In Brazil’s 2022 general election, Jair Bolsonaro lost, but asserted claims that the election was rigged and engineered a failed coup against the Brazilian Government. The same was the subject of a criminal trial, conviction, and a prison sentence for 27 years plus 3 months..
On January 6, 2021, in response to his election loss to Joseph Biden, Donald J Trump had orchestrated a bloody insurrection, or coup, against the Washington Capitol Building, which was participated in by a large horde of insurgents on his factually unsupported claim that the election was “rigged.” Trump was never punished for his outrageously criminal act, the latter, resulting in loss of life, serious injuries to Capitol police, and desecration of the historic institution. Like Bolsonaro, Trump was demonstrably responsible for the attempted (and failed) coup d’état. But, unlike Bolsonaro, he suffered no analogous (or any) punishment. By happenstance, Trump managed to win the succeeding election, and as President, pardoned all of his loyal insurrectionists for their (Trump-inspired) crimes.
Notably, like the United States, Brazil is a Federal Republic with a tri-partite governmental architecture, Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, established under a National Constitution.
Notably, the Trump Administration, which has chosen to be busy utilizing its autocratic wrecking ball against the Nation’s democratic institutions, has indicated its displeasure with the disposition of the criminal case by the Brazilian Courts against Bolsonaro and has stated that the United States would “respond accordingly.” This declaration is shameful and fundamentally perverse.
We were entirely discombobulated by the Alice-in-Wonderland distortion of reason, evident in such an outrageously undemocratic response by the dystopian minds of our current political Administration. Is criminal insurrection against a duly elected, Democratic Republic to be judged an esteemed act? Are arbitrary and completely unsupported claims of “foul,” solely based on subjective disappointment at the ballot box, a rationally acceptable basis for claims of election denial, and worse, for violent insurrection? If such were the case, democracy would be dynamically impossible.
Stated in the most diplomatic and objective lexicon, the type of persona demonstrated by Bolsonaro and Trump is, inarguably, not suitable for leaders of a Democratic Republic. For this reason, we have eternally advocated vetting all aspiring candidates for the American Presidency.
-p.
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