Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva urged President Trump to negotiate a trade agreement this week as the U.S. has pursued increasingly aggressive action over the criminal prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.
“What we cannot have is President Trump forgetting that he was elected to govern the U.S. he was elected not to be the emperor of the world,” Lula told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday through a translator. “It would be much better to establish a negotiation first, and then to reach a possible agreement.”
Last week, Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods starting Aug. 1 over the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who carries the nickname “Trump of the tropics.”
The former Brazilian president lost his re-election bid in 2022 to Lula and questioned the veracity of the election results, including the reliability of certain voting machines. Thousands of his supporters then attempted to storm the country’s Supreme Court, Congress and presidential headquarters, acts that Bolsonaro is now accused of having incited.
Bolsonaro and dozens of allies were charged over the efforts in February.
Pressure from the U.S. further escalated Friday when Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked visas for the judge overseeing Bolsonaro’s prosecution, as well as the judge’s allies and family members.
In a letter to Lula announcing the tariff last week, Trump deemed the prosecution of Bolsonaro a “witch hunt” and called on the Brazilian president to end it. Lula has no power to interfere in the proceedings against his predecessor.
“I think it was a mistake. Big mistake, because the letter that President Trump is full of things that are not true,” Lula said Thursday on CNN.
Trump claimed in that letter that the U.S. runs a trade deficit with Brazil. The U.S. in fact has a trade surplus with Brazil. Still, Lula on Thursday said that Brazil would do its best to work out a trade deal with the U.S.
“We will use all the words that exist in the dictionary in trying to negotiate. If we don’t manage to reach an agreement, I can reassure you that we will go to the World Trade Organization, or we can gather a group of countries to respond, or we can use the reciprocity law,” he said, citing a law that would allow Brazil to raise its own tariffs against the U.S.
The U.S. is the second-largest trading partner for Brazil, which accounts for about a quarter of America’s coffee imports.
The threats from Trump have been a domestic boon in some ways for Lula, who has received praise for standing up to a perceived bully and seen his sagging approval ratings jump, The New York Times reported.
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