Lessons in Autocracy: How Bolsonaro and Trump Weaponized Nostalgia Against Democracy

As Jair Bolsonaro, the former President of Brazil, is led into custody in the nation’s capital, his supporters flood the streets waving flags and sharing WhatsApp memes, insisting the arrest is proof of a vast conspiracy and leftist corruption. Online, calls for military intervention surge, and from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump rushes to Bolsonaro’s defence, a man often labelled “The Trump of the Tropics”, denouncing the charges as a “witch-hunt” and warning that democracy is under attack. For many Americans, this looks unsettlingly familiar, echoing the narrative Trump used during his own trials. Political distrust has become contagious, spreading across borders through the same authoritarian playbook: nostalgic mythmaking, provocative rhetoric, digital misinformation, and the belief that losing an election must mean the system is broken. 

Throughout his career, Bolsonaro, a former Army captain, has invoked nostalgia and wistful idealism about the past to legitimize skepticism towards democratic institutions. By referencing a supposedly more stable and unified era, he suggests that contemporary democracy has failed to deliver order, morality, and national pride. Bolsonaro selectively frames collective memories of the military dictatorship as moments of patriotic resistance. Through memory politics—the strategic use of historical narratives to shape national identity and legitimize power—he blurs the line between a critique of democracy and a yearning for control. By contrasting the disciplined past with the chaotic present, a strongman becomes a solution rather than a threat. 

Trump tells a version of the same story. His painted narrative of a “lost America” that must be made “great again,” finds its Brazilian echo in “Brasil acima de tudo” (Brazil above all else). Both slogans use patriotism to shift loyalty towards a leader’s vision rather than to institutions, framing national unity as something that comes from following a single direction. 

These appeals to “order” and “national pride” resonate especially in Brazil, where authoritarian rule is still barely in the rearview, and where many citizens feel disillusioned by decades of political scandal and economic instability. Bolsonaro seized on the fallout of former President Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment, which exposed deep public distrust in institutional fiscal mismanagement. He linked this controversy, along with public anger over the Lava Jato corruption scandal, as justification that the democratic system was broken and needed to be rebuilt. Trump relied on the same formula, painting Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and later, Joe Biden, as symbols of a corrupt establishment conspiring against “the people.” 

This type of language and strategy is frequent in populist rhetoric. Like Trump, Bolsonaro taps into collective frustration and cultivates a sense of betrayal, painting himself as the only truth-teller fighting an entrenched and corrupt elite. Both leaders rely on national mythmaking, rewriting the past to justify distrust in the present. Fake news spread online all supports a greater narrative: erode confidence in the democratic system. By stirring up fear about electronic voting, “deep state” judges, and the mainstream media, such politicians have managed to plant real doubt in people’s minds. 

Bolsonaro has gone even further in this playbook, leaning heavily on WhatsApp and Telegram to supercharge misinformation and conspiracy theories. In these closed, encrypted networks, fake news spreads more quickly, and many consume parallel truths from their friends and family. Ads were spread pushing for violent coups and discrediting the electoral process. These platforms struggled to contain misinformation and detect harm, even after the American case. This new age creates a new battleground for dictatorships—manufacturing chaos, flooding the system, and weakening trust. By delegitimizing the referees before the game, legal losses can’t be legitimate. 

After seeding doubt, the playbook moves to its next phase: converting distrust into action. In the United States, this materialized as the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, fueled by claims of a “stolen” election. In Brazil, almost exactly two years later, the same election-fraud script fueled the January 8, 2023, attack in Brasília. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters overran multiple branches of government at once—Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace—in an intense and more coordinated attack. Strongman language, a refusal to promptly concede, and mass praise for torture and pro-barracks demonstrations signal to supporters that violence is acceptable, even without issuing explicit orders. As Reuters reported, many of those protesting on January 8 openly admitted that they believed creating chaos would force the military to intervene and supposedly restore order. 

On one hand, Brazil’s recent history has made its system more vigilant, but also more vulnerable. With a dictatorship still in living memory, Brazil’s institutions have developed fast immune responses that the US lacks. The Electoral Court (TSE) and Supreme Court (STF) have ordered platforms to remove election falsehoods in real time and widened their enforcement toolkit during tense votes. In 2022, Justice Alexandre de Moraes briefly suspended Telegram nationwide until the company agreed to comply with judicial orders to freeze accounts disseminating disinformation. The same posture shaped Brazil’s head-to-head with Elon Musk’s X in 2024, when a judge ordered the platform to be blocked until it appointed a legal representative and obeyed Brazilian rulings on disinformation. 

However, these countermeasures don’t directly translate to reassurance. Underlying distrust remains, even after Bolsonaro left office in 2024. Brazil’s recent history has only reinforced this perception. From the mensalão vote-buying scandal in the 2000s to the massive Lava Jato corruption probe, successive governments have been tainted by allegations of graft and collusion between politicians and business elites. For a large segment of the population, current President Lula da Silva is a reminder of civil distrust: corruption scandals, backroom politics, and an untouchable political elite. Even after Lula’s corruption convictions were annulled, doubts lingered about judicial bias and the persistence of insider politics. The so-called “secret budget,” a scheme allowing legislators to allocate funds with little transparency, deepened the sense that power remains concentrated in the hands of a few. Such scandals have sustained Bolsonaro’s narrative that democracy serves the elite rather than the people, allowing him to take advantage of this emotional uneasiness and resentment. 

Does the memory of the past provide stronger antibodies for resisting democratic backsliding? Brazil’s recent interventions suggest it can; courts and the election authority have shown they will move quickly to contain digital diffusion when it endangers the vote. But those same muscular responses can deepen polarization and feed claims of political overreach. Is memory a safeguard against authoritarianism, or a pathway that leads back to it? Both Brazil and the US are reminders that democratic erosion often begins at home. In Brazil’s case, the authoritarian playbook certainly seems to thrive where memory fails.

Edited by Maisie Minnick

Featured Image: “Encontro com o Senhor Donald Trump, Presidente dos Estados Unidos da América.” Photo by Palácio do Planalto. Licensed by CC by 2.0.