Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Looks to Trump and the U.S. to Avoid Prison

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 J. 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 on 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.”

But reality has a way of spoiling plans.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has confiscated Mr. Bolsonaro’s passport as part of an investigation into whether he tried to stage a coup after losing re-election in 2022. To attend Monday’s inauguration, Mr. Bolsonaro had to request permission from a Supreme Court justice who is also his political nemesis.

On Thursday, that justice rejected his request. Mr. Bolsonaro will watch from home.

That likely split screen — Mr. Trump returning to the world’s most powerful job while Mr. 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, Mr. Trump will head to the White House — and Mr. Bolsonaro could be headed to prison.

Three separate criminal investigations are closing in on Mr. Bolsonaro, and there are widespread expectations in Brazil — including from Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. Bolsonaro new hope. Mr. 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, Mr. Bolsonaro has accused a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, of censoring conservative voices and politically persecuting him. Justice 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 Mr. Musk last year, resulting in the judge’s ban on Mr. Musk’s social network, X, in Brazil. Mr. Musk eventually backed down. But the dispute drew global attention to Mr. Bolsonaro’s complaints about Brazil’s Supreme Court.

So Mr. Bolsonaro said he was delighted last week when Mr. Zuckerberg said his company would “work with President Trump to push back against” foreign governments that want to “censor more.” One of his main examples were “secret courts” in Latin America “that can order companies to quietly take things down.”

Brazilian officials took that as a shot across the bow. The next day, Justice Moraes warned that social networks could only operate in Brazil if they follow Brazilian law, “regardless of the bravado of big tech executives.”

Mr. Bolsonaro had a different view. “I’m liking Zuckerberg,” he said. “Welcome to the world of good people, of freedom.”

How exactly will Mr. Trump and the tech executives affect his many legal and political challenges? Mr. Bolsonaro was vague. “I’m not going to try to give Trump any tips, ever,” he said. “But I hope his politics really spill over into Brazil.”

Elizabeth Bagley, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Brazil, said Mr. Bolsonaro’s wish that the United States could come to his rescue is far-fetched. The U.S. government does not interfere with another country’s judicial process, she said.

Mr. Bolsonaro has bigger problems than censorship. Over the past year, Brazil’s federal police has formally accused him of crimes in three separate cases.

In one, the police said Mr. Bolsonaro took money from the sale of jewelry he received as state gifts, including a diamond Rolex watch from the Saudis that his aide later sold at a Pennsylvania mall. Mr. Bolsonaro blamed the situation on unclear rules around who owned such gifts.

In a second, the police said he participated in a plot to falsify his Covid-19 vaccination records so he could travel to the United States. Mr. Bolsonaro said he did not receive the vaccine, but denied knowing of efforts to fake his records.

And in the most grave accusation, the police said Mr. Bolsonaro “planned, acted in, and had direct and effective control over” a conspiracy to carry out a coup.

The federal police recently released two reports, totaling 1,105 pages, that detailed its accusations, including that he personally edited a decree for a national state of emergency designed to prevent the election’s winner, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office.

Mr. Bolsonaro abandoned the plan after he pitched three leaders of Brazil’s military and two refused to take part, the police said.

In the interview, Mr. Bolsonaro vehemently denied any coup plot — he handed over power after all, he said — but he did admit having discussed the decree. “I won’t deny it to you,” he said. “But in the second conversation it was given up.”

He said he considered a state of emergency because he believed the election had been stolen, but Justice Moraes had blocked his party’s request to overturn the results. Then his team realized Congress would have to approve the measure, too. “Forget it,” he said. “We lost.”

Yet the police said there was a far darker plan at the center of the conspiracy: assassinating Mr. Lula, his running mate and Justice Moraes. The police have arrested five men whom they accuse of planning to carry out the assassinations, four of them from an elite Brazilian military unit.

The men, the police said, deployed to Justice Moraes’s neighborhood several weeks before Mr. Lula’s inauguration. They were prepared to kidnap the judge but abandoned the plot after Mr. Bolsonaro did not declare the state of emergency, the police said.

The police said Mr. Bolsonaro was aware of the plan. The closest link the police disclosed was that the plan had been printed at the presidential offices and later taken to the presidential residence.

Mr. Bolsonaro denied he knew anything about such a plot. “Whoever made this possible plan should respond,” he said. “On my part, there was no attempt to execute three authorities.”

He then downplayed the accusations. “Even so, I think it was just another fantasy — bravado. Nothing. This plan is unfeasible. Impossible,” he said. He admitted he knew the accused leader of the plot. “Everyone is responsible for their actions,” he said. “Although, as far as I know, he did not take any action.”

Brazil’s attorney general is weighing whether to indict the former president, which would likely lead to a high-profile trial this year and a potential prison sentence.

While maintaining his innocence, Mr. Bolsonaro admitted he worried about his freedom because Justice Moraes could help convict him. “I’m not worried about being judged,” he said. “My worry is who will judge me.” After police confiscated his passport last year, he slept for two nights at the Hungarian embassy in an apparent bid for asylum.

Brazil’s courts have already taken action. Six months after he left office, Brazil’s electoral court, led by Justice Moraes, barred Mr. Bolsonaro from office until 2030 because of his attacks on Brazil’s voting systems.

Mr. Bolsonaro called the ruling “a rape of democracy” and said he was trying to find a way to run in next year’s presidential election. Two Supreme Court justices he nominated will lead the electoral court before the election, he said. Those judges have told him, he said, “that my ineligibility is absurd.”

Polls show Mr. Bolsonaro remains by far Brazil’s most popular conservative candidate, but many on the right are seeking new options. Some have speculated about his sons: One, Flávio, 43, is an experienced senator, while another, Eduardo, 40, is a congressman who speaks English and has built close ties to the MAGA movement.

But Mr. Bolsonaro is not yet ready to hand over the keys to his movement. He said he would only support his sons staying in Congress for now. “For you to be president here and do the right thing, you have to have a certain amount of experience,” he said, as another son, Carlos, 42, looked on with a blank expression.

Should Mr. Bolsonaro stage a political comeback, he said he would focus his administration on deepening ties with the United States and moving away from China.

But first, he wished he could just go to Washington this weekend. “I ask God for the chance to shake his hand,” Mr. Bolsonaro said of Mr. Trump. “I don’t even need a photo, just to shake his hand.”