Brazil’s Supreme Court Declared Former President, Jair Bolsonaro, Guilty of Coup D'état

Sep 13, 2025 11:01 AM EDT, Sat

Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the ‘Trump of the Tropics,’ is found guilty of coup charges

As Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is convicted by a Supreme Court majority of plotting a coup, the White House’s reaction will make a big difference.

Sept. 11, 2025, 4:20 PM EDT By Steve Benen

A few years ago, Brazil’s then-President Jair Bolsonaro narrowly lost his bid for a second term. In circumstances that might sound familiar to American audiences, the far-right leader responded to the defeat by, according to prosecutors, plotting what was effectively a coup that would’ve allowed him to remain in office.

Bolsonaro now wants to return to power in South America’s largest country, but a rather important hurdle was standing in the way: criminal charges for allegedly trying to overturn the results of his 2022 loss.

The process isn’t going especially well for the man who has embraced the “Trump of the Tropics” label. Reuters reported:

Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by a Supreme Court majority on Thursday of plotting a coup to remain in power after losing the 2022 election, a powerful blow to the populist far-right movement he created. The presumptive ruling by a majority of a panel of five justices in Brazil‘s Supreme Court makes Bolsonaro the first former president in the country’s history to be convicted for attacking democracy.

While the majority on the Brazilian bench found Bolsonaro guilty, the ruling was not unanimous, and one of the justices said the former president should be acquitted on all charges.

I won’t pretend to have any expertise in the country’s legal process, but Reuters’ report added: “That single vote could open a path to challenges to the ruling, potentially bringing the trial’s conclusion closer to the run-up of the 2026 presidential elections, in which Bolsonaro has repeatedly said he is a candidate despite being barred from running for office.”

In the meantime, it will also be of interest to see how the White House responds to the developments. Indeed, in keeping with his usual pattern, Donald Trump has rallied behind his controversial ally, dismissing the criminal allegations as a “witch hunt” and demanding that the charges against the former president be dropped.

But that’s not all the American president did. In July, the Republican also announced steep new trade tariffs on Brazil, in part because the Brazilian prosecutors brought a case that Trump didn’t like.

The tariffs against Brazil were the highest of any levy Trump has imposed this year. The move came on the heels of Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing steps to revoke the visa of a Brazilian judge who imposed restrictions on Bolsonaro as his case unfolded. The Treasury Department soon followed by sanctioning the judge.

There’s no precedent in the American tradition of a U.S. administration trying to leverage trade policy to derail a criminal case in a sovereign nation, but the president and his team did it anyway.

Now that Bolsonaro has been convicted, it’s likely that the Republican administration’s response will become even more radical. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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