Junior lucked out. Look what happened:
Trump adviser Jason Miller made news on Tuesday when Brazilian authorities allegedly questioned him for hours after he attended CPAC Brasil 2021, held in Brasilia.
Miller, however, wasn’t the only denizen of Trumpworld to attend the conference. Rather, the decision by an as-of-yet unnamed Brazilian authority to question him highlights a series of bizarre links between Brazil’s leader Jair Bolsonaro and the American right.
First off, why is there a CPAC Brasil?
CPAC did not return TPM’s request for comment. CPAC chair Matt Schlapp issued a tweet after the Miller debacle, however, referring to his presence there as part of CPAC’s “delegation” to the conference.
CPAC appears to have sent more than a “delegation.” The American organization’s website describes the Brazilian gathering as another “CPAC conference,” this time held overseas, and says that it originated from a friendship between Schlapp and Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo.
CPAC Brasil ran Sept. 3-4, with Miller, who also works as CEO of right-wing social network GETTR, delivering a closing speech on Sept. 4. It’s the second time CPAC has supported a conference in Brazil, with the first taking place in 2019.
In addition to Miller, the gathering featured Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of the Brazilian parliament who spent much of the Trump administration building inroads with the American right.
Eduardo Bolsonaro cultivated a friendship with former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon, agreeing in February 2019 to work for The Movement, a group that Bannon founded during the Trump presidency in a bid to take his far-right ideology global.
It’s not clear exactly when and how the Brazilian president’s son befriended Schlapp, but Eduardo Bolsonaro appeared at CPAC in 2020, and has featured in Schlapp’s own promoting of the events.
CPAC Brasilia 2021 itself featured not only Miller, but also other MAGA glitterati like GOP gubernatorial candidate and macabre driver Charlie Gerow, Rep. Mark Green, and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump Jr. gave a full, 40-minute address to the Brazilian conference, video reviewed by TPM shows. It’s not clear what the circumstances surrounding Trump Jr.’s appearance were or whether he was compensated for his appearance.
It’s not clear why the “delegation” attempted to depart Brazil on Tuesday, when the conference itself seems to have concluded on Sept. 4.
But photos posted to Facebook by Matthew Tyrmand, another member of the CPAC “delegation” and a board member of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, give a possible clue.
Tyrmand initially wrote on Twitter about the questioning of Miller, before adding later that the group’s plane appeared to be “taxiing back to the USA.”
In a Facebook post published on Sunday, Tyrmand said that he, Miller, and others had met with President Bolsonaro while in the country’s capitol.
“I’ve been fortunate to meet many heads of state but JB is like no other (closest parallel of course is DJT and the correlations are numerous),” Tyrmand wrote. “JB is totally humble and down to earth…he puts on no airs and lives to continue the culture and political war battles against the global left looking to subvert the wills and mandates of free peoples who are conservative at heart.”
Bannon wanted a global movement. This is it.
I wrote about Bolsonaro and CPAC 2020 a while back. And CPAC has gone international in recent years. Here’s CPAC Japan. But I think the relationship between Trump and Bolsonaro is something different. Here’s what Eduardo had to say last year:
In October, Eduardo Bolsonaro made a shocking statement. The son of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right authoritarian president of Brazil, suggested in an interview that his country may need to return to the tactics employed by its former military dictatorship to help crush his father’s enemies on the left. He asserted without evidence that Cuba was behind recent protests in Latin America and Argentina’s election of a moderate Peronist was part of a conspiracy to bring about a new leftist “revolution” in Latin America.
“If the left radicalizes to this extent [in Brazil] we will need to respond, and that response could come via a new AI-5,” he said, referring to the notorious Institutional Act Number Five, a notorious 1968 edict issued by the military government that indefinitely outlawed freedom of expression and assembly and shuttered the National Congress. The act began an era of intense political repression and media censorship. Hundreds of dissidents were tortured, killed and disappeared during the dictatorship, which ended in 1985.
Elected officials in the country quickly denounced Bolsonaro’s comments as “repugnant” and a “serious attack on democracy.” American conservatives, on the other hand, invited Bolsonaro to take the stage at one of DC’s biggest political events of the year, this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). ..
Nothing to see here …