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To those who want to see Donald Trump fail in his attempt to turn the US into an authoritarian state, it is maddening when lawmakers, companies, universities, news outlets, law firms, institutions, and entire countries yield to his relentless bullying instead of putting up a fight.

Those who resist seem few and far between. 

One country that, until now, has been standing up for itself is Brazil, which has found itself at the receiving end of one of the highest tariff rates that Trump is threatening to impose on one of the US’s trading partners.

At first glance, that seems odd. After all, these tariffs are supposedly a tool to counterbalance trade inequities. However, while the US runs a trade deficit with most countries (because American companies and individuals want to buy goods from all over the world), that is not the case with Brazil.

Upon a closer look, however, it makes perfect sense because the tariffs are a weapon that Trump wields to get his way. 

Brazil is the most obvious example. 

Here, the threat of a steep tariff is all about Trump’s attempt to interfere in the country’s internal politics, namely by trying to shield former president Jair Bolsonaro from prosecution for launching a coup. 

He has all but admitted as much in a letter he sent to his counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, earlier this month.

However, since Lula has refused to yield, Trump on Wednesday issued an executive order stating that, beginning next week, many of Brazil’s products, including coffee and beef, would be subject to a tariff of 50 percent. 

The US president declared that “the scope and gravity of the recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US, which is a patently ridiculous justification for tariffs. 

This is especially true because many of the actions that Trump lists to show how bad Lula’s government is — particularly Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes — are things he is doing right now in the United States.

See for yourself. 

“[De Moraes] has abused his judicial authority to target political opponents, shield corrupt allies, and suppress dissent, often in coordination with other Brazilian officials,” the order states. 

That is exactly what Trump is doing. Just in recent days, he has called for the investigation and/or prosecution of various high-ranking Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA), and Sen. Adam Schiff (CA). 

In addition, he shielded corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams from prosecution. 

And Trump is certainly also trying to “suppress dissent” at every turn, both within his party and throughout the US. 

That’s not all. 

The president goes on to say that de Moraes has also “jailed individuals without trial for social media posts,” which is precisely what happened to a Turkish doctoral student earlier this year (to be fair, in her case, it wasn’t a social media post but rather an editorial in her college newspaper).

“These judicial actions, taken under the pretext of combatting ‘disinformation,’ ‘fake news,’ or ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘hateful’ content, endanger the economy of the United States by tyrannically and arbitrarily coercing United States companies to censor political speech, turn over sensitive United States user data, or change their content moderation policies on pain of extraordinary fines, criminal prosecution, asset freezes, or complete exclusion from the Brazilian market,” the order states further. 

Of course, Trump is also doing similar things under the guise of fighting “fake news,” which is any news he doesn’t like. 

For example, he is filing frivolous lawsuits to elicit what amounts to bribes from news organizations, including CBS News, ABC News, and, most recently, the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Trump has threatened to strip the licenses of the major US television networks.

In other words, the entire order reads like a list of things that the president is either doing already or would like to do.

As for the real reason for why Trump is targeting Brazil, i.e., ending the prosecution of a fellow right-wing coup stager, that, too, sounds familiar.

“Members of the Government of Brazil are also politically persecuting a former President of Brazil, which is contributing to the deliberate breakdown in the rule of law in Brazil, to politically motivated intimidation in that country, and to human rights abuses,” the order states. 

And that sounds exactly like the kind of thing Trump is doing in the US right now by calling for the prosecution of the past four Democratic presidential candidates.