International Panorama: Donald Trump in Brazil, a campaign manager in trouble

That São Paulo newspaper, a regular critic of Lula’s management, commented in an article with a sharp title that with these movements Donald Trump “he is not proving to be a good campaign manager”. He was alluding to the conservative candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, publicly supported by the White House, but who in polls usually appears below and sometimes very far from the president. This behavior worsens every time the North American government displays an operation in support of the clan of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president imprisoned for a coup, or multiplies sanctions against the country. For these reasons, it is not surprising that Lula’s government prefers to delay resolving the dispute. They are vitamins for the official campaign.

The inventory of these measures is abundant. Before the ambassador’s case, The US applied 25% tariffs to Brazil arguing that their practices harmed the North American economy. To this he added the 12.5% that he distributed in dozens of countries per “forced labor”. On the same dates, he announced the sending of two senior officials from Rubio’s Foreign Ministry to inspect and place the electronic voting systems under suspicion.

This same official attacked the PIX instant payment system of the Brazilian Central Bank that successfully competes with North American plastics and declared “terrorists” to the Brazilian drug mafia gangs, elevating them to a matter of US national security. An extraordinary barrage that is crowned with the decision to appoint an ally of Rubio, the Cuban-American Daniel Pérez, as ambassador and before the October elections.

Behind this strategy There seems to be a wrong characterization of the Brazilian scenario and idiosyncrasy.. Even distant from the legitimate criticisms that can be attributed to Da Silva’s government, but that do not appear in the North American conversation. For example, the steep increase in the fiscal red from 1.43% to 6.7% between June 2022 and June 2026, a debt that will exceed 100% of GDP by the end of the decade and a suffocating bureaucracy in the public service that conspires against the country’s competitiveness.

All this in addition to the very high interest rates of 14%, ten percent above annual inflation, — which the Central Bank justifies for that expense — causes, according to the IMF, that investors prefer to deposit money in accounts rather than in productive activities. But the US campaign in favor of Bolsonaro It only stops at describing the Brazilian government as an enemy of the United States and even the West. due to its non-aligned position and the significant commercial relationship with China.

Possibly the Republican leader does not go with those numbers because Trump also inflates the reds of his country and the public debt. But the results of the strategy are clear. A Meio/Ideia survey published last Wednesday, after the scandal of the aggressive speech of Javier Milei, a Trump ally, in Bolsonaro’s proclamation, reveals that 44.9% affirm that US support does not increase the probability of voting for the conservative leader. Only 20%, less than half, think otherwise.

“As has happened in other countries, such as Canada, Mexico, France and Hungary, the intervention of US President Donald Trump in the elections has a boomerang effect on candidates. “We are already seeing how Brazilian voters resist these actions,” says Cila Schulman, director of Ideia. According to her, this position of the electorate is aligned with the discourse of defense of sovereignty, a flag that Lula ended up flying successfully.

Things are as they are to the point that the governor of São Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas, a former ally of Jair Bolsonaro, but much more pragmatic and a central figure of the real Brazilian right, just announced that he would no longer wear a Donald Trump cap with the acronym MAGA, the magnate’s fundamentalist internal line in the Republican Party. The governor, who is seeking re-election and is being challenged by Lula’s former Finance Minister, Fernando Haddad, wore one of those caps in January 2025 and wrote the phrase “Great day! Let’s make America great again!””. But now, after the increase in tariffs by the US government against his country, he has declared that he would not do it again. Signs.

From a more geopolitical level, interesting contradictions are noted in this entire event. The United States, which bears such hostility towards the main capitalist economy in South America and the second in the hemisphere, is going through an extraordinary existential crisis. A perfect storm clouds the future of the North American governmentand Trump’s management and future capabilities. It is, by the way, a circumstance that China closely observes, which paradoxically is the empire whose presence in the region is the one that Washington intends to eliminate or at least grind away. Objectives that exceed this government and already constitute a State policy.

But the problem is in the current scenario and management capabilities. The war launched six months ago against Iran has become a dead end due to the government’s strategic and skill failures. It seems clear that Trump has decided to withdraw from the conflict without seriously discussing the conditions that the regime has decided will prevail going forward, what they define as the new geopolitical realities of the region. That is control of the Strait of Hormuz that will be shared with Oman and there will be payments to transit it. The US is unable to reverse this outcome, nor was it able to defend its Arab allies in the region, the target of the effective missiles of the Persian dictatorship.

That setback (the magnate’s critics call it capitulation) It is based on the urgency of alleviating the energy crisis created by the war that hits Trump’s popularity at historically low levels and the Republican Party with a view to the November legislative elections. The request with a pleading tone from the upright Trumpist leader in the Lower House, Mike Johnson, still resonates, demanding Trump: “We have to finish this” marking a contrast with officials who propose prolonging the bombings.

The domestic economic hit adds to the domestic effect of the tariffs, a tax on the wallets of voting consumers. It’s one of the reasons there is pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise rates. She’s not the only one. Japan, the main holder of North American Treasury bonds, that is, the largest creditor, has its currency collapsing at levels unprecedented in more than 40 years due, among other factors, to the fact that it depends almost entirely on imported gas and oil, made more expensive by the war.

Washington came to the aid of Tokyo to urgently support the currency for a simple reason. If the Bank of Japan (BOJ) raises rates, which is already happening, puts downward pressure on the performance of North American public papers because investors liquidate them to return to the Tokyo market. To avoid this, Treasury bonds must reward greater profits, that is, higher rates that make the debt of the power more expensive and water the entire economy, including mortgages, upwards.

According to analysts the bad newsis that there is no clarity regarding whether the yen can recover; rather the opposite. It is the third factor in the storm that weakens this White House, determined however to standardize Latin America, which can contribute little, with or without China, in the perspective of these problems.