How can Bolsonaro avoid prison? Trump, Musk and Zuckerberg, he says.
BRASILIA, Brazil — Jair Bolsonaro has had a rough couple of years: election losses, criminal cases, questionable embassy sleepovers. So when he finally received a piece of good news last week — an invitation to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration — it lifted his spirits.
“I’m feeling like a kid again with Trump’s invite. I’m fired up. I’m not even taking Viagra anymore,” the former Brazilian president said in an interview Tuesday, employing his trademark sophomoric humor. “Trump’s gesture is something to be proud of, right? Who’s Trump? The most important guy in the world.”
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But reality has a way of spoiling plans.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has confiscated Bolsonaro’s passport as part of an investigation into whether he tried to stage a coup after losing reelection in 2022. To attend Monday’s inauguration, Bolsonaro had to request permission from a Supreme Court justice who is also his political nemesis.
On Thursday, that justice rejected his request. Bolsonaro will watch from home.
That likely split screen — Trump returning to the world’s most powerful job while Bolsonaro stays home on court orders — will encapsulate the two political doppelgängers’ starkly divergent paths since they were voted out of office and then claimed fraud.
In 2025, Trump will head to the White House — and Bolsonaro could be headed to prison.
Three separate criminal investigations are closing in on Bolsonaro, and there are widespread expectations in Brazil — including from Bolsonaro himself — that he could soon be at the center of one of the highest-profile trials in Brazil’s history.
“I’m being watched all the time,” Bolsonaro, 69, said in the lively 90-minute interview, in which he aired grievances, repeated conspiracy theories and confessed his anxiety about his future. “I think the system doesn’t want me locked up; it wants me eliminated.”
But developments in the United States have given Bolsonaro new hope. Trump, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are leading a global push for free speech, he said, and he hopes that could somehow transform the political landscape in Brazil. “Social networks decide elections,” he said.
For years, Bolsonaro has accused a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, of censoring conservative voices and politically persecuting him. De Moraes has indeed become one of the most aggressive policemen of the internet in a democracy, ordering social networks to block at least 340 accounts in Brazil since 2020, and often keeping his reasons under seal.
That led to a clash with Musk last year, resulting in the judge’s ban on Musk’s social platform X in Brazil.