Jair and Donald: two blows – 05/08/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

“Despite losing, the accused was determined to stay in power. So for more than two months after the election […], the accused lied that the election result was altered by fraud, and that he had, in fact, won the election. These accusations were false, and the accused knew they were false. But the accused disseminated them […] to make their claims, known to be false, appear legitimate, create a national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode the public’s faith in the administration of the election.”

No, it is not yet the sentence against Jair. It is the beginning of the accusation of the American authorities against Donald Trump, presented last week.

What the findings of the American authorities show is that the stories of Donald in 2020 and Jair in 2022 were very similar.

From very early on, American authorities had already demonstrated that all the fraud claims put forward by Trump were false. The republican alleged, for example, that in the state of Georgia thousands of votes would have been registered in the name of people who had already died. The authorities gave him the correct number: two. The accusations denied by Trump’s own aides included, lo and behold, an attack on voting machines (page 9 of the indictment).

In Brazil, Bolsonaro has been spreading false information about the electoral process since forever. Recently, he was made ineligible by the Brazilian courts for having lied about it at an ambassadorial meeting. He always knew it was a lie. He never found any evidence of fraud on the electronic voting machines. Even hacker Walter Delgatti Neto, formerly of “Vaza Jato”, now “Vaza Carla”, told Bolsonaro that Brazilian ballot boxes could not be hacked.

Why did Trump and Jair tell easy-to-rebut lies about the electoral process? To cause a popular uprising that would justify the suspension of the democratic order. His lies just needed to survive in the public eye long enough for chaos to ensue.

According to American authorities, on January 3, three days before the invasion of the Capitol, a White House aide warned one of Trump’s accomplices (“co-conspirator number 4”, in the indictment) that if Trump tried to remain in power , “there would be riots in every major city in the United States” (p. 30). The co-conspirator responded, “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” The Insurrection Act authorizes the American president to use the Armed Forces within the United States to suppress popular uprisings.

It was exactly the Bolsonaristas’ plan, whether in the various drafts of the coup already found calling for “Article 142”, or in the strategy of the Bolsonarist terrorists who tried to blow up the airport in Brasília, or in the plan of those camped in front of the barracks (according to the confession of the extremist Oswaldo Eustáquio to piauí magazine): creating chaos that “required” the intervention of the Armed Forces.

Last week, by the way, we not only discovered that the two coup plans were similar. In an interview with the website O Antagonista, Bolsonaro himself declared that the problem with carrying out a coup would have been “the ‘after day’: how is the world going to relate to us?”. For Bolsonaro, what hindered his coup was that Trump went wrong.

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