Trump and Bolsonaro Put Their Bromance to Its First Test
The Western Hemisphere’s disruptors-in-chief meet in Washington this week. Is a new U.S.-Brazil entente in the offing?
Washington rolls out the welcome wagon.
Photographer: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro doesn’t like his look. That’s a big part of why he’s substituting the ambassadors to Washington and 14 other A-list foreign posts, Brazil’s biggest foreign-service makeover in recent memory. The mission: “Not to present the government and president as if they were racist and homophobic,” Bolsonaro told journalists in Brasilia last week, on the eve of his first bilateral visit to the United States and a meeting with his campaign idol, President Donald Trump.
If there’s one place Bolsonaro doesn’t have to explain himself, it’s in Washington, where civility, institutional backstops and the rules of democratic decorum are being cut down faster than the Amazon. What’s less clear is how the Western Hemisphere’s ranking disruptors-in-chief will manage their announced “new beginning,” and whether Latin America’s economy of record can put the feeling to good use at home and beyond.