Decoding Trump’s UN Speech: Part 8 — Brazil, BRICS, and the Push for Democratic Backsliding
- john raymond
- Sep 24, 2025
- 2 min read
Late in his September 23 UN address, Trump turned his fire on Brazil. He declared: “Brazil is doing poorly and will continue to do poorly. They can only do well when they’re working with us. Without us, they will fail.”
Unlike his attacks on NATO members or multilateral institutions, this one carried a different strategic purpose. Brazil is a member of BRICS, aligned with emerging powers, but it is not yet a failing democracy. For Trump and Putin, that is the problem.
The West already looks at Brazil with skepticism—concerned about its hedging between democratic alliances and authoritarian blocs. By singling Brazil out as weak and dependent, Trump feeds that skepticism.
His words are designed to paint Brazil as unreliable, to stigmatize its democracy, and to accelerate its drift away from liberal norms. The goal is not to bring Brazil closer to the West but to push it toward democratic backsliding, the condition Putin most desires in his partners.
According to the Raymond Method, the maneuver is clear...
Pillar One (Regime Security): Trump casts himself as the arbiter of Brazil’s success or failure, demanding fealty as the price of prosperity.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare): he transforms an emerging democracy’s vulnerabilities into ammunition, portraying its democratic experiment as doomed unless subordinated to his will.
Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm: he seeks to sow distrust among Western democracies, portraying Brazil as a potential traitor whose loyalties can never be counted on.
The broader effect is destabilizing. Brazil is not Russia, nor is it China, but it is an influential power in the Global South whose alignment matters. If Trump can magnify doubts about its democracy, he not only weakens its credibility abroad but also feeds the internal forces within Brazil that already yearn for authoritarianism.
In this way, his attack on Brazil was not a throwaway insult. It was part of the larger strategy: to turn every potential ally into a suspect, to push every wavering democracy toward failure, and to ensure that Putin’s model of governance spreads, not contracts.
By weaponizing skepticism, Trump aimed to add Brazil to the roster of democracies in retreat. For the Kremlin, that is the prize: fewer reliable partners for the West, more compromised states willing to hedge or align with Moscow.
Trump’s jab at Brazil was, in reality, an invitation to slide backward—a small but significant part of his larger campaign to erode the democratic world from within.
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