Mac Margolis, Columnist

Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is Trump’s Biggest Orphan

Politics by tantrum may ring hollow absent the hemisphere’s alpha provocateur.

November 9, 2020 at 12:26 PM UTC

Corrected

November 9, 2020 at 2:45 PM UTC

Mac Margolis is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

And then there was one.
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America

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Donald Trump may have lost the U.S. election, but a squadron of populists and authoritarians who found inspiration in his pugnacity still has his back. Perhaps none so enthusiastically as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who as of Monday morning had yet to join the world leaders congratulating president-elect Joe Biden.

From his debut visit to the White House in early 2019 — “I love you,” he gushed — to his devotional Facebook live in which he filmed himself watching Trump deliver a speech, Bolsonaro never wavered.