Brazil Stopped Its Trump. It’s Pathetic that We Couldn’t Stop Ours.

Republicans obviously deserve blame too, particularly the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that defined much of what Trump did after the 2020 election as official acts of the president and therefore not subject to prosecution.

It’s worth noting that the United States was particularly ill-equipped to punish an anti-democratic president because we, unlike most other democracies, have a deeply entrenched system of only two major parties. So the party whose leader could face sanctions for anti-democratic behavior has very strong incentives to stand by that leader, no matter what he has done. By defending Trump, Republicans like Supreme Court Justice John Roberts are also defending the brand and ideology of a party they have invested their professional lives in.

In contrast, Brazil’s current president, left-leaning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Bolsonaro may be the country’s leading political figures today and represent two major parties, but it’s not the same decades-long battle between just two parties as in the United States. “The Brazilian right is fragmented (at least four parties claim a conservative identity in the Brazilian Congress) and not particularly beholden to Bolsonaro,” Bard College Latin American politics professor Omar G. Encarnación wrote in a recent essay in Time.