How to blunt ‘Trump of the tropics’

Brazil’s president can make Trump look empathetic. But the spread of Covid-19 has offered voters an alternative, writes Genaro Oliveira.

When Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll passed China’s last week, a reporter asked Jair Bolsonaro for his thoughts on the morbid figures. The president’s first answer,

‘‘E daı´?’’ (‘‘So what?’’), shocked even those who thought they had become numb to the divisive public statements so characteristic of his first months in office.

Bolsonaro’s antagonistic personality and unscripted press conferences have often led to comparisons with US President Donald Trump. Some analogies are valid; like his US counterpart, the ‘‘Trump of the tropics’’ also rose to power in unconventional ways.

At first, his candidacy was equally taken as a joke. Brazil’s presidential race had been a repetitive clash between two big parties representing centre-left and centre-right alliances. In that predictable arrangement, in which mainstream candidates held virtual hegemony over TV and radio ad time, a lower house representative from an obscure party running a relatively low-budget campaign seemed unthreatening.

Bolsonaro’s ferocious anticorruption tirades – usually blended with attacks on identity politics and political correctness – were seen as the outbursts of a healthy democracy at best, or at worst, as just venting the antiquated and fringe views of conservative Brazilians.

But like Trump, Bolsonaro’s campaign made brilliantly disgraceful use of social media, together with a calculated effort to reach Brazilians who felt disenfranchised after years of leftleaning governments.

His election triumph, and the ‘‘cultural war’’ backlashes that followed, again parallel events in the US. Just as the chauvinistic, buffoonish Trump contrasted with the cosmopolitan, academic Barack Obama, so the macho-athletic, promilitary, European-looking

Bolsonaro could not be more different to Brazil’s previous presidents: unionist ‘‘Lula’’ da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, the first female president and former guerrilla.

Like Trump, Bolsonaro also managed to cast himself as an outsider. Although Brazil’s capital, Brası´lia, was built on one of the driest regions in the country, Bolsonaro promised something comparable to swamp draining: to halt the mamata, the Portuguese colloquial word for embezzlement.

Just as Trump both antagonised and reduced the stature of his political opponents, Bolsonaro’s metaphor captured the imagination of voters desperate to shut off funds to insatiably greedy politicians.

While adversaries poke fun at their inarticulate use of language, both presidents pride themselves on speaking in plain and unmediated terms. Bolsonaro relies heavily on WhatsApp, Brazilians’ preferred social media tool, with more than 120 million users.

Echoing the White House’s clashes with CNN and MSNBC reporters, Bolsonaro has pointed fingers at the money-driven motivations and political biases of local media, such as Folha and Globo. And just like Trump, Bolsonaro is accused of being a mass producer and propagator of fake news.

But comparisons are also misleading. Bolsonaro is much better at being worse. Trump’s genitalia-grabbing ‘‘locker-room’’ bragging sounds almost naive beside

Bolsonaro telling a congresswoman upfront, on live TV, that she was not worthy of being raped.

Trump’s blase´ ‘‘good people on both sides’’ response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville was repugnant. But it doesn’t compare with Bolsonaro’s sadistic assessment that the great mistake of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-85), of which he is still a supporter, was that it just tortured and didn’t kill political opponents.

Although they share many characteristics, Bolsonaro trumps Trump by having an added militarist stripe. Trump’s megalomania comes from the tangled history of dollars over ethics in US politics. Bolsonaro’s paranoia comes from direct lineage to banana republic dictators.

Still we can’t stop talking about Bolsonaro. Yesterday, his ecocidal denial of Amazonian fires, today, his genocidal response to Covid-19. But how to honestly report on such politicians without giving them even more oxygen, or being manipulated by their liberal-baiting tactics?

Even harder, how to genuinely talk with – and hopefully sway the opinions of – their seemingly immovable supporters? Local and global headlines berating Bolsonaro have done nothing except fuel loyalty from the one-third of voters he already has, and needs to keep, to win Brazil’s next election.

I suggest this counter-narrative: being a federation, state governors in Brazil have relative autonomy to defy federal directives, and have, in many cases, implemented responsible responses to the pandemic.

Being a largely poor population of more than 210 million, Brazil’s coronavirus statistics were always going to be high. But as the state governors have shown, people in power also display independent thinking, compassion and assume responsibility for serious problems.

There is intelligent leadership and respect for science in Brazil, just as there is in the US and New Zealand. I believe we should make this defiance the real story of Covid19 in Brazil.

Comparisons [with Trump] are also misleading. Bolsonaro [right] is much better at being worse.

Genaro Oliveira is a member of the NZ Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Auckland, and a lecturer at Massey University.