On: Brazil attorney general says meddling ‘cannot be tolerated’ after Trump funding...

2 October 2026

The news from Brazil arrives with a familiar taste. A great power, holding money in one hand, reaches toward the courts of another nation and calls it something else - assistance, perhaps, or the advancement of liberty. The attorney general there, Messias, has named it plainly: meddling that cannot be tolerated. I find myself wishing more men in high office spoke so directly.

Consider the structure of the thing. The United States declares itself the champion of sovereignty - it insists, loudly and often, that no outside hand shall touch its elections, its institutions, its laws. Yet here it is, directing funds toward a campaign against the supreme court of a sister republic, and doing so in the very season when that republic goes to the polls. You say sovereignty is sacred. Sovereignty is sacred for you implies it is sacred for others. But you fund campaigns against their courts. So either sovereignty is sacred, or it is a flag you raise only when it shelters you. The question is which you actually believe, and the money answers before the words can.

I knew what it was to have a government speak of me in one register and act in another. The slaveholder proclaimed the most perfect democracy on earth while holding the auction block. The contradiction did not weaken him; it was his method. So it is here. The injury is not only the funds themselves but the assumption beneath them - that the institutions of Brazil are clay to be shaped by a foreign hand, that the Brazilian voter is a child to be managed.

The people of that country will judge this for themselves, at the ballot box, without permission from Washington. That is the whole of the matter. A nation’s courts belong to its people. Say otherwise, and you have said what you are.