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Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany. (Photo: National Archives)
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
Once they had control of the machinery of the state, the fascists were able to control those mainstream abettors through fear and intimidation. Fascist parties were able to mobilize supporters to engage in violent intimidation in the streets, and their inside conspirators intimidated other members of the ruling coalitions through violence and threats to violence.
While this may not be the exact situation we are in right now, there are important resonances. Trump has offered the right wing in this country a path to power. He has offered a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which would likely have been pushed to margins by a Clinton administration. And he was able to offer popular support for a whole set of policies promoted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and super rich bad actors such as the Koch brothers, policies which are in the interest of no one outside the 1%.
And the Republican Party has done a masterful job distorting the electoral system such that the machinery of the state is already stretched against the limits of what could plausibly be considered constitutional. Millions of people have been disenfranchised through a variety of forms of voter suppression: from mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement, to blatantly discriminatory voter identification laws. Republicans have also engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts, redistricting with scientific precision and leaving many states with majority Democratic voting populations and strongly Republican majority congressional delegations.
One of the lessons we need to draw from the experience of early Twentieth Century Fascism is that we need to be very vigilant about protecting our constitutional system. People who live under the new right wing nationalism, such as Hungarians under Orban and Italians under Berlusconi have been telling us to not be smug about the stability of our constitutional system. Just as an earthquake can turn what seems like firm ground into a runny liquid in a matter of moments; so too can constitutional systems, which have seemed well rooted and stable, under the right conditions, come to allow for all sorts of horrors.
The other lesson to be drawn from early twentieth century fascism is that people need a sense of belonging, and if the fascists are successful at offering that to people, then they will get support. Fascism in Germany and Italy ran those countries into the ground. Any yet support for those regimes and the parties that led them rose as the regimes became more extreme.
The German population at the turn of the twentieth century were highly educated, and had pride in a rationalist enlightenment worldview. They did not fall for fascism because they were uneducated. And it is important for us to not be fooled by what is attractive to people in the US about our country's emerging right-wing nationalism.
In his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the ways that people become a nation by telling themselves stories that weave a sense of common purpose and meaning. Those stories often focus on heroic past accomplishments and mistreatment on the part of others outside the boundary of the imagined community of the nation.
One problem for the left in Europe at the dawn of the fascist period is that leftists were seen as supporting an internationalist ideology over a nationalist one. And when people felt that their homelands were being mistreated in the aftermath of World War I, they were open to the narratives of belonging that the fascists offered.
Fascist leaders offered a sense of pride and purpose to people in societies with a sense of chaos. The left tried to engage people with an alternative narrative of belonging to an international working class. That narrative did have a lot of support. In the early days of German fascism, more people were on the left than were fascists. But the left was divided between different competing parties. And support for the left was not enough to fight off the growing power of the coalition of fascists and pro-capitalists. As street violence of the fascists and the more organized violence of the police were unleashed against the left, the left became the first victims of fascist power.
The people who supported Trump based on the desire to "Make America Great Again" have a lot in common with Europeans who support Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, and Orban in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, people see their future prospects diminishing. The new right-wing nationalism is a mixture of two major strands of resentments. One has to do with a sense of displacement from cultural centrality that many white people feel as their countries become more multicultural. The other key ingredient is something that many on the left have more sympathy with: the sense of a lack of control over the conditions one one's existence under neoliberal capitalism.
We are living in a world where communities have been destroyed by global capitalism, and where mainstream liberals and the mass media do little to help people to understand the complex conditions under which they live.
In The origins of Totalitarianism, a reflection on the Nazi rise to power, the great German Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote,
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
People who feel displaced and dishonored and who have no understanding of the complex processes that impact their lives are ripe for fascist ways of thinking. Those of us who want to oppose the drift toward fascism, need to engage in work to help people understand the complex conditions of their lives, and we need to build ways of understanding the world that give people a sense of meaning and purpose in life that is emotionally satisfying and helps people to see the realities of our political situation. Many people live in communities that have been devastated by neo-liberalism. Vague calls to be kind and tolerant and multicultural will not resonate as the way out of that problem. A plausible story about the current situation needs to include an honest description of the ravages of global capitalism.
Part of rebuilding our social fabric involves building our civic culture. Consumer culture promises that we all deserve an unlimited and effortless satisfaction of our individual desires. Advertisers feed that story every day, and everywhere we turn. The right wing media has fed a compatible story about government. Grounded in the Reagan revolution, it claims that government, and therefore civic life, is corrupt and pointless. Missing is any idea of a civic life through which we build a common social fabric that can meet our ever changing needs. People are moved from being citizens who feel an obligation to be informed, engaged, and make thoughtful choices, to becoming consumers who feel entitled to have their needs met, and are ready to rail against the incomprehensible structures that get in the way of those satisfactions.
We need to explain how people's communities, sense of purpose, and sense of a possible desirable future have been destroyed, and what can be done to reverse that damage and rebuild people's communities and their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. According to Anderson, newspapers were an important part of what wove together a sense of belonging to a common community in the early part of the twentieth century. An important question for our time is: how can the forms of media that people now use connect them with a world greater than themselves and their sphere of private concerns. How can we build a progressive and satisfying public sphere?
Social media are likely to be a part of that, but our habits of how we validate information, what we share, and how we build a shared and common understanding of the world all need to improve drastically.
One advantage we have in the United States over the early Twentieth Century German and Italian left is that we live in a very multicultural society. The demographics do not actually bode well for the Republican Party. We don't need to win over all of the people who are inclined toward right-wing nationalism to keep them from destroying our country. But we do need to have political narratives that will motivate enough people to stand up for something else in the way they engage the government: through street action and pressure campaigns, as well as through running for election, helping progressives get elected, and challenging the political structures of disenfranchisement. And we need to understand and promote the many real alternatives that exist to the global capitalist framework that is in fact destroying the economic future of people in our country.
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Cynthia Kaufman is a writer and educator. She is the author of five books on social change: Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness: How to Build a World Where Everyone Has Enough (Routledge 2023), The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press 2021), Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press 2016). She is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College. Visit her website.
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
Once they had control of the machinery of the state, the fascists were able to control those mainstream abettors through fear and intimidation. Fascist parties were able to mobilize supporters to engage in violent intimidation in the streets, and their inside conspirators intimidated other members of the ruling coalitions through violence and threats to violence.
While this may not be the exact situation we are in right now, there are important resonances. Trump has offered the right wing in this country a path to power. He has offered a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which would likely have been pushed to margins by a Clinton administration. And he was able to offer popular support for a whole set of policies promoted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and super rich bad actors such as the Koch brothers, policies which are in the interest of no one outside the 1%.
And the Republican Party has done a masterful job distorting the electoral system such that the machinery of the state is already stretched against the limits of what could plausibly be considered constitutional. Millions of people have been disenfranchised through a variety of forms of voter suppression: from mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement, to blatantly discriminatory voter identification laws. Republicans have also engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts, redistricting with scientific precision and leaving many states with majority Democratic voting populations and strongly Republican majority congressional delegations.
One of the lessons we need to draw from the experience of early Twentieth Century Fascism is that we need to be very vigilant about protecting our constitutional system. People who live under the new right wing nationalism, such as Hungarians under Orban and Italians under Berlusconi have been telling us to not be smug about the stability of our constitutional system. Just as an earthquake can turn what seems like firm ground into a runny liquid in a matter of moments; so too can constitutional systems, which have seemed well rooted and stable, under the right conditions, come to allow for all sorts of horrors.
The other lesson to be drawn from early twentieth century fascism is that people need a sense of belonging, and if the fascists are successful at offering that to people, then they will get support. Fascism in Germany and Italy ran those countries into the ground. Any yet support for those regimes and the parties that led them rose as the regimes became more extreme.
The German population at the turn of the twentieth century were highly educated, and had pride in a rationalist enlightenment worldview. They did not fall for fascism because they were uneducated. And it is important for us to not be fooled by what is attractive to people in the US about our country's emerging right-wing nationalism.
In his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the ways that people become a nation by telling themselves stories that weave a sense of common purpose and meaning. Those stories often focus on heroic past accomplishments and mistreatment on the part of others outside the boundary of the imagined community of the nation.
One problem for the left in Europe at the dawn of the fascist period is that leftists were seen as supporting an internationalist ideology over a nationalist one. And when people felt that their homelands were being mistreated in the aftermath of World War I, they were open to the narratives of belonging that the fascists offered.
Fascist leaders offered a sense of pride and purpose to people in societies with a sense of chaos. The left tried to engage people with an alternative narrative of belonging to an international working class. That narrative did have a lot of support. In the early days of German fascism, more people were on the left than were fascists. But the left was divided between different competing parties. And support for the left was not enough to fight off the growing power of the coalition of fascists and pro-capitalists. As street violence of the fascists and the more organized violence of the police were unleashed against the left, the left became the first victims of fascist power.
The people who supported Trump based on the desire to "Make America Great Again" have a lot in common with Europeans who support Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, and Orban in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, people see their future prospects diminishing. The new right-wing nationalism is a mixture of two major strands of resentments. One has to do with a sense of displacement from cultural centrality that many white people feel as their countries become more multicultural. The other key ingredient is something that many on the left have more sympathy with: the sense of a lack of control over the conditions one one's existence under neoliberal capitalism.
We are living in a world where communities have been destroyed by global capitalism, and where mainstream liberals and the mass media do little to help people to understand the complex conditions under which they live.
In The origins of Totalitarianism, a reflection on the Nazi rise to power, the great German Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote,
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
People who feel displaced and dishonored and who have no understanding of the complex processes that impact their lives are ripe for fascist ways of thinking. Those of us who want to oppose the drift toward fascism, need to engage in work to help people understand the complex conditions of their lives, and we need to build ways of understanding the world that give people a sense of meaning and purpose in life that is emotionally satisfying and helps people to see the realities of our political situation. Many people live in communities that have been devastated by neo-liberalism. Vague calls to be kind and tolerant and multicultural will not resonate as the way out of that problem. A plausible story about the current situation needs to include an honest description of the ravages of global capitalism.
Part of rebuilding our social fabric involves building our civic culture. Consumer culture promises that we all deserve an unlimited and effortless satisfaction of our individual desires. Advertisers feed that story every day, and everywhere we turn. The right wing media has fed a compatible story about government. Grounded in the Reagan revolution, it claims that government, and therefore civic life, is corrupt and pointless. Missing is any idea of a civic life through which we build a common social fabric that can meet our ever changing needs. People are moved from being citizens who feel an obligation to be informed, engaged, and make thoughtful choices, to becoming consumers who feel entitled to have their needs met, and are ready to rail against the incomprehensible structures that get in the way of those satisfactions.
We need to explain how people's communities, sense of purpose, and sense of a possible desirable future have been destroyed, and what can be done to reverse that damage and rebuild people's communities and their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. According to Anderson, newspapers were an important part of what wove together a sense of belonging to a common community in the early part of the twentieth century. An important question for our time is: how can the forms of media that people now use connect them with a world greater than themselves and their sphere of private concerns. How can we build a progressive and satisfying public sphere?
Social media are likely to be a part of that, but our habits of how we validate information, what we share, and how we build a shared and common understanding of the world all need to improve drastically.
One advantage we have in the United States over the early Twentieth Century German and Italian left is that we live in a very multicultural society. The demographics do not actually bode well for the Republican Party. We don't need to win over all of the people who are inclined toward right-wing nationalism to keep them from destroying our country. But we do need to have political narratives that will motivate enough people to stand up for something else in the way they engage the government: through street action and pressure campaigns, as well as through running for election, helping progressives get elected, and challenging the political structures of disenfranchisement. And we need to understand and promote the many real alternatives that exist to the global capitalist framework that is in fact destroying the economic future of people in our country.
Cynthia Kaufman is a writer and educator. She is the author of five books on social change: Consumerism, Sustainability, and Happiness: How to Build a World Where Everyone Has Enough (Routledge 2023), The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press 2021), Challenging Power: Democracy and Accountability in a Fractured World (Bloomsbury 2020), Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope (Lexington Books 2012), and Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change (2nd Edition PM Press 2016). She is the director of the Vasconcellos Institute for Democracy in Action at De Anza College. Visit her website.
The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler's rise to power. I've known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people's fears, could take control of the levers of power.
I just read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.
His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.
Once they had control of the machinery of the state, the fascists were able to control those mainstream abettors through fear and intimidation. Fascist parties were able to mobilize supporters to engage in violent intimidation in the streets, and their inside conspirators intimidated other members of the ruling coalitions through violence and threats to violence.
While this may not be the exact situation we are in right now, there are important resonances. Trump has offered the right wing in this country a path to power. He has offered a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry, which would likely have been pushed to margins by a Clinton administration. And he was able to offer popular support for a whole set of policies promoted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and super rich bad actors such as the Koch brothers, policies which are in the interest of no one outside the 1%.
And the Republican Party has done a masterful job distorting the electoral system such that the machinery of the state is already stretched against the limits of what could plausibly be considered constitutional. Millions of people have been disenfranchised through a variety of forms of voter suppression: from mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement, to blatantly discriminatory voter identification laws. Republicans have also engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts, redistricting with scientific precision and leaving many states with majority Democratic voting populations and strongly Republican majority congressional delegations.
One of the lessons we need to draw from the experience of early Twentieth Century Fascism is that we need to be very vigilant about protecting our constitutional system. People who live under the new right wing nationalism, such as Hungarians under Orban and Italians under Berlusconi have been telling us to not be smug about the stability of our constitutional system. Just as an earthquake can turn what seems like firm ground into a runny liquid in a matter of moments; so too can constitutional systems, which have seemed well rooted and stable, under the right conditions, come to allow for all sorts of horrors.
The other lesson to be drawn from early twentieth century fascism is that people need a sense of belonging, and if the fascists are successful at offering that to people, then they will get support. Fascism in Germany and Italy ran those countries into the ground. Any yet support for those regimes and the parties that led them rose as the regimes became more extreme.
The German population at the turn of the twentieth century were highly educated, and had pride in a rationalist enlightenment worldview. They did not fall for fascism because they were uneducated. And it is important for us to not be fooled by what is attractive to people in the US about our country's emerging right-wing nationalism.
In his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the ways that people become a nation by telling themselves stories that weave a sense of common purpose and meaning. Those stories often focus on heroic past accomplishments and mistreatment on the part of others outside the boundary of the imagined community of the nation.
One problem for the left in Europe at the dawn of the fascist period is that leftists were seen as supporting an internationalist ideology over a nationalist one. And when people felt that their homelands were being mistreated in the aftermath of World War I, they were open to the narratives of belonging that the fascists offered.
Fascist leaders offered a sense of pride and purpose to people in societies with a sense of chaos. The left tried to engage people with an alternative narrative of belonging to an international working class. That narrative did have a lot of support. In the early days of German fascism, more people were on the left than were fascists. But the left was divided between different competing parties. And support for the left was not enough to fight off the growing power of the coalition of fascists and pro-capitalists. As street violence of the fascists and the more organized violence of the police were unleashed against the left, the left became the first victims of fascist power.
The people who supported Trump based on the desire to "Make America Great Again" have a lot in common with Europeans who support Le Pen in France, Farage in Britain, and Orban in Hungary. On both sides of the Atlantic, people see their future prospects diminishing. The new right-wing nationalism is a mixture of two major strands of resentments. One has to do with a sense of displacement from cultural centrality that many white people feel as their countries become more multicultural. The other key ingredient is something that many on the left have more sympathy with: the sense of a lack of control over the conditions one one's existence under neoliberal capitalism.
We are living in a world where communities have been destroyed by global capitalism, and where mainstream liberals and the mass media do little to help people to understand the complex conditions under which they live.
In The origins of Totalitarianism, a reflection on the Nazi rise to power, the great German Jewish Philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote,
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
People who feel displaced and dishonored and who have no understanding of the complex processes that impact their lives are ripe for fascist ways of thinking. Those of us who want to oppose the drift toward fascism, need to engage in work to help people understand the complex conditions of their lives, and we need to build ways of understanding the world that give people a sense of meaning and purpose in life that is emotionally satisfying and helps people to see the realities of our political situation. Many people live in communities that have been devastated by neo-liberalism. Vague calls to be kind and tolerant and multicultural will not resonate as the way out of that problem. A plausible story about the current situation needs to include an honest description of the ravages of global capitalism.
Part of rebuilding our social fabric involves building our civic culture. Consumer culture promises that we all deserve an unlimited and effortless satisfaction of our individual desires. Advertisers feed that story every day, and everywhere we turn. The right wing media has fed a compatible story about government. Grounded in the Reagan revolution, it claims that government, and therefore civic life, is corrupt and pointless. Missing is any idea of a civic life through which we build a common social fabric that can meet our ever changing needs. People are moved from being citizens who feel an obligation to be informed, engaged, and make thoughtful choices, to becoming consumers who feel entitled to have their needs met, and are ready to rail against the incomprehensible structures that get in the way of those satisfactions.
We need to explain how people's communities, sense of purpose, and sense of a possible desirable future have been destroyed, and what can be done to reverse that damage and rebuild people's communities and their sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. According to Anderson, newspapers were an important part of what wove together a sense of belonging to a common community in the early part of the twentieth century. An important question for our time is: how can the forms of media that people now use connect them with a world greater than themselves and their sphere of private concerns. How can we build a progressive and satisfying public sphere?
Social media are likely to be a part of that, but our habits of how we validate information, what we share, and how we build a shared and common understanding of the world all need to improve drastically.
One advantage we have in the United States over the early Twentieth Century German and Italian left is that we live in a very multicultural society. The demographics do not actually bode well for the Republican Party. We don't need to win over all of the people who are inclined toward right-wing nationalism to keep them from destroying our country. But we do need to have political narratives that will motivate enough people to stand up for something else in the way they engage the government: through street action and pressure campaigns, as well as through running for election, helping progressives get elected, and challenging the political structures of disenfranchisement. And we need to understand and promote the many real alternatives that exist to the global capitalist framework that is in fact destroying the economic future of people in our country.
Even right-wing Brazilian politicians are condemning Trump's actions as "an unacceptable attempt at foreign interference."
U.S. President Donald Trump is facing international condemnation for his decision to level sanctions against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes in a bid to punish him for overseeing the criminal trial of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime Trump ally.
The Guardian reported on Wednesday that Brazilian political leaders are not backing down in the face of Trump's economic warfare, which includes not only sanctions against Moraes but also 50% tariffs on several key Brazilian exports to the United States, including coffee and beef.
Chamber of Deputies member José Guimarães, a member of the left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores, described Trump's actions as "a direct attack on Brazilian democracy and sovereignty" and vowed that "we will not accept foreign interference in... our justice system."
Left-wing politicians weren't the only ones to criticize the sanctions and tariffs, as right-wing Partido Novo founder João Amoêdo condemned them as "an unacceptable attempt at foreign interference in the Brazilian justice system." Eduardo Leite, the conservative governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, said he refused to accept "another country trying to interfere in our institutions" as Trump has done.
In justifying the sanctions and tariffs, the Trump White House said they were a measure to combat what it described as "the government of Brazil's politically motivated persecution, intimidation, harassment, censorship, and prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and thousands of his supporters."
Bolsonaro is currently on trial for undertaking an alleged coup plot to prevent the country's current president, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, from taking power after his victory in Brazil's 2022 presidential election.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the former president, openly celebrated Trump's punitive measures against Brazil this week, which earned him a stiff rebuke from the editorial board of Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil's largest daily newspapers. In their piece, the Folha editors labeled Eduardo Bolsonaro an "enemy of Brazil" and said he was behaving like "a buffoon at the feet of a foreign throne" with his open lobbying of the Trump administration to punish his own country.
Elsewhere in the world, the U.K.-based magazine The Economist leveled Trump for his Brazil sanctions, which it described as an "unprecedented" assault on the country's sovereignty. The magazine also outlined the considerable evidence that the former Brazilian president took part in a coup plot, including a plan written out by Bolsonaro deputy chief of staff Mario Fernandes to assassinate or kidnap Lula and Moraes before the end of Bolsonaro's lone presidential term.
U.S. government reform advocacy group Public Citizen was also quick to condemn Trump's actions, which it described as a "shameless power grab."
"Trump's order sets a horrifying precedent that literally any domestic judicial action or democratically enacted policy set by another country could somehow justify a U.S. national emergency and bestow the president with powers far beyond what the Constitution provides," said Melinda St. Louis, global trade watch director at Public Citizen.
St. Louis also predicted that the tariffs on Brazil would soon be tossed out by courts given their capricious justifications, although she said the reputation of the U.S. would suffer "lasting damage."
"Follow the money," one critic wrote in response to the Justice Department's decision to drop an antitrust case against American Express Global Business Travel.
The U.S. Justice Department this week dropped an antitrust case against a company represented by the lobbying firm that employed Pam Bondi before her confirmation as attorney general earlier this year.
American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) has paid the lobbying giant Ballard Partners hundreds of thousands of dollars this year to pressure Bondi's Justice Department on "antitrust issues," according to federal disclosures.
The DOJ's decision to drop the antitrust lawsuit, which was initially filed during the final days of the Biden administration, allows Amex GBT's acquisition of rival CWT Holdings to move forward despite concerns that the merger would harm competition in the travel management sector. Amex GBT said it was "pleased" the DOJ dropped the case ahead of trial, which was set to begin in September.
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the anti-monopoly American Economic Liberties Project, called the Justice Department's move "so so so corrupt" and urged observers to "follow the money."
Amex GBT paid Ballard Partners $50,000 in the first quarter of 2025 and $150,000 in the second quarter to lobby the Justice Department. Jon Golinger, democracy advocate with Public Citizen, said last week that "the American people deserve to know whether Attorney General Bondi has been involved with her former firm's lobbying and if the red carpet is being rolled out for these clients by the Department of Justice because of her former role at Ballard."
"If Bondi has been involved with the Ballard firm's lobbying, she has likely violated the ethics pledge," Golinger added. "The American people deserve an attorney general who always puts their needs above the special interest agendas of former business associates."
Scrutiny of the Justice Department's decision to drop the Amex GBT case comes amid allegations of corruption surrounding the DOJ's merger settlement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks last month. It also comes days after the Justice Department fired two of its top antitrust officials.
The American Prospect's David Dayen noted Tuesday that the Justice Department's voluntary dismissal of the Amex GBT lawsuit means the case—unlike the Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper settlement—doesn't have to face a Tunney Act review.
In a statement to the Prospect, a Justice Department spokesperson denied that Bondi had any involvement in the antitrust division's decision to drop the Amex GBT case.
"The smell of corruption has gotten bad enough that they're trying to shape the information environment," Dayen wrote in response to the DOJ statement.
"The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future."
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' latest effort to block additional American arms sales to Israel failed again late Wednesday at the hands of every Republican senator and some Democrats.
But a majority of the Senate Democratic caucus voted in favor of Sanders-led resolutions that aimed to halt the Trump administration's sale of 1,000-pound bombs, Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits, and tens of thousands of assault rifles to the Israeli government.
The first resolution, S.J.Res.41, failed by a vote of 27-70, and the second, S.J.Res.34, failed by a vote of 24-73, with the effort to block the sale of assault rifles to the Israeli government garnering slightly more support than the bid to prevent the sale of bombs.
The following senators voted to block the assault rifle sale: Sanders, Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Angus King (I-Maine), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
And the following senators voted to block the sale of additional bombs: Sanders, Alsobrooks, Baldwin, Blunt Rochester, Duckworth, Durbin, Heinrich, Hirono, Kaine, Kim, King, Klobuchar, Luján, Markey, Merkley, Murphy, Murray, Schatz, Shaheen, Smith, Van Hollen, Warnock, Warren, and Welch.
Three Democratic senators—Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan—did not vote on either resolution.
"Every senator who voted to continue sending weapons today voted against the will of their constituents."
In a statement responding to the vote, Sanders said growing Democratic support for halting arms sales to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an indication that "the tide is turning" in the face of Israel's "horrific, immoral, and illegal war against the Palestinian people."
"The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza," the senator said. "The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future."
Wednesday's votes revealed a significant increase in support for halting U.S. military support for the Israeli government compared to earlier this year, when only 14 Democratic senators backed similar Sanders-led resolutions.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who did not vote on the Sanders resolutions in April, said Wednesday that "this legislative tool is not perfect, but frankly it is time to say enough to the suffering of innocent young children and families."
"As a longtime friend and supporter of Israel, I am voting yes to send a message: The Netanyahu government cannot continue with this strategy," said Murray. "Netanyahu has prolonged this war at every turn to stay in power. We are witnessing a man-made famine in Gaza—children and families should not be dying from starvation or disease when literal tons of aid and supplies are just sitting across the border."
The Senate votes came days after the official death toll in Gaza surpassed 60,000 and a new poll showed that U.S. public support for Israel's assault on the Palestinian enclave reached a new low, with just 32% of respondents expressing approval. The Gallup survey found that support among Democratic voters has cratered, with just 8% voicing approval of the Israeli assault.
"The vast majority of Democratic voters say Israel is committing genocide, and have repeatedly demanded that their party's elected officials in Congress stop helping President Trump deliver more and more weapons to Israel with our tax dollars," Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, said Wednesday. "Tonight proved that an increasing number of Democrats in the Senate–more than half of the Democratic caucus–are hearing that demand."
Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, called the vote "unprecedented" and said it "shows that the dam is breaking in U.S. politics."
"Our job is to increase the pressure on every member of Congress to stop all weapons and military funding," said Miller. "For 22 months, the U.S. has enabled, funded, and armed the Israeli government's slaughter and starvation in Gaza, and still the majority of senators just voted to continue sending weapons to a military live-streaming its crimes against humanity."
"The overwhelming majority of Americans want to stop the flow of deadly weapons to the Israeli military and end U.S. complicity in its horrific genocide against Palestinians," Miller added. "Every senator who voted to continue sending weapons today voted against the will of their constituents."