U.S. must act on the Brazil coupsters among us | Will Bunch Newsletter

Even Barry Sanders in his prime couldn’t spin after taking a rough hit like the PR gurus of the National Football League. The gruesome, nationally televised, near-death experience of Buffalo Bills’ Damar Hamlin was followed by wonderful news about his recovery — but the NFL couldn’t stop there. Hamlin’s saga became a “feel-good story” about the football community — to make sure no one dwelled on the sport’s longer-term health dangers, or whether the league truly supports the men who take these risks. Never stop asking the right questions.

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Jair Bolsonaro was sick to his stomach on Monday — but then so were a lot of us.

Yet somehow it wasn’t Sunday afternoon’s nauseating sight of several thousand of Bolsonaro’s rioting countrymen in the capital, Brasília — storming the seat of government, clashing with cops, and vandalizing the modernist architecture of a UNESCO World Heritage Site — that sent the defeated strongman to a Florida hospital.

The cause wasn’t even Bolsonaro’s virally photographed indulgence, or over-indulgence, in the 11 once-secret herbs and spices at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is apparently where internationally famous losers go in Orlando, as opposed to the Disney World respite of Super Bowl winners. At least not according to the weakened strongman’s family, who claimed his sudden pains and hospitalization were the result of his stabbing in a 2018 assassination attempt.

Fair enough. We wish him a speedy recovery, and we are also grateful that authorities now know the Brazilian’s exact location. That’s because the Biden administration needs to whisk Bolsonaro onto a deportation jet back to his native country — as one part of a bold defense of democracy. In hindsight, Bolsonaro — who never conceded his fall defeat to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and has sent mixed signals to supporters who think the election was stolen (sound familiar?) — never should have been allowed into the United States.

The images from Brasília that lit up social media during what was supposed to be a football Sunday were certainly shocking — not because they felt fresh but because they looked numbingly familiar. The flimsy metal barricades so easy for a riled-up throng to toss around. The seeming indifference of some of the local cops. The smashing of windows to enter the hall where government meets, followed by the jokers climbing up the legislative podium. One face-painted pro-Bolsonaro insurrectionist even dressed in a buffalo-lodge tribute to the QAnon Shaman of America’s Jan. 6.

For sure, there were also huge differences between Brazil’s Jan. 8 insurrection and what happened here two years and two days earlier. It’s now January 10 and I’ve already hit my yearly limit for using the Karl Marx line about history starting as tragedy and repeating as farce, but honestly, this yellow-and-green insurrection wasn’t even effective enough to label a farce. Unlike our Jan. 6, Lula had already been inaugurated, no government functions were interrupted by the Sunday afternoon uprising, no one was killed, and Bolsonaro — laying low some 4,000 miles to the north — wasn’t there to rally the troops as Trump famously did on the Ellipse. Meanwhile, Lula and Brazilian authorities made one major change to the Jan. 6 script by rounding up and immediately charging at least 1,200 rioters, instead of the U.S. 2021 example of letting them go back to their luxury hotels and then trying to ID them from grainy Facebook videos months later.

The United States government under President Biden should learn something from Lula’s example. By that I partly mean — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — there should be criminal accountability for Trump and the other leading coup plotters, including some Republican members of Congress. There should also be rapid-fire justice — investigations, charges, deportations — for any Americans who played a role in supporting Sunday’s Brasília mayhem, and for Bolsonaro and any of his allies hoping to take shelter in the home state of a simpatico authoritarian, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Here are three matters that the Biden administration must urgently address:

1. What role did prominent Americans from the inner circle of Trump — who forged a close relationship with his fellow right-wing populist demagogue — play in giving advice to Bolsonaro and his allies on how to overturn Lula’s narrow but fair-and-square victory? Two men in particular stand out.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager — somehow still a free man despite his 2022 contempt of Congress conviction, on top of his pardon by Trump blocking felony charges over a scam targeting Trump supporters — has been a vocal supporter of Bolsonaro’s bogus election-fraud claims since last fall. He confirmed to the Washington Post that he met in November with Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and discussed ways to challenge Lula’s victory. He certainly did not lay low during Sunday’s violence, taking to the right-wing social media site Gettr to praise what he called “Brazilian Freedom Fighters.”

But Team Bolsonaro also took advice from a longtime Trump political consultant, Jason Miller, who in October was briefly detained and questioned about his activities by authorities at the Brasília airport. Other prominent Team Trump players who played a role in our Jan. 6 insurrection, like “Stop the Steal” rally organizer Ali Alexander, have also voiced support for the pro-Bolsonaro uprising.

2. Why is Bolsonaro still on U.S. soil? Since arriving in the Sunshine State two days before Lula’s Jan. 1 inauguration, the vanquished Brazilian president has been caught on pixels in that iconic KFC shot, devouring a chicken thigh, and at a Publix supermarket. He’s believed to be staying with a well-known Brazilian fighter, in an upscale community outside Orlando where other ex-pats occasionally show up to cheer him on.

It’s not known exactly whom Bolsonaro — who (again, mimicking Trump on Jan. 6) was silent during the insurrection and later issued a tepid condemnation of violence against property on social media — has been talking to in Florida, or whether he’s been meeting his Trump allies. But I think we’ve seen enough. U.S. officials should move to expel Bolsonaro from the country, especially since he’s likely here on an A-1 government-leader visa that would have expired when Lula took office. We should also honor any extradition request from Lula’s government.

3. Which Bolsonaro allies are in the United States, and why? Why was the head of public security for Brasília — Anderson Torres, who was fired by authorities on Sunday night after criticism of an initial lax police response to the insurrection — also “vacationing” in Orlando this week? What more do we know about the U.S. activities of Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who was in D.C. with Trump’s close associates the week of Jan. 6, 2021, and was seen at Mar-a-Lago this November? We need to find out if any of this assault on a democratic ally was plotted on American soil.

In particular, it’s critical to understand the role of Americans like Bannon in this insurrection. There is precedent for charging U.S. citizens who’ve fomented overseas coups with felony violations of the Neutrality Act, but what just happened in Brasília goes beyond the basic rule of law. We are in the middle of a global conflict between the forces of democracy and autocracy, in which the United States is becoming the incubator and brain center for some of the worst of a new strain of fascism. The official Washington response to Jan. 6, 2021, has been muddled and luke warm. The response to Jan. 8, 2023, should be rapid and forceful.

Question: For how long will we see the both sidesy ‘Biden stole classified docs, too’ story in the major news outlets? — Via Dianabanana (@diana_vasilakis) on Twitter

Answer: Thanks for the question, Diana — since we all know that a small sliver of “whataboutist” newsletter readers would demand that I address this breaking story somewhere. Look, the Justice Department is absolutely right to thoroughly investigate how and why a small number of classified documents turned up at D.C.’s Penn Biden Center think tank. But as multiple experts are pointing out — and as scores of right-wing pundits will spend the coming days and weeks ignoring — there at first blush seems to be a stark difference between this case and the top-secret papers discovered over time, including an FBI raid, at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and residence. The Biden papers were found, reported, and immediately turned over by his own team. The reported facts in the Trump case point so far to exactly the opposite: obfuscation and potential cover-up, which is what turns a mistake into a crime. But let’s see all the facts — in both matters.

When Kevin McCarthy — second straight House Speaker from our most populous state of California — took the gavel in the dead of night early Saturday, he touched on a mix of right-wing fever dreams and pseudo-issues, such as stopping “woke indoctrination” in public schools and promoting an “America First” energy policy rich in fossil fuels. He made no mention of the storm brewing over his own Golden State and most of its more than 39 million residents — the series of ”atmospheric rivers” of Pacific Ocean-fed moisture that are currently dumping inch after inch of windswept rain on California’s once-parched hillsides, triggering floods and mudslides cascading with deadly force and getting worse by the day.

As I write this just before dawn on Tuesday, heavy flooding is reported in major Los Angeles neighborhoods like downtown and Chinatown, the entire mudslide-prone town of Montecito is under an evacuation order, at least one person is dead, and a 5-year-old child is missing — and with much more rain in the forecast, officials believe the worst is yet to come. Yet, in a crazy news week from Capitol Hill to Brasília, California’s storms have received less news coverage than expected, and virtually no discussion of what fuels their intensity: greenhouse-gas pollution from those fossil fuels that Bakersfield’s McCarthy wants to keep pumping out.

Just like hurricanes here on the Atlantic side of the U.S., California’s ocean-fed storms become more intense when there is more moisture in the atmosphere — one of the major impacts of a warming planet heated by human-made pollution. “The dominant thing that’s happening is just that, in a warmer atmosphere, there’s exponentially more potential for it to hold water vapor,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel L. Swain told the New York Times. Rain and mudslides are nothing new on the Pacific Coast, but the Biblical intensity of this week’s flooding will remain a threat until we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In guaranteeing two years of climate inaction on Capitol Hill, Kevin McCarthy is “delivering” for his home state in the worst way possible.