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Bolsonaro is a surname originating from the northeastern Italian region of Veneto, where it is spelt Bolzonaro. The phonetic spelling of Bolsonaro is used by the branch of the family that migrated to Brazil in the late 19th century.
Jair Messias Bolsonaro (Brazilian Portuguese: [ʒaˈiʁ meˈsi.ɐz bowsoˈnaɾu, ʒaˈiɾ -]; born 21 March 1955) is a Brazilian politician and retired military officer who has been the 38th president of Brazil since 1 January 2019. He served in the country’s Chamber of Deputies, representing the state of Rio de Janeiro in several parties between 1991 and 2018. He was elected president as a member of the conservative Social Liberal Party (before cutting ties with them in 2019)
There are two types of twins — identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic). One fertilized egg (ovum) splits and develops two babies with exactly the same genetic information to form identical twins.
They differ from fraternal twins, where two eggs (ova) are fertilized by two sperm and produce two genetically unique children. They are no more alike than individual siblings born at different times.
I have powerful reasons to believe that Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are fraternal twins.
Although many people may question this assumption, I cannot find any other plausible explanation for why Bolsonaro so closely follows Trump’s script — even though Trump clearly is ahead of him in terms of brutally stirring domestic unrest.
One can count on Mr. Bolsonaro licking his chops and catching up speedily.
A true “twinship”
Their “twinship” is manifested on how both leaders have responded to the coronavirus pandemic, showing their insensitivity and ignorance.
As an example, discounting the dangers of the epidemic and anxious for approval, both presidents meet their supporters without wearing masks and brushing aside the basic principle of interpersonal distancing to avoid contagion.
They also act oblivious to the fact that even asymptomatic persons can be contagious, something impossible to know just by looking at them. And this happens as both in the U.S. and in Brazil the pandemic carves its course unrelentingly.
Medicines that kill
In a clear disregard for what medical experts say, both Bolsonaro and Trump have promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat COVID 19.
Bolsonaro recommends the use of the drug to his supporters, insisting he keeps a box in hand should his 93-year-old mother need it. Trump, without any scientific evidence, prides himself on having taken the drug to prevent the infection.
At the end of May 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) suspended the international trial of hydroxychloroquine. The international agency had concerns that it provokes a “significantly higher risk of death” compared to patients who didn’t receive the drug, according to a study published in the medical journal the Lancet.
This is happening as Brazil continues to be one of the countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. On May 26, Brazil reported 1,039 deaths while the United States reported 592.
As of this writing, the United States reports over 100,000 deaths and more than 1.7 million people infected. These figures are likely to be an underestimate, since public health experts estimate that the actual figures on the pandemic in Brazil are 15 times higher than those officially released.
The best and the worst
The coronavirus pandemic, like few other events worldwide, has clearly exposed the best and the worse in people.
The best, because it has shown the heroic work of hundreds of thousands of health workers who, risking their own lives (and in many cases without basic protective equipment,) have saved millions of people from dying of a deadly infection.
The worse, because leaders like Bolsonaro and Trump, with their cavalier attitude towards the pandemic, have unnecessarily put millions of citizens at risk.
The Trump administration has sealed the border to immigrants and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to deport thousands of migrants held in detention centers. Many among those who have been sent back to their countries are infected with the coronavirus.
Guatemala’s health minister, Hugo Monroy, said, “The United States has become the Wuhan of the Americas.” Amnesty International USA has called on the Department of Homeland Security to place a moratorium on deportations.
Coronavirus out of control
Both in Brazil and in the United States, the number of infected people continues to increase rapidly. Sᾶo Paulo, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, has become a hot center of the pandemic — and hospitals are overwhelmed.
According to a study conducted at London’s Imperial College, Brazil has now the most cases and deaths in Latin America, and is the country with the highest rate of transmission.
The infection is reaching indigenous communities living in remote areas of the Amazon rainforest and is starting to spread in the favelas, marginal areas in Rio de Janeiro and home to approximately 13 million people.
“Yet, perhaps the biggest threat to Brazil’s COVID-19 response is its president, Jair Bolsonaro,” stated an editorial in the Lancet.
Racism 101
In 2019, Human Rights Watch denounced how indigenous people in Brazil who had organized themselves to defend their land had been attacked and murdered by people involved in illegal deforestation.
Since assuming power, Bolsonaro has scaled back environmental protections and disregarded indigenous people’s rights.
In March 2020, several NGOs reported Bolsonaro to the UN Commission on Human Rights for encouraging indigenous genocide. Traditional indigenous lifestyles, he declared in 2019, were akin to “prehistoric men.”
“Bolsonaro’s personality is extremely ill-suited to a pandemic. He can’t unite the country, because his whole modus operandi is based on sowing division,” said Gustavo Ribeiro, founder of The Brazilian Report, a politics site in Brazil.
Exactly the same words could be applied to Donald Trump, who has incited people to rebel against the lockdown imposed by the authorities of several states in the United States.
George Floyd
Following nation-wide protests against the police killing of George Floyd, Trump called Minneapolis demonstrators “thugs” and threatened to send the U.S. military with a green light to open fire on those who steal goods or damage property.
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” Trump tweeted. This irresponsible comment was widely condemned.
“Trump doesn’t care at all about the Constitution, of course, especially when he is trying to scare voters. But actually, following a policy of ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ would violate the Fourth Amendment, for starters,” tweeted Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said that the president’s threat was a call for “violence against Black Americans.” A review carried out by ABC News identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was mentioned by the perpetrators.
Trump’s actions led Physicians for Human Rights USA state, “While the deaths of Black people at the hands of police is a centuries-long phenomenon, the current United States president is actively fueling discord and intolerance.
A true leader would offer empathy and strive to help heal the nation. Time and time again, President Trump instead has opted to heighten divisions and inflame hatred and distrust.”
Does magic have a role?
Given these circumstances and the great variability of manifestations of the coronavirus, it is impossible to predict what will happen in the coming months — and for how long we will have to deal with the effects of this pandemic.
During an interview with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, Eric Trump, who is a mouthpiece for his father, suggested that the Democrats were using the pandemic to undermine his father’s popularity.
“And guess what, after November 3, coronavirus will magically, all of a sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen,” said Eric Trump, the president’s son.
Only people of a callous nature can deny the horrendous impact of this terrible pandemic.
Bolsonaro was born in the small town of Glicério, in the northwest area of the state of São Paulo. He graduated from the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in 1977 and served in the Brazilian Army’s field artillery and parachutist units. He became known to the public in 1986, when he wrote an article for Veja magazine criticizing low wages for military officers, after which he was arrested and detained for fifteen days. One year later, he was accused by the same magazine of planning to plant bombs in military units, which he denied. After a first degree conviction, he was acquitted by the Brazilian Supreme Military Court in 1988
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The Environment, the Trump and Bolsonaro
“[A] great empire and little minds go ill together.”—Edmund Burke, 2d Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)
Great minds think alike. And you probably thought the only thing those two great minds had in common was their love of hydroxychloroquine and their enthusiastic support for using it to combat the coronavirus. As Trump explained some weeks ago, during the period he was taking the drug, he’d received lots of letters “from people who support my use of the drug.” Letters from “people” is clearly of more importance to Trump than medical information from experts. And in that respect, we learned that President Jair Bolsonara of Brazil and Trump have a lot in common.
In mid-May Brazilian Health Minister, Nelson Teich, resigned from Mr. Bolsonaro’s cabinet. He was the second health minister to resign within a 30-day period. Among other reasons, each man resigned because of Mr. Bolsonaro’s insistence that the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus be expanded. What we have since learned is Trump and Mr. Bolsonara share a concern for the environment and the way in which it can have adverse effects on the economy.
In January Trump EPA promulgated a new rule called: “The Navigable Waters Protection Rule.” Under that rule many wetlands, streams and similar waterways formerly protected by the Clean Water Act will no longer be entitled to protection from pollution. According to the current EPA administrator the rule protects the environment and waterways “while respecting the states and private property owners.” Not everyone agrees that it protects the environment and waterways. The former director of the Office of Science and Technology in EPA’s office of Water called the new approach “scientifically indefensible and socially unjust.” The new rule went into effect on June 23, 2020. The new rule was not the only trumpian attack on the environment in 2020.
On April 30, 2020, the EPA enacted the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles rule that a spokesperson for the EPA said would, among other things, improve the U.S. fleet’s fuel economy.” In typical trump like fashion, it improves fuel economy by lowering the requirement for fuel efficiency in new vehicles for model years between 2021 and 2026. Under the fuel efficiency standards required by standards put in place by the Obama administration fuel efficiency in new vehicles had to be increased by nearly 5 percent. Under Trumpian rules that standard has been lowered to 1.5 per cent. As Trumpites explained, with the lower standards cars will be more affordable.
In mid-April Trumpsters weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal fired power plants. In addition to that, and during the three years they have been empowered, Trumpsters have, among other things, loosened curbs on automobile tailpipe emissions, weakened rules to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, and made it easier for coal companies to dump debris in streams.
On June 7, 2020 Trump issued an executive order weakening the National Environmental Policy Act. That Act is designed to protect the environment by requiring all branches of government to consider the effects on the environment of any major federal action such as building highways, pipelines, and other infrastructure projects. The order directs agencies “to ignore environmental laws to speed up federal approval for new mines, highways, pipelines, and other infrastructure projects.” All in all, and for good reason, those concerned about the environment are not among trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. And in dealing with environmental matters President Bolsonaro’s affinity for Trump approach manifests itself.
Since becoming president of Brazil in October 2018 President Bolsonara has not only followed in Trumpian footsteps by advocating for the use of hydroxychloroquine. He has also followed in the footsteps of Trump in assaulting the environment. Since becoming president he has presided over a rise in deforestation in the Amazon. He has relaxed rules designed to prevent illegal logging and illegal gold mining in the rain forest. Deforestation in 2019 hit its highest level since 2008. Between August 2018 and July 2019 deforestation rose by 34%. Between January and April of this year 464 square miles of amazon tree cover was removed. Reportedly fifty percent of that tree cover was on public lands. The amount of illegally logged timber seized by Brazil’s main environmental protection agency fell by nearly 64% from 2018 to 2019.
Inspired by Trump, President Bolsonaro has taken one further step to model himself after Trump. In early June 2020 he announced that he was considering withdrawing from the World Health Organization just as his trumpian role model had announced pm May 29, 2020 that the United States was going to do. As President Bolsonara explained: “I’m telling you right now, the United States left the WHO, and we’re studying that, in the future. Either the WHO works without ideological bias, or we leave, too.” As observed at the outset, great minds think alike.
