isn’t the first to attempt to prove a point about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies through analogy, but we might no longer need to transpose Trump into a country we view as more unstable than our own. Plenty of other countries’ governments have gone through this process, and many of them because of our own government; it might just be easier to look at how they’re describing us.

Support our work today.