In January 2020, the then President of the United States was at his best. The American economy was booming and the people were happy. Reelection was guaranteed. Without having anything to criticize with consistency, his opponents tried to convince the world that Donald Trump would push the world towards a nuclear catastrophe for having authorized a bombing that killed in Iraq what was the main name of the state terrorism apparatus promoted by Iran, General Qasem Soleimani.
On the other side of the world, in China, the Covid-19 virus was still unknown to politicians (and strangely possibly also to intelligence). The pandemic came and with it the succession of Trump’s mistakes. The first was to sneer at the plague in public, to bolster the hysterical base, and virtually hide the work that helped the world get vaccines in record time.
Then came the case of George Floyd, a victim of failure to help by a policeman and which became a pretext for setting fire to the streets and walling up the government even more. The United States caught fire. Since the world was not going to end in that war with Iran, they decided to set fire to racists, fascists and history.
Trump seems to have understood nothing. He hurried into the abyss on a road paved with care by the QAnon conspiracy theories – an evident psychological operation of foreign and possibly state origin.
The confusion between truths, hypotheses, outright lies and manipulation was the recipe that led President Trump to step on all the banana peels along the way. The biggest of all was his final speech that led to the march to the Capitol and its invasion – clearly facilitated by someone interested in the chaos scenario. But what does it matter?
Trump spent four years in government being called a fascist, a Nazi, an anti-democratic, a coup plotter and anything else of the sort of political name-calling possible. He held up well. And to show that he was right in front of his critics, he took even greater strides on the road – the same one mentioned two paragraphs ago – towards the abyss.
The republican president was defeated, but he came out of the elections gigantic. With much more votes than in the previous election and as a symbol of a movement. But he didn’t understand anything. He preferred to throw himself into the abyss of January 6th, legitimizing everything here that they said he was.
Trump shrunk. He turned to me. There are those who believe he will return to the White House, but there are many more people willing to send him to prison. This week, movements in the US Congress have shown that this is not a theory. Every day new pieces appear (some quite questionable, but does it matter?) that serve to justify his indictment.
Many of Trump’s follies and his furious base were reactions to the grossest of gratuitous anti-Trumpism. They were undeserved. disqualified. Almost dehumanized. After all, they were the basket of deplorables, as Hillary Clinton came to define in the election campaign. Trump and his gang were made to be beaten, they were good at spitting.
In Brazil, it’s cattle. That’s what bolsonaristas are called. And it was trivialized. With a great deal of goodwill, it can be said that the offense stems from the bovine behavior of the base that follows the leader’s horn. But, with a drop of honesty, it must be recognized that it is the purest dehumanization.
All the major Brazilian newspapers and magazines endorse this. The terms appear in columns, caricatures and cartoons. This week, Folha went a step further and threw Bolsonar women into Trump’s basket of deplorables. He made a series of analogies about the group’s sexual and affective unhappiness and painted President Jair Bolsonaro, with his rudimentary masculinity, as a kind of consolation that fills the void of these suburban ladies who work hard at sewing machines, behind counters or mopping the floor.
Looking at the United States and Brazil, it is impossible not to see similarities.
The result of composting intolerance disguised as a defense of democracy is a constant point of friction. It cannot be called a cause, but it is one of the greatest factors in the radicalization and destruction of civility.
By assuming pathological anti-Trumpism, an important part of American society turned a blind eye to real problems that were not faced in order not to feed the agenda of the deplorables. Taking advantage of this silence, China advanced on the West at unprecedented speed. The Russians turned Washington into a party hall, sometimes watering the Democrats’ tantrums, sometimes placating the republican lack of affection.
In the dance of chaos, Latin America was lost and Europe seems to have been left adrift. Vulnerable from political, cultural and military aspects. It’s that world in rearrangement that we’re seeing emerge.
In Brazil, it was not and is not different. There is an environment of constant conflict. Bolsonarism reacts angrily and resentfully to the environment of constant stoning. It’s an incorrigible relationship. And to trample on the government, exactly what was done in the United States was done in Brazil. And there’s no shortage of people to take advantage of. China took advantage of this. It advanced, under the silence of antibolsonarism, more than ever.
Bolsonaro is walking down a road full of traps. Many of his tiles are very similar to those that were part of Donald Trump’s disaster road. The impression that remains is that Brazil copies the worst and doesn’t do the least to avoid repeating the mistakes of others. Or as Mark Twain wrote: “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes”.
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