No. of Recommendations: 6
Part 2: "In Peru and South Korea, self-coups happened as a reaction to challenges to the leader’s authority outside of elections: they were desperate attempts to avoid impeachment. Authoritarian leaders take such risks because they have a proprietary notion of power. They don’t recognize boundaries between public and private. For them, having to leave office and endure the shame of impeachment and possible prosecution for any corrupt activities is a situation that warrants exceptional action.
For example, despite South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s claims of an impending threat from Communist North Korea, the only emergency was a personal one: Yoon, whose approval rating was down to just 17%, would have had to step down and face an influence-peddling scandal without the protections of high office. So he declared martial law. Political and judicial elites delivered a rebuke that caused his power grab to fail, and he was impeached and banned from foreign travel.
In Brazil, Trump’s great admirer Jair Bolsonaro staged a version of Jan. 6 on Jan. 8, 2023. Having lost the 2022 presidential election, and plagued by several investigations, he set up camp in Florida to have plausible deniability for his self-coup, while his hard-core supporters camped out near the targeted sites of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace.
The outcome differed because the new Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva took immediate action. This included arresting thousands of rioters, suspending the powerful Brasilia governor Ibaneis Rocha, a Bolsonaro ally with oversight of the police in his area, for 90 days, and investigating those who funded the foot soldiers. Ultimately, Bolsonaro was convicted of spreading election fraud, and banned from running for office until 2030.
All of this throws into relief the lack of a political will among American institutions to hold Trump accountable. Authoritarians view the absence of restraints on them as a sign of weakness. Although the House Jan. 6 Committee cast a wide net and held hearings that engaged the public, delayed action by the Department of Justice and half-hearted investigations into extremism within the military and U.S. security forces made it increasingly clear that Trump would not meet the same fate as his foreign counterparts.
This non-action further emboldened those who wish to facilitate the destruction of democratic ideals of leadership and create a legal context for strongman governance, which is why the far-right operatives on the Supreme Court decided to grant the holder of presidential office immunity from prosecution for “official acts.”
Failing to punish Trump for trying to overthrow the government also accelerated the plans of Project 2025, the Federalist Society, and myriad other partners to transform America into an autocracy and realign the United States with anti-democratic countries abroad. We and our allies will pay the price for this dereliction of democratic duty for years to come.
