Each morning, Edite Costa steps out of her bungalow on Brasília’s sun-baked savannah, stands beneath a mango tree and lifts her hands to the sky in prayer. “I ask God to work so that not just Trump but all Americans come to help us rip out the evil that has taken hold of the country I love,” said the 66-year-old Baptist, who is a fervent supporter of Brazil’s far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro could face decades in jail for allegedly leading a murderous conspiracy to seize power after his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat him in the 2022 presidential election. But Costa believes her populist leader can still be saved – if her prayers are answered and Donald Trump intervenes.
“I believe in God and I believe God will touch Donald Trump’s heart and that he will help us,” Costa proclaimed as she stood in her garden clutching the American flag she waves at pro-Bolsonaro rallies. “I’m convinced God has chosen him as a liberator,” she says of the US president. “And I believe God will empower him – and all Americans – so they come to love and liberate my land.”
Costa is far from the only Bolsonarista pinning her hopes on a Trumpian intercession as the end of Bolsonaro’s trial nears. In the coming weeks, Brazil’s supreme court is widely expected to find Bolsonaro guilty of masterminding a coup plot, which would leave the 70-year-old looking at up to 43 years behind bars.
Friends and foes of the ex-president, who governed from 2019 to the end of 2022, are convinced the outcome is a foregone conclusion. “We’re almost certain the sentence has already been written [and] Bolsonaro will be jailed,” said Patrícia de Carvalho, 50, a pro-Bolsonaro businesswoman from Brazil’s capital who insists her leader is innocent.
Guilherme Boulos, a leftwing congressman and close Lula ally, also believes Bolsonaro’s conviction and imprisonment is assured. “I’ve read the chief prosecutor’s 300-page report … the evidence is extremely robust,” Boulos said, pointing to a slew of incriminating material unearthed by federal police investigators.
The evidence includes the discovery that an alleged plan to assassinate Lula and Alexandre de Moraes, the supreme court judge presiding over the trial, was printed out in Bolsonaro’s presidential palace. “Any fair trial that considers this evidence will lead to Bolsonaro’s conviction for an attempted coup,” Boulos predicted.
Costa, Carvalho and millions of other devotees now see only one possible lifeline for their movement’s leader: Trump heaping pressure on the supreme court and Lula’s government in an attempt to force judges to absolve him.
In recent weeks the US president has started answering their calls, first by imposing 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports in retaliation against a supposed anti-Bolsonaro “witch-hunt”, then by stripping eight supreme court judges of their US visas, and finally by hitting Moraes with sanctions and accusing him of turning South America’s biggest democracy into “a judicial dictatorship”.
At the centre of Trump’s pressure campaign is Bolsonaro’s third son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a congressman who has close ties to the Maga movement. Eduardo, 41, moved to the US in February claiming he was a victim of political persecution and has busied himself trying to persuade Trump officials to target Brazil.
“[I visit the White House] almost every week,” he told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo this week, admitting he was lobbying the Trump administration to impose further sanctions after his father was placed under house arrest on Monday.
He said he hoped for a reaction from the US. “What they’ll do, I don’t know,” added the hard-right politician, who named some of his US contacts as the Republican congresspeople María Elvira Salazar, Richard McCormick and Chris Smith, and Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon.
With Bolsonaro’s day of judgment expected in September, his disciples are urging Trump’s administration to impose sanctions on other members of the 11-member supreme court in order to secure an acquittal. Last Sunday, Carvalho joined thousands of protesters outside Brasília’s central bank, carrying a banner urging Trump to make Brazil great again. Many marchers carried US flags or wore red Maga caps stamped with Trump’s name. Carvalho voiced confidence that the court would buckle under US pressure and drop the case.
Experts disagree. They believe Trump’s sanctions and tariffs do not have a prayer of swaying the five judges who will decide Bolsonaro’s fate.
What could Trump do to save Bolsonaro’s skin? “Invade Brazil,” quipped Thomas Traumann, a political pundit and the author of a book about his politically divided country called Biography of the Abyss. “There’s no chance at all of it happening.”
Traumann said Trump’s pressure campaign had been Bolsonaro’s “last card” but it had failed, serving only to turn many of Brazil’s conservative elites against the ex-president for putting his own personal interests above those of his country. This week one industry federation warned that Trump’s tariffs could cost Brazil’s economy £3.5bn over the next two years.
Traumann believed the chances of another member of the Bolsonaro clan winning next year’s presidential election and offering their patriarch a get-out-of-jail-free card had also taken a hit.
Boulos also thought Trump’s ploy – which he called “a shameful, arrogant, imperialist affront” – had backfired on Bolsonarismo. “Even people on the right are looking at this and saying this can’t be possible … Brazil isn’t the US’s back yard, it isn’t a little banana republic where he can intervene and do whatever he wants.”
Bolsonaro and his politician sons have long portrayed themselves as flag-waving patriots, encouraging followers to wear Brazil’s yellow-and-green football jersey and adopt the national anthem as their song. “But they have revealed themselves to be traitors to the nation who are being used by Trump to attack Brazilian sovereignty, Brazilian jobs and the Brazilian economy,” Boulos claimed. “If the objective was to save Bolsonaro, they’ve completely shot themselves in the foot.”
Yet the Bolsonaristas have vowed to fight on. This week after Bolsonaro was confined to his mansion, fleets of cars and motorbikes honked their way through the streets of the capital in protest at his treatment. Pro-Bolsonaro congresspeople staged a 30-hour occupation of the lower house to demand an amnesty for the former president and for the rightwing activists who ransacked the same building during their 8 January 2023 rampage through Brasília.
At one street protest, Costa, who admitted climbing on to the roof of congress during those pro-Bolsonaro riots, hoisted her stars-and-stripes flag into an azure sky and begged the US president to act. “Trumpy! Trumpy! Trumpy! Trumpy!” the throng around her chanted joyfully, using the Brazilian pronunciation of his name.
“Trumpy! Come here to Brazil, Trumpy!” Costa bellowed back in English, imploring him to encircle Brazil with US military bases and colonise her homeland. “We love you!”
