In an eerily similar insurrection on Jan. 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s capital. Brasilia and its government buildings mirrored the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier in 2021. Both extremist leaders spread baseless accusations of election fraud, with supporters demanding militant intervention.
However, unlike the U.S., which has arguably never experienced authoritarianism since its inception, memories from Brazil’s traumatic 1964-1985 military dictatorship prepared its institutions to enact safeguards to defend the country from authoritarianism.
While President Donald Trump was initially impeached by the House of Representatives in 2019, he was eventually acquitted by the Senate as the vote fell short by 10 votes, highlighting the partisan divide that delayed accountability for Trump’s complicity in the Capitol’s insurrection.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s institutions went on the offensive. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes led formal investigations, arresting over 2,000 rioters and unraveling Bolsonaro’s coup plot, which included plans by allied military officers to assassinate president‑elect Lula da Silva, his vice president‑elect Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as part of an effort to overturn the 2022 election.
In a consequential 2025 trial, Brazil’s top federal court convicted Bolsonaro in a four-to-one vote, sentencing him to 27 years for plotting a coup. This level of accountability from Brazil’s institutions sharply contrasts with how the U.S. handled its insurrection, where immunity rulings have delayed prosecutions.
In Brazil, the sheer number of viable parties in Congress means no president can govern alone, so leaders must build broad coalitions that span multiple ideological camps. This coalition-building incentivizes presidents to negotiate and share power with rival parties, which defends core democracy even when leaders like Bolsonaro try to subvert it.
By contrast, the United States’ entrenched two‑party system channels almost all political conflict into a binary partisan struggle, making it easier for one party to align tightly behind a norm‑breaking leader and harder to form ad hoc, cross‑party coalitions to contain the erosion of democracy.
Ultimately, President Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 underscores how vulnerable the United States remains to the dangers posed by unchecked executive power. By contrast, Brazil’s response to its own democratic crisis demonstrates how a multiparty system and a decisive judiciary can act swiftly to hold leaders accountable, deter future attempts at democratic backsliding and clearly signal that efforts to subvert elections will not be tolerated.
While U.S. courts have prosecuted many of the individuals involved in the Jan. 6 attack, their cautious, incremental approach toward Trump himself — shaped by concerns over politicization, free speech and separation of powers — has not produced the same kind of clear institutional barrier to his political comeback.
This gap does not necessarily mean that the U.S. judiciary is uniformly partisan. Still, it reveals structural and political constraints that, in practice, create a more fertile environment for aspiring authoritarians than Brazil does and has primed itself against.
Legislative and electoral changes need to be made to dilute partisanship in the U.S., modelling after Brazil’s institutional checks and balances. What was once a bold plan by Bolsonaro to stay in power became a prison sentence. If U.S. institutions can’t formally punish authoritarianism, this will be a dangerous sign for what’s to come.
