There is nothing new about the United States lecturing other nations on the rule of law. But in the past, such scoldings have been doled out in support of democratic values, rather than in an attempt to subvert them. Last week, Donald Trump flipped the old dynamic on its head: The American president delivered a particularly undiplomatic tongue-lashing to his Brazilian counterpart, Lula da Silva — for obeying the law, respecting a free election, and holding a would-be dictator accountable for his crimes. The facts of the case, and Trump’s threat to punish Brazil with crushing tariffs for the sin of upholding democracy, show how far the US has slipped from the standards it long claimed to champion.
Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro revels in the nickname “Trump of the Tropics,” and in office he shared the authoritarian leanings of his soulmate. When Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, he fraudulently denied the election results and incited his supporters to stage a violent assault on the US Capitol. When Bolsonaro lost his own re-election campaign two years later, he followed his friend’s playbook almost exactly: Just two days after the anniversary of Trump’s January 6 insurrection, Bolsonaro’s partisans stormed the federal government buildings in the capital city of Brasília.
But Brazil’s justice system took its job more seriously than America’s had. Merrick Garland, the timid US Attorney General selected by Trump’s successor Joe Biden, dithered and delayed investigating Trump’s crimes until it was too late for a successful prosecution. Brazil’s justice system, by contrast, snapped speedily into action: In February 2025, it charged the former leader with a variety of coup-related offenses.
On his first day back in office this year, Trump pardoned every one of the nearly 1,600 insurgents who had been convicted (in many cases, who had pleaded guilty) for the January 6 attack. The fact that Brazil was prosecuting Bolsonaro for nearly identical actions has clearly enraged Trump. “This Trial should not be taking place,” he fulminated, in his letter to Bolsonaro’s successor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”
Is Bolsonaro guilty of the crimes alleged? It sure looks that way — but that’s what a trial is meant to determine. Nobody alleges that the Brazilian judicial system isn’t credible: The World Justice Project, for example, gives the nation the exact same rating on its Rule of Law Index that it gives to India. The evidence against Bolsonaro is strong, and he has every opportunity to make his counter-argument in court. That’s how the rule of law works. Well, that’s how it works in nations which respect the law, and for people who aren’t Donald Trump.
Throughout his life, Trump has used his wealth and power to evade legal accountability for alleged crimes ranging from fraud and corruption to sexual abuse and theft of classified documents. When he finally faced trial for his most serious attack on American democracy, he was given the constitutionally-implausible gift of absolute legal immunity — by a Supreme Court majority composed of justices who had either been appointed by him or effectively declared themselves his political partisans. It’s understandable that he’d be surprised at Bolsonaro’s fate: The prospect of misdeeds leading to meaningful punishment is something Trump himself has never had to face.
If the cause of Trump’s wrath is unjust, his tool of vengeance is even worse. He threatened Brazil, in contradiction to US law, with 50 per cent tariffs across the board. US citizens will bear the brunt (a tariff is simply a tax on imports), but Brazilian exporters will suffer too. An American buying a pound of coffee that costs $10 today will pay $15 for it in August; the Brazilian farm producing the coffee might go out of business.
Under the US constitution, only Congress can impose taxes. It has delegated tariff authority to the President for a very specific set of reasons: Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, for example, permits tariffs in response to unfair foreign trade practices; Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 authorises tariffs if imports threaten national security. A president can’t legally impose a tariff just because he wants to.
That’s exactly what Trump has threatened to do. His entire global tariff war — imposing a 10 per cent levy on all imports, with significantly higher tariffs on a country-by-country basis — has an exceptionally flimsy claim on legality. Trump invoked a provision of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, permitting tariffs in response to a formally-declared national emergency. This is, of course, nonsense: The US has no national emergency stemming from any nation’s trading practices — let alone from the trading practices of every nation on earth.
But threatening to slap Brazil with tariffs linked to the Bolsonaro trial goes even further: Here, there isn’t even a pretense of any motivation based on America’s economic interest. In other cases, Trump has made the (absurd) argument that bilateral trade deficits constitute a national emergency — but Brazil is a nation with which the US has a trade surplus, and has had one for 18 years. The rationale here is nothing more than presidential pique. Trump is threatening to use a power he does not legally possess, to inflict harm on both Americans and Brazilians, purely because a democratic nation dares to practise democracy.
For decades, American leaders have spoken eloquently in defense of values such as rule of law. Sometimes the speeches were hypocritical, given the gap between America’s ideals and its real-life practices. But quite often advocating universal values serves a real purpose: Ask a survivor of Apartheid South Africa or Tiananmen Square whether they desired more US moral leadership or less, and you’ll hear few of them arguing for American silence.
In the past, all US presidents did their moral preaching in rhetorical support of democracy and rule of law. We’ve never before had a president actively jawboning foreign leaders against these values. And when Trump carries out his latest tariff threat on August 1, he’ll effectively translate his jawboning into precisely the kind of anti-democratic action he’s trying to force on Brazil: By wielding presidential power with blatant illegality, he’ll go from demanding the law’s debasement to actually causing it.
The writer is is author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras
The American president delivered a particularly undiplomatic tongue-lashing to his Brazilian counterpart, Lula da Silva — for obeying the law, respecting a free election, and holding a would-be dictator accountable for his crimes. 
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