The ability to cast tariffs on foes like magic spells seems to be what Donald Trump missed the most about the power of the presidency.
Unfortunately, tariffs aren’t very effective and are usually counterproductive. Sometimes, as a policy choice, they are illegitimate altogether—which is arguably the case regarding Trump’s decision to hit Brazil with 50 percent tariffs. The move is retributive—not for Brazilian tariffs on the U.S. but rather for Brazil’s legal system having put former president Jair Bolsonaro on trial for allegedly plotting a coup after losing the last election to current president Lula da Silva.
Trump demanded Lula drop the charges and, when he refused, dropped the tariffs on Lula’s head and sanctioned the head of the country’s high court, under whose purview the case is carried out.
The main problem with Trump’s intervention here is that it is inappropriate. A secondary problem—for Trump, at least—is that it has backfired. The row has given Lula’s otherwise difficult reelection a spark of life. He seems to have gotten a bump in popularity while Trump’s moves have hamstrung the conservative opposition by enabling Lula to carry the populist mantle of sovereignty and Brazilian national pride.
It has also backfired on Bolsonaro specifically. His son has been lobbying the Trump administration for relief for his father, and the Brazilian high court clamped down on Bolsonaro père in response. He must now wear an ankle bracelet and is forbidden from contacting foreign officials.
This latter move especially bothers Bolsonaro, who appears to agree that Trump went too far. He opposes the tariffs, he said, and insisted that he could set everybody straight if he were just allowed to talk to Trump. Yet because of Trump’s tit-for-tat with the court, that is even less of an option than it might have been before.
Trump is obviously taking Bolsonaro’s prosecution personally because of its echoes with the domestic investigations into Trump’s behavior during the Jan. 6 riots. But prosecution isn’t always persecution, and the U.S. president must be much more careful about distinguishing the two. We do punish foreign autocratic governments that punish dissidents, but it would be difficult for even the most skilled debater to argue that that is what’s happening here. Not everyone who is arrested is Solzhenitsyn.
Trump is starting to make a habit of this kind of direct intervention. In late June, the president hit social media with a lengthy post railing against what he called Israel’s “ridiculous Witch Hunt against their Great War Time Prime Minister! Bibi and I just went through HELL together, fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran, and Bibi could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land. Anybody else would have suffered losses, embarrassment, and chaos! Bibi Netanyahu was a WARRIOR, like perhaps no other Warrior in the History of Israel.”
Trump added that “Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State. Perhaps there is no one that I know who could have worked in better harmony with the President of the United States, ME, than Bibi Netanyahu. It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu. THIS TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’ CAN NOT BE ALLOWED!”
Then last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee attended a part of Netanyahu’s trial for a day as an explicit show of support: “It’s just unfortunate that a person who’s involved in trying to get rid of a war, get hostages home, is going through the distraction [of this trial] that is very time-consuming and difficult. The president understands it, because that’s what he’s been through in the United States.”
Again, Israel is a democracy and—whatever one thinks of the individual charges against Netanyahu—its judicial decision-making must be subject only to the democratic process, not foreign interference.
As it happens, this type of interference is rarer with Republican presidents than with Democratic ones, who seem to possess a compulsion to “save Israel from itself.” The pre-Oct. 7 judicial reform was one recent example: Likud’s proposed reforms would have benefited Netanyahu politically but they also would have democratized Israel’s absurdly antidemocratic judicial elite. Either way, they didn’t need America’s interference—yet that’s exactly what they got. As Amit Segal recalled during the Biden years: “President Biden and his administration spearheaded the campaign against altering Israel’s legal system. While there have been American administrations that interfered in Israel’s internal politics before, it was always done to promote diplomatic moves the Americans believed in, such as peace with the Palestinians or territorial withdrawals. Never before had an administration acted as the de facto opposition leader in Israel’s domestic politics.”
Now Trump himself would benefit from learning this lesson, which won’t change the outcome of the cases he calls witch hunts. And even if he could affect the outcome, it is entirely inappropriate to do so.
