What happens in Washington doesn’t always stay in Washington. Donald Trump’s playbook of poisoning the polity with misinformation for years and seeking to discredit electoral results and peaceful transitions of power is being exported and deployed beyond the United States and becoming a transnational threat to democracy.
Mr. Trump’s methods were energetically adopted in Brazil by his authoritarian, right-wing friend Jair Bolsonaro, who pushed misinformation during his presidency, seeded distrust in the electoral system for years and, eventually, tried to discredit the electoral process in Brazil after losing the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month.
For more than 44 hours after his electoral defeat, Mr. Bolsonaro maintained a dangerous silence while his supporters blocked roads and raged against the verdict; some of them even called upon Brazil’s military to intervene.
On Nov. 1, when Mr. Bolsonaro finally spoke, he did not concede. Though he authorized his aides to work with Mr. Lula’s team on the transition of power, Mr. Bolsonaro did try to discredit the democratic process by describing the protests by his supporters as the fruit of “indignation and a sense of injustice” over the electoral process.
Mr. Bolsonaro is supported by influential figures in the American alt-right who were crucial to the Stop the Steal campaign. For the past two years our team at the investigative news outlet Agência Pública followed the connections between Mr. Trump’s important allies and the Bolsonaro family.
The attempts of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters to create uncertainty about Brazil’s future could be the new global norm as would-be autocrats are embracing the Big Lie as a legitimate political strategy.
After the first round of presidential elections in Colombia in May, as Gustavo Petro, a leftist politician, won the largest share of votes, a right-wing former president of Colombia took to social media and tried to discredit the results. A foundation presided over by the leader of a far-right party in Spain followed up by publishing a series of articles suggesting fraud in that round of polls. Mr. Petro won the second round as well and was elected president.
“Bolsonaro can’t concede”, Steve Bannon told the right-wing site Rumble right after the election in Brazil. “This election was stolen in broad daylight … outrageous”, Mr. Bannon wrote on his Gettr account. His claims were baseless. The Organization of American States, the Carter Center and other international observers commended the conduct of the elections in Brazil and singled out the Superior Electoral Court, the body overseeing the electoral process, for praise.
Other outspoken American voices supporting Mr. Bannon’s lies about Brazilian democracy were Matthew Tyrmand, a self-described investigative journalist and board member of Project Veritas, a conservative group known for its deceptive tactics, and Ali Alexander, the leader of the Stop the Steal movement. Mr. Tyrmand repeated the claims of electoral fraud and posted messages supportive of a military intervention in Brazil. Mr. Alexander claimed that President Biden’s team was “stealing” the election in Brazil for Mr. Lula, and called for a “military standby”.
Mr. Alexander and Mr. Bannon tried to create and link imaginary Democratic interference in Brazil to push Republicans to vote in the midterms. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News prime-time host, peddled conspiracy theories on his show and claimed that “millions” of ballots had been thrown out in Brazil — an impossible feat in an electronic voting system.
The Bolsonaro family has spent immense time and effort to build alliances in the United States based on conspiratorial far-right narratives such as the threat of Communism and “cultural Marxism”. Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the former president’s sons, met Mr. Bannon in August 2018, and months afterward he was named the South American representative of The Movement, Mr. Bannon’s platform of rightist political parties that never took off. Since then, the younger Mr. Bolsonaro visited and met with key Trump supporters more than 70 times.
The younger Mr. Bolsonaro founded his own conservative institute that helped organize a Brazilian version of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference. The former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, C.E.O. of Gettr, a far-right social media platform, spoke at this year’s conservative conference in Campinas. He also showed up at a Brazilian independence celebration that turned into a presidential campaign rally for Mr. Bolsonaro in September.
Brazil is not the United States. Some protesters called for the military to stage a coup. Fueled by hate speech, electoral violence was on the rise. At least 15 people were killed during the elections, according to estimates by Agência Pública.
Mr. Bolsonaro used his presidential powers to subvert democracy in ways that would be unacceptable in America. At his request, the army was set to make a “parallel vote count”. His allies in Congress changed the country’s expenditure cap to raise the social stipend for the poor just before the vote. On the day of the election, the highway police, run by a Bolsonaro ally, stopped hundreds of buses carrying voters mostly in Mr. Lula’s strongholds, defying a Supreme Court order.
Four days after the election, crowds of Bolsonaro supporters gathered in front of military premises in various cities and called for military “intervention”. Inflamed by misinformation that the elections were stolen, Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters are a political force that could cause enormous harm until Jan. 1, 2023, when Mr. Lula takes office.
And of course, the Breitbart website proceeded to describe extremists calling for a military coup as peaceful protesters who want “a constitutional federal intervention” to keep Mr. Lula from “taking over”. And an Argentine website, La Derecha Diario, whose owner met with the younger Mr. Bolsonaro, spread false claims about statistical analysis supposedly proving “fraud” in Brazil’s vote count — the lie was debunked. Similar unsubstantiated theories were spread by the American alt-right media during and after the elections.
Campaigns against democratic elections seed mistrust in democracy. American alt-right figures seeking to discredit the democratic process in Brazil — and potentially other countries in the future — evade moderation policies that social media platforms have in place for a country’s election. Their presence in America also makes it harder for local law enforcement to act against them.
In September, I spoke with Representative Jamie Raskin, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, and he understood there is a global dimension to the threat to American democracy. “The committee is trying to take full measure of the magnitude of the threats that are bearing down on American democracy”, Mr. Raskin said. “And there is a global dimension to this threat”.
It is time for other parliaments in the Americas to step in. A continental commission to fight misinformation-fueled attacks on democracy could share information, act across borders and languages, monitor culprits and influence social media platforms to address the crisis. And President Biden and Mr. Lula need to coordinate an approach to this threat that continues to hover.
Natalia Viana is a 2022 Nieman fellow at Harvard and an executive director of the nonprofit investigative site Agência Pública. She is the author of five books about Brazilian politics and society.