Brazil’s Trump-like president walks a well-worn authoritarian path

Thursday, July 29, 2021 | 2 a.m.

A sitting president whose administration is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its ineptitude and corruption lobs unsubstantiated accusations of voter fraud and threatens not to acknowledge the outcome of an upcoming election. This leads to concerns that the president will stage a coup and establish an authoritarian government.

Is this America in 2020?

Yes, but it’s also Brazil right now, where the actions of President Jair Bolsonaro suggest where former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s extremist leadership are trying to take the United States.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, stated in a television interview two decades ago that he would shut down Brazil’s congress and re-establish its military dictatorship, which fell in 1985. In recent comments, he’s prompted fears among Brazilians that he intends to make good on his threats.

“Next year’s elections have to be clean,” he declared this month. “Either we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.”

This was just the latest comment in which Bolsonaro sounded like Trump, or vice versa. He claimed before the 2018 election that the only way he could lose was by fraud, and he came out of the vote saying he’d won by more than the official results indicated. He also offered his take on the 2020 U.S. election, echoing Trump by saying, “There was a lot of fraud there.”

The parallels between the situation in Brazil and the GOP’s sowing of distrust in American elections are plain to see, and in both cases they point to something that has occurred throughout the history of democratic governments: Undermining faith in elections is an inevitable prelude to attempts at dictatorship.

This helps explain the recent revelations about Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley’s actions late in the Trump presidency, when he reportedly led his colleagues in developing informal plans to prevent a Trump coup after the 2020 election. As reported by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker in their book “I Alone Can Fix It,” Milley likened what was happening in the White House at the time to Adolf Hitler’s dismantling of Germany’s democracy in the 1930s and his rise to dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley reportedly told his aides, referring to the 1933 arson of Germany’s seat of parliament, the trigger event that Hitler used to consolidate power. “The gospel of the Führer.”

Milley hasn’t commented on the book by Leonnig and Rucker, or another new book reporting that he pressed Trump to tone down his violent rhetoric about protests in Seattle and Portland. But he has stressed that the military’s role is not to provide political muscle for any elected official.

“We don’t arbitrate elections,” he said. “That’s the job of the judiciary and the legislature and the American people. It is not the job of the U.S. military. We stayed out of politics. We’re an apolitical institution.”

In Brazil, as in the U.S. under Trump, democracy currently is holding together. But Bolsonaro’s assault on election integrity and his musings about canceling the vote have left the nation on edge as the 2022 election nears in October.

In another direct parallel with Trump, Bolsonaro’s approval ratings have sunk to an abysmal level amid complaints over his administration’s inaction on the pandemic, leaving him deeply vulnerable in the election. And like Trump, he’s ratcheted up his attacks on voting integrity as he lost support. This will sound familiar to Americans: Bolsonaro alleges Brazil’s electronic voting machinery isn’t trustworthy, and claims the election system has been rigged against him by forces on the left. Experts say that regardless of the outcome of Brazil’s election, Bolsonaro’s actions have already weakened democracy by creating the possibility that millions of voters will not believe the results and therefore would be more amenable to Bolsonaro overturning them or establishing an authoritarian regime.

“The genius of electoral fraud claims is that you don’t even need to demonstrate fraud; you just need to demonstrate the possibility of fraud,” Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told MSN. “Then, in the hothouse environment of social media, it will be picked up with very little fact-checking, really catch fire and be reinforced.”

Again, this sounds familiar — it’s the Big Lie that the GOP has used in passing voter-suppression measures in several states and has used to counter congressional legislation to preserve voter rights and access.

Look at democracies that have fallen throughout history, and you see the same thing: Authoritarian-minded forces weakening public trust in institutions — electoral processes, representative structures, the media, educational systems, etc. — as a way of softening the beaches for a takeover of representative government.

It’s happening in Brazil. And unless Americans stand up to the extremist forces in the Republican Party and return it to responsible, constructive leadership, it will remain a threat here too.