Jair Bolsonaro - The Fall of the “Trump of the Tropics”

The courtroom in Brasília was silent enough to hear the hum of the air conditioning when Justice Cármen Lúcia leaned forward to speak. The slight woman with silver hair and a voice trained in restraint knew her words would tip the scales. For hours, Brazil’s highest judges had delivered long, winding arguments, each probing the evidence. Four days earlier, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, once president, once the self-styled savior of the right, had listened through his lawyers as the case against him unfolded. Now, on September 11 2025, the verdict was inevitable. The only question was how history would remember it.

When Lúcia’s calm voice broke the silence, the words struck with finality. She compared the attempted coup to a virus, a sickness that if ignored could rot a nation’s core. She cast her vote for conviction. With it, Brazil’s fragile democracy, scarred by two decades of military rule, chose to name its illness out loud.

Bolsonaro, seventy years old and under house arrest in Brasília, was not there to hear it. He sat miles away in his residence, still guarded by judicial police, still watched by neighbors who had grown used to seeing the man who once commanded the nation pacing on his balcony. His health had faltered in recent years — lingering pain from the knife attack during his 2018 campaign, bouts of hiccups that sometimes left him sleepless, and sudden nausea that came without warning. Yet his eyes remained sharp when he looked into cameras, accusing judges of betrayal. Even more when comparing himself to Donald Trump, insisting that he was the victim of a witch hunt.

But the court did not bend. Four of five justices declared him guilty of conspiring to overthrow the state. Only Luiz Fux, after eleven hours of lonely argument, voted to acquit.

The sentence came down in crisp language: twenty-seven years and three months in prison, plus disqualification from office until 2060. For Bolsonaro, it was as good as exile from public life. For Brazil, it was the first time a president had been condemned not only for corruption or abuse of office but for trying to end democracy itself.

The roots of the conspiracy stretched back long before the narrow October 2022 election that returned Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to power. Bolsonaro, a former army captain, had built his presidency on suspicion of Brazil’s institutions. Electronic voting machines were his favorite target. He told crowds they could not be trusted, that only fraud could explain his defeat, and that the system was rigged against him.

Investigators later uncovered drafts of decrees prepared inside the presidential palace. One document gave him emergency powers to seize control of the Superior Electoral Court. Another, more sinister, outlined plans to eliminate Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the man who would later preside over his trial.

He had courted the military too, whispering of “other possibilities within the constitution,” trying to stir commanders to act. The chiefs of the army and air force resisted the Commander-in-Chief, holding the line for democracy. Without their support, the plan faltered.

Then came January 8, 2023. A week after Lula’s inauguration, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters, draped in green and yellow, surged into Brasília. They smashed windows of the presidential palace. Into Congress they tore and then went ahead to ransack the Supreme Court itself. It was a mirror image of Washington’s January 6th, but this time the echo rang in Portuguese. Bolsonaro watched from afar, already in Florida, silent as the chaos he had seeded bloomed into violence. Again, a mirror image of Washington’s January 6th. More than 1,500 people were arrested. Again, a mirror image to what?

Justice Alexandre de Moraes, often vilified by Bolsonaro, later said Brazil had nearly descended into authoritarian darkness that day. “We are slowly forgetting that Brazil almost returned to its 20-year dictatorship because a criminal organisation doesn’t know how to lose elections,” he told the court.

By the time the trial opened in June 2025, Brasília had become a city under siege. Judicial police ringed the Supreme Court, wary of protests. Supporters of the former president carried placards naming de Moraes a tyrant. Opponents carried pictures of the dictatorship’s victims, warning against amnesia.

Inside, the proceedings were deliberate. Justice Flávio Dino cited evidence of a “digital militia” that spread lies about electoral fraud. Moraes himself showed a video of Bolsonaro sneering into a camera: “Step down, Alexandre de Moraes. Stop being a scoundrel!” He told the nation this was not rhetoric but a coded threat.

Bolsonaro’s lawyers countered with defiance. “There is not a single piece of evidence,” said Celso Vilardi, his lead counsel, claiming the trial had been rushed. They insisted their client never pressed a coup into action, that he was guilty of words, not deeds. But the panel was unmoved.

The lone dissenting justice, Luiz Fux, spoke for over twelve hours. He argued the case belonged not in the Supreme Court but in lower courts since Bolsonaro was no longer in office. He called the accusations ungrounded. His words may yet become ammunition for an appeal, but on that September day, they were drowned by the majority.

No foreign figure loomed larger in the trial than Donald Trump. From Washington, the twice-impeached American president called the conviction “very bad” and compared it to his own tribulations. Earlier that year, Trump had already imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian imports and slapped sanctions on Justice de Moraes.

The message was unmistakable: defend Bolsonaro, punish Brazil. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further, calling the court’s decision “unjust” and threatening retaliation. Brazil’s foreign ministry responded with unusual steel, posting on X that its democracy “will not be intimidated.”

Yet for many Brazilians, Trump’s voice echoed their own doubts. Polls showed a nation divided nearly evenly: a majority supported prosecution, but a stubborn minority viewed the trial as persecution. For them, Bolsonaro was still the captain who spoke their anger aloud, the man who promised to sweep away elites and bring back order.

Bolsonaro’s decline has been slow, almost cruel. Once hailed as the “Trump of the Tropics,” he swept to power in 2018 after a knife nearly killed him on the campaign trail. That near-death turned him into a martyr, carried by a wave of evangelical support, rural voters, populist voices, and those nostalgic for the military era.

His presidency was turbulent. He dismantled environmental protections, oversaw mass deforestation in the Amazon, mocked masks during the COVID-19 pandemic even as Brazil’s death toll climbed above 700,000, and clashed with courts at every turn. Yet his charisma held a base together.

Now, stripped of power, barred from running until he would be 105 years old, his life has narrowed. He spends his days under house arrest, visited by lawyers and loyalists, railing at cameras. His son Eduardo campaigns abroad, lobbying in Washington. His wife, Michelle, posts Bible verses online. Neighbors see him at the balcony, hunched, sometimes shouting at reporters who gather at the gates.

The man who once stood at the heart of national life is now a relic in real time, fading before the country that once embraced him.

Bolsonaro’s fate will not end Brazil’s divisions. Already, right-wing legislators speak of amnesty. Some whisper of pardons if their side retakes power in 2026. Historians warn that democracies often punish coup plotters in the moment only to forgive them later.

But for now, Brazil has made a choice. It has declared that its democracy is not to be toyed with. The image of Supreme Court justices, some once threatened with assassination, calmly casting votes to condemn a former president, has burned itself into the country’s memory.

Justice Lúcia’s words linger: “There was no immunity to authoritarianism.” She spoke with the weight of someone who remembered the dictatorship, who knew what it meant to wake each day uncertain if the rule of law still lived.

For Bolsonaro, the years ahead may be spent in cells, in hospitals, or even in limbo as appeals wind through the courts. For Brazil, the story is larger. A country that has endured coups and corruption, for the first time, placed its highest leader on trial for trying to destroy democracy and held him accountable.

The trial was not only about one man. It was about whether Brazil would allow the ghosts of its past to rise again. For now, at least, the answer is no.