MAGA influencers use Brazil’s election to sow doubt on midterms

For a preview of the conservative copium that could follow the Nov. 3 midterm election results, look no further than the conspiracy theories MAGA’s biggest voices are already spinning about Brazil. The immediate reaction to the country’s presidential race makes clear that MAGA is preparing to unleash a predictable wave of election denialism. 

On Sunday, the incumbent leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came back from a first-round deficit to beat Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. It was the first time since Brazil returned to democracy in 1985 that the candidate who lost the first round won the runoff, and it made Lula the first person elected to his country’s presidency four times. Before the disappointment had settled, Lula’s MAGA detractors were turning an inconvenient result into an international election fraud narrative — and warning their followers that the same supposedly sinister forces were coming for the United States. Conservative podcaster and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon made the connection explicit: Without action, he claimed on his show, it would happen “next Tuesday.”

Other influential MAGA figures immediately began manufacturing reasons to doubt the outcome in Brazil, telling Americans that a right-wing defeat cannot possibly reflect what voters wanted. Nick Shirley primed his audience’s disappointment with an exuberant before picture. The 24-year-old YouTuber traded his trademark hoodie and the Minnesota daycare centers that gained him right-wing notoriety for a spot on Bolsonaro’s campaign bus and a pre-election parade, then reported back to his followers. “I have never seen crowds and energy like this for an election,” he posted Saturday, adding that thousands of people were chanting that Lula is a thief whose place is prison. On Sunday Shirley declared that Brazil’s right-wing revolution had begun. Then Lula won by roughly 4.4 million votes and the revolution lasted about as long as the polls stayed open. The hoodie had returned on Monday, along with Shirley’s posts about corruption and election meddling.

The centerpiece of the fraud story is a two-hour extension of voting on Sunday, ordered by Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin amid bad weather and transportation problems. Zanin once served as Lula’s personal lawyer, and the American right has treated that line on his résumé as a signed confession. MAGA conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called the ruling unprecedented and said it came from a judge loyal to Lula. 

What MAGA leaves out is that both campaigns asked for more time. Lula’s side cited bus delays in cities where he was strong. Bolsonaro’s side cited flooding in regions largely loyal to him. In a race decided by millions, early data shows that fewer than 40,000 votes were cast during the added window. Still, Elon Musk told his 241 million followers that the math doesn’t add up. But it does. It just doesn’t add up to the answer he wanted.

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Bolsonaro himself initially called the extension a “dirty trick” and said he would challenge the outcome. Donald Trump supplied his blessing. At Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews, where he was about to board Air Force One to hold a rally for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is in a surprisingly tight re-election bid, the president told reporters, “It looked like another rigged election, frankly.” The White House Rapid Response account promptly promoted the clip, even as the president insisted he had not taken sides. He offered no evidence because there is none. 

Minutes after Trump signaled that he would not intervene, Bolsonaro effectively conceded and backed off his call to annul the election results. He said he would instead sue Lula for abusing the power of incumbency. “I wasn’t the one who lost; the system won,” Bolsonaro said, vowing to turn the overwhelming conservative legislature into a fortress against what he called barbarism.

The personal and political networks linking the MAGA movement to Bolsonaro’s ultra-conservative apparatus run deep, and they have been cultivated over years. Prominent figures within the American right, including Bannon and senior MAGA advisers like Jason Miller, have long maintained intimate ties with the Bolsonaro family. Organizations like the Conservative Political Action Conference have repeatedly expanded their presence into South America, hosting regional summits that fuse American-style culture war rhetoric with local right-wing nationalism. Mar-a-Lago has also served as a gathering ground for the Bolsanaros. When Jair Bolsonaro faced legal consequences and potential imprisonment in Brazil following his own post-election maneuvering, his political allies in the U.S. took the development as a personal warning, treating the legal accountability of a foreign leader as a direct threat to their own domestic political project.

Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has become a hub for election denialism. Right-wing pundits and administration officials alike have used the show to argue for a national emergency declaration covering the midterms. Bannon spent Monday demanding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut off diplomatic relations with Brazil and shut down trade entirely. The goal of his rant was clear: to convince MAGA that democratic institutions across the globe have been captured by hostile forces, rendering standard electoral participation obsolete unless it is backed by relentless resistance. Alex Jones declared that Brazil must be liberated. The disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn asked whether Brazil was turning into a banana republic. Kari Lake, who is hardly a neutral authority on losing gracefully after claiming fraud in her own losing bids for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate in 2022 and 2024, said Brazil’s elections reminded her of Arizona’s. 

Running underneath the fraud talk is a conservative creation myth. MAGA lore holds that the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development dismantled the left’s machinery in Latin America, and its triumphalists claim the left has not won a single election in the region since. But much of the region has been governed from the right for decades, and its longest-lived left-wing governments expelled USAID years ago precisely because they regarded it as a hostile American instrument, not a benefactor.

The immediate deluge of claims alleging manipulation and shadowy state intervention is more than standard right-wing culture wars. They are a calculated effort to prime American audiences for the idea that any electoral outcome unfavorable to Trump’s MAGA coalition is inherently fraudulent. The narratives depend on a selective performance of democracy in which visible enthusiasm for a preferred candidate counts as evidence of popular legitimacy, all while the actual votes can be dismissed as fraudulent whenever they produce an unwelcome result. Crowds become proof that a candidate must win. A defeat becomes proof that the system is rigged. No outcome can disprove the theory.  

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., recently told CNN that Americans have to assume Republicans will try to come up with any diabolical scheme to prevent Nov. 3 from being a free and fair election. After watching Brazil, you could argue the scheme is no longer diabolical so much as announced.

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