Trump-Lula: A relationship of dramatic ups and downs

In Brazil's hotly contested election, US President Donald Trump is clearly hoping for a win by right-wing challenger Flavio Bolsonaro, who has pledged to join a wave of conservative Latin American leaders cozying up to Washington. Yet Trump has also shown an uncanny fondness for incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, saying that despite turbulent trade relations, he and the veteran leftist, both 80, have "excellent chemistry."

Victory for Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, would represent another major strategic triumph for Trump, who has been accumulating allies in the region through elections or, in the case of Venezuela, by force, reported Agence France-Presse.

Brazil will join Trump's Shield of the Americas security initiative if Bolsonaro wins, the 45-year-old senator has said. While Trump and Lula are political opposites, both favor a personal approach to international relations – a dynamic highlighted by their brief encounter at the UN last year that led to reactivating trade talks.

Trump hailed their "excellent chemistry" after the meeting and eventually invited Lula to the White House in May. Those closed-door trade talks went "very well," Trump said, while calling Lula "very dynamic." He hosted Bolsonaro for an Oval Office meeting weeks later, also behind closed doors, describing him as "a smart young man who loves his Country, Brazil, very much!"

As campaigning in Brazil has ramped up, Lula has increasingly cast himself as a defender of Brazilian sovereignty. "We will not allow the enemies of democracy, whether domestic or foreign, to undermine the popular will," Lula told the United Nations last week, without naming names.

Tensions flared again in August as Brazil withheld its approval of Trump's pick to be US ambassador, Daniel Perez. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio then decided to revoke the visa of Brazil's ambassador to Washington, leaving her in a delicate position: unable to leave the United States without risking being barred from returning.

"They wanted to put pressure (so) that Brazil would accept that person (Perez) at that moment, and what Brazil said was, 'Well, I'm sorry, but that's not how the game is played,'" a Brazilian diplomatic source told AFP on condition of anonymity. The spat will likely not be resolved until after Brazil's October elections, the source said, "because we don't want to risk having the American ambassador meddling in our elections."

A senior US State Department official told reporters: "We've taken reciprocal action with respect to a Brazilian diplomat here to make the point that it can't always be one-sided." "That said, that's not the situation we're interested in," the official added.

Lula let the diplomatic storm pass and once again revived trade negotiations with a phone call to Trump. That may not matter much in the election, said Bruna Santos, director of the Brazil Programme at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. "Brazilian voters are concerned with other issues, not with Lula's moderating ability in this standoff with the US," she said.

Another thorny issue in bilateral relations is a lawsuit filed in February 2025 by Trump Media, the parent company of the president's Truth Social platform, and another Florida-based company, Rumble, against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes barred Trump Media and Rumble from disseminating messages deemed to be false allegations in Brazil. He had previously ordered Elon Musk's platform X to remove certain accounts. Trump Media and Rumble sued Moraes in federal court in Florida, and the case is still working its way through the courts.

Moraes was briefly subjected to US sanctions and is now embroiled in another alleged corruption scandal in Brazil that has rocked the Supreme Court.