'A family of traitors': Trump's Brazil tariffs ultimatum backfires on Bolsonaro [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Beneath the museum’s brutalist hulk, Marques spotted a cardboard effigy of the US president and took a picture with her phone before the Trump dummy was set on fire. “Laranjão safado,” which translates as big orange dirtbag, she wrote under her photo on Instagram. Nearby, demonstrators hoisted a red banner into the air which read: “Nice try Trump. But we’re not afraid.”
The rally was a response to Trump’s decision last week to launch a politically motivated trade war against South America’s biggest economy in an attempt to help his rightwing ally, the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, avoid jail.
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But a week after Trump’s tariff announcement, the ploy seems to be backfiring badly. The move has reinvigorated Bolsonaro’s leftwing rivals, given Lula a bounce in the polls and prompted a wave of public anger, largely focused on the Bolsonaro clan who have spent years portraying themselves as flag-loving nationalists.
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But Cantanhêde believed Trump’s “megalomaniac” move had boomeranged, handing Lula a golden opportunity to recover slumping public support by posing as a nationalist defender of Brazilian coffee producers, orange growers, cattle ranchers and plane manufacturers in the face of Bolsonaro’s anti-patriotic and self-serving sellout to Trump.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/16/trump-brazil-tariffs-ultimatum-backfires-bolsonaro-lula
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