For years now, politics in Brazil have been the fun-house-mirror version of those in the United States. The dynamic was never plainer than it became last week, when Brazilian prosecutors formally charged the far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, along with 33 co-conspirators, with crimes connected to a sprawling plan to overthrow the nation’s democracy and hang on to power after losing an election in October of 2022.

That the charges against Bolsonaro sound familiar to Americans is no coincidence. Bolsonaro consulted with figures in Donald Trump’s orbit in pursuit of his election-denial strategy. But the indictment against Bolsonaro suggests that the Brazilian leader went much further than Trump did, allegedly bringing high-ranking military officers into a coup plot and signing off on a plan to have prominent political opponents murdered.

In this, as in so many things, Bolsonaro comes across as a cruder, more thuggish version of his northern doppelgänger. Trump calculated, shrewdly, to try to retain his electoral viability after his January 6 defeat; Bolsonaro seems to have lacked that impulse control. He attempted so violent a power grab that the institutional immune system tasked with protecting Brazil’s democracy was shocked into overdrive.

The distortion in the mirror is most pronounced with regard to this institutional response. While American prosecutors languidly dotted i’s and crossed t’s, Brazil’s institutions seemed to understand early on that they faced an existential threat from the former president. Fewer than seven months after the attempted coup, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ruled Bolsonaro ineligible to stand for office again until 2030. Interestingly, that decision wasn’t even handed down as a consequence of the attempted coup itself, but of Bolsonaro’s abuse of official acts to promote himself as a candidate, as well as his insistence on casting doubt, without evidence, on the fairness of the election.

The U.S. might have done the same thing. In December 2023, Colorado’s secretary of state refused to allow Trump’s name on the state’s primary ballot, following the state supreme court’s judgment that his role in the events of January 6, 2021, rendered him ineligible to run for president. Trump appealed the legality of the move, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices could have done what their Brazilian counterparts did—ruled that abuses of power and attempts to overturn an election were disqualifying for the highest office of the land. Instead, in March 2024, they voted unanimously to allow Trump to stand.

My home country, Venezuela, faced a roughly analogous situation in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez moved to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution, which contained no provision for him to do so. Cowed, the supreme court allowed him to go ahead. Venezuela’s then–chief justice, Cecilia Sosa, wrote a furious resignation letter, saying that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being murdered.” The result in Venezuela was the same as that in the United States: The rule of law was dead.

I can’t help but wish that U.S. jurists had shown the nerve of their Brazilian counterparts. In their charging documents against Bolsonaro, Brazil’s prosecutors don’t mumble technicalities: They charge him with attempting a coup d’état, which is what he did. Brazilian law enforcement didn’t tie itself up in knots appointing special counsels; the attorney general, Paulo Gonet, announced the charges himself. The conspiracy “had as leaders the president of the Republic himself and his candidate for vice president, General Braga Neto. Both accepted, encouraged, and carried out acts classified in criminal statutes as attacks on the … independence of the powers and the democratic rule of law,” Gonet said.

[Anne Applebaum: What rioters in Brazil learn from Americans]

Contrast that with the proceduralism at the core of the case against President Trump. After an interminable delay that ultimately rendered the entire exercise moot, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump not for trying to overthrow the government but for “conspiring to obstruct the official proceeding” (that would lead him to lose power) as well as “conspiring to defraud the United States”—a crime so abstract that only a constitutional lawyer knows what it actually means.

In ruling Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office, Brazil’s elections court did not engage in lengthy disquisitions on 19th-century jurisprudence, as the U.S. Supreme Court did in the Colorado case: They said that he had serially abused his power, which is what he did, and which is what renders him unfit for office. This bluntness, this willingness to call a spade a spade, was something the American republic, for all its institutional sophistication, seemed unable to match.

As recently as 2014, one would have been hard-pressed to find anyone willing to forecast that Brazil’s institutions would prove more effective than those of the United States at protecting democracy from populist menace. Maybe Brazilians are just more comfortable with, and accustomed to, holding national leaders to account: The current center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, spent more than two years in prison for corruption after his last stint in power. (Lula was ultimately freed and allowed to stand for office again when courts ruled that the judge in his initial prosecution was biased.) Or maybe it was the speed of response: Rather than waiting months or years to move against the rioters who took over the country’s governing institutions, the Brazilian police started jailing them and investigating the coup conspiracy almost immediately after it took place.

But the biggest difference is that dictatorship is a much more real menace in Brazil, a country that democratized only in the 1980s, than it is in a country that’s never experienced it. Older Brazilians carry the scars, in many cases literal ones, of their fight against dictatorship. This fight for them is visceral in a way it isn’t—yet—for Americans.

Brazil has demonstrated how democracies that value themselves defend themselves. America could have done the same.

The former Brazilian president may struggle to stage a comeback.

The former Brazilian president has been charged with attempting a coup after his 2022 election loss.

Jair Bolsonaro and dozens of others have been charged over an alleged plot to overturn his 2022 election loss.

Brazil’s prosecutor-general has filed charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro for attempting a coup to stay in office after his 2022 election defeat.

If President Donald Trump defies the courts by refusing to comply with their rulings, what will stop him? This question has suddenly become central to U.S. democracy, as federal judges have temporarily barred numerous administration actions, including ending birthright citizenship and granting Elon Musk’s team access to a Treasury Department payment system. Troublingly, Vice President J. D. Vance has repeatedly suggested that the executive should disobey the courts in certain cases, writing last weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Conventional wisdom, dating back to Alexander Hamilton, is that independent courts should protect democracy; the judiciary, Hamilton argued, is an “excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions” of elected politicians. Yet Hamilton also observed that “from the natural feebleness of the judiciary, it is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its coordinate branches,” meaning the executive and Congress. Hamilton’s paradox is that courts are designed to restrain a powerful executive but lack a clear basis for their own power. When and how, then, do courts prevail over an executive who threatens to flout their rulings?

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

As a political scientist, I have researched this question by interviewing high-ranking judges and lawyers in backsliding democracies, collecting original data in Turkey, Israel, and Brazil. The answer: When courts confront a powerful, noncompliant executive, three paths enable the judiciary to stop an executive power grab. Each path musters support for the courts from a distinct outside source: intrastate actors such as state governors and Congress, societal mobilization, or the armed forces. The first path is most effective; the second is costly and challenging to organize; the last is itself dangerous to democracy.

To ensure that powerful leaders obey legal limits, the first and most reliable path is to mobilize intrastate allies—that is, actors within the federal, state, and local governments who can implement the court’s decision over political resistance from the executive. Take the example of Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro. After Bolsonaro was elected, he clashed repeatedly with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal. Bolsonaro even threatened to close the court, impeach its justices, and refuse to comply with a judge’s rulings. But at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Bolsonaro “systematically sabotaged” pandemic control measures, the high court successfully constrained an antagonistic president.

Why? Brazil’s high court ruled that Bolsonaro could not override state and local public-health measures, and that decision mobilized governors and mayors as intrastate allies. These subnational government officials put muscle behind the court’s decision by acting to implement their own public-health policies against Bolsonaro’s wishes. What is more, the court benefited from support in Brazil’s Congress, which swiftly passed legislation to recognize the pandemic as an emergency.  

[Read: What the rioters in Brazil learned from Americans]

The federal system in the United States provides some opportunities for state and local actors to push for compliance with the courts. For instance, to override a court ruling to protect birthright citizenship, the Trump administration would need cooperation from officials nationwide, who could choose to side with the judiciary. But concerningly, many court decisions require active compliance from the Trump administration itself, on issues such as limiting the powers of Elon Musk’s team or placing thousands of federal employees on leave. The governors of California or Texas cannot easily use their state governments to restore the U.S. Agency for International Development. On many policy issues that the administration could lose on in court, a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to intervene.

When intrastate allies are absent, the second, more costly path to protecting judicial power becomes the next-best option: societal mobilization. This was apparent in Israel in 2023, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proposed a package of changes to curb the judiciary’s power. The effort to block this judicial overhaul mobilized support from the streets, economic power brokers, and state officials.

At the street level, every Saturday night, Israelis protested by the thousands to oppose the judicial overhaul. To apply economic pressure, trade unions, business leaders, and top Israeli economists spoke out about the economic damage of curbing judicial independence. Among state officials, military reservists threatened to refuse to serve, and Netanyahu’s own defense minister opposed the judicial changes. Ultimately, this mass societal mobilization forced Netanyahu to suspend the overhaul—and empowered the high court to strike down a law limiting the judiciary’s powers.

Mass societal mobilization, however, was costly for Israel’s economy and arguably its national security. The protests closed banks, shops, ports, and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. The contentious fight over the judicial overhaul reduced annual GDP by an estimated 2.8 percent. Societal divisions may also embolden geopolitical adversaries. In a survey after the attack of October 7, 2023, 70 percent of Israelis believed that the domestic discord over the judicial overhaul affected Hamas’s decision to attack.

Mass societal mobilization is also difficult to coordinate and sustain. In Israel today, many citizens are psychologically exhausted, and anti-government protests, although still significant, have become smaller. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue, illiberal leaders can also use state power to inhibit opposition, as individuals and organizations come to fear that publicly opposing the executive will cause repercussions such as tax audits and lawsuits.

The third and final path to upholding judicial power is a dangerous one: military involvement in politics. In Turkey during the 2000s, after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party rose to power, the military served as the backstop for a powerful judiciary. Turkey’s generals and judges shared a militantly secular ideology, and the armed forces publicly backed judicial efforts to constrain Erdoğan’s religious conservative party. Because Turkey’s military had repeatedly ousted elected governments in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, the threat of military intervention put pressure on Erdoğan and his party to accept court decisions, rather than risk a constitutional crisis. Paradoxically, legal constraints on the executive—a hallmark of democracy—came from a deeply antidemocratic source, the threat of a coup.

Yet relying on men with guns to empower the judiciary was unsustainable, precisely because the military’s threat of coercion was democratically illegitimate. The military’s involvement enabled opponents of the judiciary to sell court reform to Turkish voters as democratic. Erdoğan argued persuasively that the military and judiciary were obstructing the “sovereignty of national will”—and won sweeping popular support for a constitutional referendum in 2010 that expanded the elected government’s influence over the courts. Key international players, including the European Union and President Barack Obama, praised the constitutional referendum as a step toward democracy. The referendum did improve a genuinely antidemocratic status quo, but it also created opportunities for Erdoğan to take control of the courts. In effect, the judiciary’s close relationship with the military enabled Turkey’s executive to cast himself as democratic when overhauling the courts—which severely eroded Turkish democracy.

[Read: Erdoğan is getting desperate]

Today, America’s judges face a dilemma that has more commonly confronted their peers in other embattled democracies: how to enforce their rulings against a president who is poised to challenge legal constraints on his power. Though Hamilton feared that “the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power,” courts elsewhere have sometimes proved surprisingly resilient. Judges can prevail over disobedient executives with support from a range of outside allies, but these methods of preserving the judiciary’s power are not created equal. For the future of U.S. democracy, it is not only whether but how the courts derive their power that will matter.

The passport of Jair Bolsonaro, a former far-right president, had been confiscated as part of ongoing investigations.