Originally published in What a Day, a podcast by Crooked Media.
Following the shooting of Donald Trump, Tre’vell Anderson and Max Fisher took a look at past assassination attempts in the U.S. and abroad to explain why surviving violent attacks does not guarantee an election victory. Has any politician successfully leveraged these assaults for political gain? DDIA Executive Director Roberta Braga joined them to discuss the 2018 stabbing of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and its after-shocks.
TRANSCRIPT
Tre’vell Anderson: Well, Max, we have to talk about another much more recent case that is also getting compared to the Trump assassination.
Max Fisher: Yes. You are talking about my boy Jair Bolsonaro, um the Trump of the tropics, as they call him in Brazil, where he became president in 2019, served four catastrophic years and after losing reelection, tried to do his own very clumsy little January 6th.
Tre’vell Anderson: Right. So back in 2018, while Bolsonaro was campaigning for the presidency, he got stabbed. To Bolsonaro supporters, this has become the key moment in his mythology, the thing that supposedly won him the race.
Max Fisher: Yeah. Even just after the Trump shooting last week, one of Bolsonaro’s sons tweeted something to the effect of, you know, take it from us, Trump surviving an attack means this election is over and he has already won.
Tre’vell Anderson: And so to find out whether or not that’s right, I spoke to Roberta Braga, who studies Latin American politics and is the director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas. Here’s Roberta.
Roberta Braga: The first thing that happened was that the voters began to paint the election as a sure thing, saying that he had already won. So following the stabbing, he was glorified and people started to say this election’s over. He’s clearly the winner. And that really set, I think, the agenda for conversation and media coverage. The second thing that happened was that, um people downplayed the attack. Um. And so the opposition really began to make fun of the incident, to portray the incident as having been a set up or orchestrated by Bolsonaro himself for his campaign to get him ahead in the polls and in the voting. The third thing that happened was that the religious rhetoric took off. So there were a lot of posts saying that because he survived the stabbing, he was anointed by God, saved by God, and appointed–
Tre’vell Anderson: Uh oh.
Roberta Braga: –by God to be the next president of Brazil. Um. And so he was predestined, they said to be president uh, and that’s why he should win.
Tre’vell Anderson: So some context here is that when the stabbing happened, Bolsonaro was already far ahead in the polls. So that’s part of why his supporters saw the race as effectively over.
Max Fisher: So Tre’vell, I reported on this election, and I will be honest with you, I have always been kind of skeptical that Bolsonaro getting stabbed affected the race one way or another.
Tre’vell Anderson: Why is that?
Max Fisher: Okay, well, if you look at the trajectory of the polls over the course of that race, Bolsonaro had been rising steadily for a while when the stabbing happened, and the stabbing didn’t speed up that rise or slow it down. You can’t see any change in the polls from it at all. And actually, right after the stabbing, Bolsonaro’s main rival saw his poll numbers surge. It looked like Bolsonaro was maybe going to lose until his numbers did recover a few weeks later, amid a corruption scandal involving the left wing party. That I think was probably more important to him winning.
Tre’vell Anderson: Yeah, I actually asked Roberta about this. Here’s what she said. I want to ask a bit about the point you made that Bolsonaro and his supporters basically suggested that the assassination attempt, that the stabbing was central in getting him elected because it drove support to him. That’s at least what we’re, you know, supposed to believe, right happened. I want to hear from you now that we’re, you know, a few years out from this incident, is that actually what would have happened? Because, you know, we look at the polls and it kind of makes it hard to tell whether or not the the stabbing itself, right, led to, you know, him eventually getting elected or whether there was a variety of other things that could have, you know, contributed to that.
Roberta Braga: So I would say that it’s really hard to attribute his winning to this singular event. Um. I agree with you. What we saw were a confluence of factors like he was already, receiving really high levels of support. Brazil’s a very polarized country. Um. In this case, in 2018, the very far left and the very far right candidates were competing. And so people were divided already. So I wouldn’t say that this necessarily led to him winning. We can’t say that for sure. Um. But we did see him rise in the polling, uh a bit after the incident. And then what happened was that the polling numbers reaffirmed certain narratives, which then reaffirmed polling numbers. And that cycle kind of continued. Um. And so I think, again, it was kind of an agenda setting thing that happened after the stabbing where people said he’s a lion, he’s a survivor. He’s so brave for having undergone these surgeries after this attack.
Max Fisher: So Tre’vell. Something else I worry about is that Trump facing this assassination attempt, even if it doesn’t alter the race itself, could bring out his worst, most authoritarian tendencies. Is that something that happened with Bolsonaro, do you think?
Tre’vell Anderson: Roberto and I talked about that as well. Here’s what she said when I asked what, if anything, the attack changed in Bolsonaro’s politics.
Roberta Braga: My simple answer to that would it be not much. So I don’t know that the stabbing actually influenced any particular policy that he put out. Um. I do think it influenced a bit how the opposition was talked about and framed. Among his supporters, there was a heavy demonization of the Workers Party and anyone affiliated with the far left in Brazil. That’s something that we’re seeing here in the US already as well. Um. There were claims that at the time, Hadad, who had been the person that kind of took over after Lula was arrested, that Hadad had orchestrated this to get Bolsonaro out of the running. Um. There were also claims about a deep state. That’s again, something that we’re seeing here, um about a global elite, that’s kind of working behind the scenes to determine the outcome of the election. Um. But no, I don’t think I don’t think that it necessarily drove him to put out new policy. It did give him what he needed to paint the left as the enemy a little bit more, and his supporters definitely took that on for him.
Max Fisher: So, Tre’vell, what do you think? What does this Bolsonaro story tell us about this moment?
Tre’vell Anderson: Well, I think back to what to what Roberta just sad about how the opposition side, right, is able to paint, right, a particular group of people as evil, as responsible. And we’ve seen even in this moment, how the Republicans, right, are blaming the Biden administration and their rhetoric, right, for the shooter attempting to, you know, kill Donald Trump.
Max Fisher: Right.
Um. And that’s that’s something that that sticks out to me. What about for you?
Max Fisher: Yeah, I noticed the same thing. It feels like the Bolsonaro stabbing reified what he believed and his supporters believed, which is that, like, he’s invincible. But the deep state is out to get him, and everybody’s conspiring against him. And he has to, like, fight for the people. And what’s kind of striking is that, like, I think to people like us who are outside of that coalition, this might look like. And my initial reaction was like, oh my God, this will accelerate those politics and make them so much worse because it’ll be proof. But the thing is, they really did already believe that. So I think for them it was actually not even a big changer because they were like, all right, we already knew the deep state was trying to kill Bolsonaro, which it wasn’t, but they thought so it kind of didn’t change their politics in a meaningful way. And I think now that we’re a few days out from the Trump assassination attempt. We are actually seeing the kind of the same thing. I really worried this was going to bring out his worst tendencies, his supporters’ worst tendencies, paranoia, conspiracism. But the thing is, is they already believe–
Tre’vell Anderson: They’re already wild.
Max Fisher: Right. Yeah, right. They already believed they were at war with the deep state and, you know, the Democratic conspiracy. So they were kind of like, okay, well, we’ll continue with the great civil war that we’re fighting.
Tre’vell Anderson: One of the things that Roberta also said that stuck with me is about the potential globalization right, of this narrative. Take a listen.
Roberta Braga: One thing that I think is important to talk about is movements are coordinated and they amplify each other’s content and they talk. And so nowadays, misinformation and conspiracy theories are very borderless. They’re very cyclical, especially among Latinos, Portuguese, Spanish speakers who have connections to home. Immediately following the attack on Donald Trump on Saturday, we saw his sons engaging with content from Bolsonaro’s sons, drawing connections between the two instances of violence and reaffirming the narrative that the left had orchestrated this against them. And so I think it’s important to kind of keep an eye on how very polarized sides of the aisle kind of coordinate across borders to reaffirm each other’s values and identities and points of view, because that really can lead to a globalization of the narrative. [music break]