Bolsonaro Banned from Politics—Just as the Left Wants to do to Trump

No matter which continent leftists are on, they play according to the same handbook.

The recent court ruling banning former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking public office for eight years has strong parallels to the strategy Democrats are currently using against Donald Trump, and should serve as a warning of what will happen if conservatives do not dismantle the communist Deep State while they are in power and able to do so.

On Friday, a seven-judge panel in Brazil prohibited Bolsonaro, the controversial leader of the center-right Liberal Party, from running for office until 2030, thereby killing his chances of a 2026 challenge to left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the left-wing Workers’ Party, to whom Bolsonaro lost in 2022 by the narrowest margin in decades.

The 2022 race was a divisive one. Bolsonaro claimed the election system was compromised by hackers and that voting machines automatically filled out ballots for the Workers’ Party. In July 2022, Bolsonaro held a meeting, which included foreign ambassadors, at which he repeated his claims of voter fraud.

These allegations prompted another left-wing party, the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), to file a lawsuit against Bolsonaro. The party called on the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to ban Bolsonaro from running again, which the court did on Friday.

“This is an injustice against me, my God in heaven! Show me something concrete I have done against democracy. Perhaps my crime was doing the right thing for four years,” Bolsonaro said of TSE’s deliberations. He said he will appeal the decision. But even if he succeeds, there are currently 15 more cases against him pending at the TSE, and any one of them could result in another ban.

Ironically, Lula was himself banned after a conviction for taking bribes in 2017. But his conviction was annulled by Brazil’s Supreme Court in March 2021, allowing him to successfully run against Bolsonaro and stage his own political comeback, returning to the presidency 12 years after having left the office.

It should be noted that Lula (who served prison time for his bribery charges) was never cleared of wrongdoing; the Supreme Court merely held that the court that tried his case did not have jurisdiction. He could therefore be convicted again. As BBC notes:

[Supreme Court Justice Edson] Fachin agreed with Lula’s lawyers that the court located in the city of Curitiba, in Paraná state, should not have tried Lula because the crimes he was accused of did not take place in that state.

At the time of the alleged crimes, Lula was president and resided in the capital, Brasilia. Justice Fachin said the cases against him should therefore be handled by a court in that city.

He annulled four corruption cases against Lula and ordered they be retried in Brasilia.

Despite Lula’s lawyers saying the decision was a vindication “of his innocence”, Mr Fachin did not make any kind of ruling on whether the former president was guilty or not of the corruption charges.

The similarities between the ordeals of Trump and Bolsonaro are uncanny. Both men were heavily demonized by the leftist establishment media with epithets such as “fascist” and “far-right.”

Both men narrowly lost their reelection bids amid suspicions of voter fraud by the opposition. The fallout of the controversial elections resulted in public pushback against the establishment; supporters of Bolsonaro stormed Congress and the Supreme Court and held heated protests. Ultimately, however, both men peacefully stepped down from office despite their misgivings about the legitimacy of the elections.

But despite their decisions to leave office peacefully, they have continued to be targeted by the Deep State.

The fate that has befallen Bolsonaro — being barred from politics for eight years — is precisely what the Left intends to do to Trump if they can get away with it here. The indictments against him are nothing more than the weaponization of the justice system by Democrats to keep their chief political rival out of power.

In the wake of the 2020 election, many called on Trump to use the executive powers of his office to have the fraud exposed and the perpetrators brought to justice so that the integrity of America’s elections could be restored — just as many of Bolsonaro’s supporters similarly called on him to not step down without a fight.

Yet both men chose the path of least resistance, perhaps to appease their detractors, who were just looking for an opportunity to call them “dictators.” Now, however, Trump has neither the power nor the resources to go after the Deep State. He is an ordinary citizen completely at the mercy of a malicious government. There is little he can do now to protect himself, or the American people, beyond placing his trust in God and hoping that the courts vindicate him.

Trump and Bolsonaro’s stories demonstrate that one must never hold communists in good faith. They will not reciprocate any olive branch or gesture of goodwill. The only way to deal with them is by bringing them to justice.