What Donald Trump should do now that his Brazilian ally has been defeated

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On Oct. 25, President Donald Trump saw his string of consecutive election victories in Latin America broken. After what looked to be a resounding win for Trump's ally, far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, in the first round of voting for Brazilian president, incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a stunning comeback to win his fourth term in office. Lula, who has been a mainstay of Brazilian politics since the 1980s, won by more than 3 percentage points.

But the drama didn't end there. Bolsonaro suddenly found himself exposed to ongoing criminal investigations that were dogging him throughout the campaign. Rather than fight the charges, he fled to the United States with his family. Trump granted the Bolsonaro family a visa to stay on U.S. soil, and one of Trump's aides reportedly helped charter the jet that took the Brazilian politician to Miami. If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. In January 2023, Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio's father, absconded to Florida after getting bested by Lula months earlier. He later returned, was arrested and eventually convicted for trying to prevent Lula from entering office.

Flávio Bolsonaro's own self-imposed exile comes at a tricky time for relations between the United States and Brazil, the Western Hemisphere's two largest economies. Part of the trouble comes down to personality. Washington and Brasília are led by two men who are strong-headed ideological opposites, have an altogether different conception of what a healthy bilateral relationship looks like and spent the last two years taking shots at the other. That dynamic might get worse before it gets better. When asked what he thought about the Brazilian presidential election, Trump called it "rigged" and "a great embarrassment to the people of Brazil."

Bolsonaro's escape to Miami is not going to help dampen the animosity. Indeed, it may just create more problems.

From the moment Trump was inaugurated for his second term, he viewed Lula's Brazil as an impediment to his regional agenda. That agenda included restricting illegal immigration to the United States to the lowest level possible, embarking on a regionwide military campaign against cartels and drug trafficking networks, minimizing China's power in the Western Hemisphere and building a network of far-right governments throughout Latin America.

Up until Lula's reelection last month, Trump was getting most of what he wanted. His far-right allies, from Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia to Nasry Asfura in Honduras, were gaining political power and proving to be eager partners in Trump's war on drugs. Some, such as Ecuador's Daniel Noboa, even agreed to bring U.S. troops into the country and authorized joint military operations with Washington against traffickers.

But Lula's agenda simply didn't square with any of that. The Brazilian perceived Trump's labeling of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations as a prelude to U.S. military interventionism. He refused to outsource Brazil's foreign policy to the Trump administration. And whereas Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio regarded China as an intrusive non-hemispheric power that needed to be tamed (or, better yet, expelled), Lula saw the Asian economic powerhouse as a key pole in his wider doctrine of multi-alignment, in which Brazil established positive relations with all the world's major powers in order to give itself maximum flexibility.

It didn't take long for Trump and Lula to clash. In the summer of 2025, the Trump administration slapped 50% tariffs on Brazilian products entering the U.S. market, arguing that the measure was an appropriate response to the Brazilian government's unfair trade practices and what it termed "persecution" of Jair Bolsonaro for an attempted coup (many of those tariffs were rescinded by Trump months later after it became clear they were contributing to high grocery prices in the United States). U.S. sanctions were levied on individual Brazilian judges responsible for Bolsonaro's legal case, and their U.S. visas were stripped too.

Later on, as the South American country's presidential campaign began, Trump met with Flávio Bolsonaro and shortly thereafter labeled two of Brazil's largest criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Lula's team branded this specific decision as one more example of U.S. meddling in Brazil's internal affairs and an acceleration of Trump's bid to make Lula's administration look soft on crime, one of the biggest issues on the minds of Brazilian voters.

None of it worked. Lula is now preparing for a fourth term. Jair Bolsonaro is trapped at home, the subject of a 27-year sentence after being convicted on coup charges. And his oldest son is trying to pick up the pieces in Miami.

The question now is whether Trump will continue to sulk about Brazil's election results or try to find a way forward. If he wants to be a statesman, he should opt for the latter. Brazil is too important a country for the United States to alienate, particularly when the country has found a way to neutralize U.S. tariffs by engaging in more business with Beijing.

There are several straightforward but helpful things Trump can do to smooth the waters. None of it will cost the United States anything. First, the Trump administration should issue an official congratulatory message to Lula for his victory and state that while the United States thinks Brazil's election wasn't run smoothly, it will accept the results. Second, the State Department should say that it will reinstate the visa it pulled from Brazil's ambassador in Washington if Brasília allows its own ambassador to start working. Finally, Trump should tell Flávio Bolsonaro that he's welcome in the United States so long as he doesn't use those privileges to undermine U.S. policy in Brazil. Trump should also be prepared to enforce that directive if the Bolsonaros violate it.

The U.S.-Brazil relationship shouldn't be held captive to ego.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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(COMMENT, BELOW)

Daniel DePetris
Chicago Tribune/(TNS)