Lula and Trump's conversation closes the coffin of Bolsonarism

The video call between the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, on the morning of October 6, 2025, represents the final nail in the coffin of Bolsonarism. It was Trump who called Lula, a detail that the Brazilian made sure to record. They talked for 30 minutes, accompanied by Fernando Haddad, Mauro Vieira, Celso Amorim, and Geraldo Alckmin. According to Mônica Bergamo's reporting, Trump told Lula that the meeting with him "was the only good thing that happened at the UN." 

The statement reinforces a dynamic that, in reality, is Trump's effort to escape the trap he himself created by listening to a bunch of failures and coup plotters like Eduardo Bolsonaro and Paulo Figueiredo. Now he's negotiating with those who have the resources: President Lula and Brazilian business leaders. Lula was direct: he asked for the end of the 40% surcharge on Brazilian products and the lifting of sanctions against Brazilian authorities. Trump appointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to negotiate. They exchanged personal phone numbers. They agreed to meet soon. Diplomatic checkmate.

While Lula was orchestrating at a high level, the Bolsonaro family watched their irrelevance being decreed in real time. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who presented himself as the only channel to Trump, was run over. His desperate post promising not to let his father be treated as "political carrion to be devoured by vultures" sounds pathetic in light of the facts. Carlos Andreazza, a columnist for UOL, said in his analysis this morning, dissecting the exposed fracture: the Brazilian right is in a civil war. 

On one side, Ciro Nogueira and the pragmatic Centrão are already working with Jair Bolsonaro's ineligibility as a fait accompli, seeking "viable" names like Tarcísio de Freitas or Ratinho Júnior for 2026. On the other, Eduardo and his shock troops reject any alternative that does not represent the ideological purity of the movement.

Eduardo Bolsonaro has put himself in a dead end. By radicalizing his discourse to the point of classifying Brazil as a "judicial dictatorship" and preaching that there will be no elections in 2026, he has made it impossible to support a candidate of the establishment without imploding his own consistency. Any retreat would be seen as betrayal by the hard core he has cultivated. 

Andreazza observes that Eduardo shows no sign of supporting Tarcísio. Self-isolation is inevitable. Fabio Wajngarten, Bolsonaro's former Secretary of Communication, tried to dismiss the Lula-Trump conversation as evidence of a "retrograde, slow, and technically unskilled foreign policy." The criticism rang hollow in the face of the effectiveness of the contact.

Big Brazilian business has already shown that it doesn't need the Bolsonaro family as an intermediary. The Batista brothers, the world's largest protein producers, hired lobbyists linked to the MAGA movement, superior to those Eduardo Bolsonaro claimed to have access to. They spoke directly with Trump. Now Lula is doing the same. 

Bolsonarism has lost its only bargaining chip: access to American power. Brazilian foreign policy, under Lula, used Trump's tariff hikes as an opportunity to diversify markets, open new lines of credit for small and medium-sized exporters, and reposition the country in the international market for goods and services. Meanwhile, Eduardo Bolsonaro retweeted the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who boasted of having impeached all the ministers of his country's Supreme Court to implement his authoritarian policies. The post, also retweeted by Elon Musk, was a response to an American judge who blocked Trump from sending military troops to Portland. Grotesque.

Polarization has its positive side: it provides transparency about which side each person is on. Let's look at the case of Ciro Gomes, for example, who is now trying to rebuild his political career through an alliance with Bolsonaro's supporters in Ceará. When he left the 2022 election with less than 3% of the vote, he said he would no longer be a candidate. His supporters understood that he would have more freedom to participate in political debates without the constraints of an electoral process. His silence on the major political issues of our time has only one explanation: he doesn't want to burn bridges with Bolsonaro's supporters. 

No comment on Trump's attacks on Brazil, not a word about the former president's trial in the Supreme Court. Nor does he denounce the genocide in Gaza, a moral obligation of all progressive leadership. Ciro has to decide what role he wants in history: to be a minor celebrity of the far right, with little videos shared by Bolsonaro, or a political leader with a positive role in defending our democracy. If he chose the second path, he would have, like Lula, Gustavo Petro, and others, denounced this humanitarian tragedy in Palestine. 

Lula has done this several times, including at the UN, even paying the price for going against the Zionist lobby. The only message coming out of Ciro's mouth for a long time has been to attack Lula. This was the moment for any democratic leader to take a stand in favor of Brazilian sovereignty, against coups and fascism, which are real dangers. Ciro's argument that the former president did not represent a danger to democracy has proven dangerously wrong. The trial, conducted transparently and publicly, offered Brazil and the world an immense amount of documents, evidence, testimonies, and confessions that leave no doubt about his responsibility for the crimes he is accused of, proving that he has always worked to undermine institutions. Ciro is seeking Bolsonaro's votes for an unviable candidacy for governor of Ceará, where Elmano de Freitas has a 56% approval rating.

The debate between Deltan Dallagnol and Marco Antonio Villa on Jovem Pan this past weekend also illustrates well how polarization makes things clearer. Dallagnol, who presented himself as a champion in the fight against corruption, is now a vulgar defender of Jair Bolsonaro, embracing all the coup-mongering theories. In the interview, he fails to deny any of the crimes of which the former president is accused. He only seeks to oppose legal technicalities, becoming a shyster at the prison gates. He posted on his social media as if he had "destroyed" Villa, but the impression that I and many others had was exactly the opposite. 

Polarization, which many want to end, is actually the essence of politics. It makes clear who is interested in saving the former president and who is interested in saving democracy. In 2026, this division will be even more evident: on one side, the defenders of democratic institutions; on the other, extremism, political violence, and social regression.

Dallagnol criticizes the Supreme Federal Court (STF), saying it applies Carl Schmitt's theory of militant democracy, when in fact this theory belongs to Karl Loewenstein, a German who fled Nazism and went into exile in the United States. Loewenstein was Schmitt's great intellectual adversary. Schmitt made a harsh, but in a way correct, critique of the vulnerabilities of liberal democracy, arguing that by depending so much on public debate, it would be exposed to media manipulation, the machinations of a financial elite, state bureaucracy, military corporations, and even popular excesses. 

Loewenstein opposed this and presented a solution: democratic regimes should be militant, in the sense of assertively combating those who want to destroy them. This is a thesis that is currently gaining traction in Brazil. In the United States, the democratic regime is learning the hard way that, if it wants to survive, its institutions will also have to roll up their sleeves and fight. Several American democratic sectors have already fallen under Trump's authoritarian boot. Now they will need a firm judiciary, as the Brazilian judiciary was in confronting Bolsonaro's authoritarianism.

With the opposition cannibalizing itself and held hostage by extremist, anti-patriotic, and subversive sectors, the moderate camp ends up being attracted to Lula, seen as a safe haven of common sense, moderation, and respect for institutions. The decision of ministers Celso Sabino (Tourism, União Brasil) and André Fufuca (Sports, PP) to remain in the government, even against the wishes of their parties and under threat of expulsion, is further proof of this positive moment for the administration and that in 2026 Lula will be able to attract important sectors of the political center. 

Various sectors of this political spectrum, which were so important in 2022, are once again drawing closer to Lula with even stronger reasons than in the last presidential election. If before the democratic question was fundamental in the political debate, this time even more powerful factors are added: national sovereignty, the independence of institutions, the pride and dignity of Brazil. Lula's diplomatic checkmate in the United States sealed the political fate of the Brazilian far-right, whose only chance would be to reinvent itself in the center and distance itself from ideological extremism. But this does not seem viable in the current circumstances, as Bolsonarism has a radicalized electoral base. It is in a dead end: if it loses this electorate, it cannot elect deputies and senators; if it maintains its exaggerated radicalism, it cannot build a campaign that is inclusive enough to confront Lula. As Bolsonaro himself would say: "It's over, damn it!"