Brazil’s president rebuffs demand to cease inquiry into Bolsonaro after Trump tariffs – as it happened

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Closing summary

This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to an end on a day when the president veered sharply from just increasing tariffs on trading partners to suddenly demanding major political concessions from Brazil’s president. We will resume our chronicle on Thursday. Here are the day’s key developments:

• Donald Trump released an intemperate letter to Brazil’s president imposing a 50% tariff and complaining about the prosecution of his friend, former president Jair Bolsonaro, for the crime of simply trying to stay in office despite losing an election and then inciting a riot by his supporters to derail the transfer of power.

• Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rejected Trump’s demand that the charges against Bolsonaro be dropped, and pointed out that Brazil has an independent judiciary and does not, in fact, have a trade imbalance with the US.

• Brazilians mocked Bolsonaro’s potential successor for supporting Trump, by remixing video of him in a MAGA hat on social media.

• Amid concerns that a wave of staff reductions threaten the core missions of Nasa, Trump announced that he is asking the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, to also serve as interim administrator of the space agency.

• Trump complimented the president of Liberia on his excellent English, revealing that he is unaware of that nation’s close ties to the United States, as a home for freed slaves.

• The US supreme court maintained a judicial block on a Republican-crafted Florida law that makes it a crime for undocumented immigrants to enter the state.

Bolsonaro's son thanks Trump on social media, asks for sanctions against Brazilian offiicals

In a series of social media posts, Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, thanked Donald Trump for imposing a punitive 50% tariff on Brazilian exports to the United States in part because of the prosecution of the former president for allegedly plotting a coup to stay in power after losing his the 2022 election.

“THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP - MAKE BRAZIL FREE AGAIN” Eduardo Bolsonaro wrote in a post on X, in which he also appealed for the imposition of sanctions on government officials in Brazil for supposedly violating his father’s human rights. “WE WANT MAGNISTKY!” he added, in reference to the US law known as the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Trump's tariffs on Brazil could help its leftist president get re-elected

While the imposition of 50% tariffs on Brazil’s exports to the US is undoubtedly terrible news for its beef industry, Trump’s attack on the nation’s economy, on behalf of its former president Jair Bolsonaro, could help Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, get re-elected.

“If Lula plays this right – and manages to frame the Bolsonaro family, who instigated Trump to impose these tariffs, as fundamentally unpatriotic and anti-Brazil – his chances of reelection next year may have just increased substantially,” Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, observed. “Supporting sanctions against your own country is hardly an attractive policy proposal,” he added.

Pedro Abramovay, who worked in Brazil’s ministry of justice during Lula’s first two terms in office, made that argument on social media. “Bolsonaro sends his son to the US to ask Trump for help. The help comes in the form of punishment for Brazilians: 50% tariffs on our products,” Abramovay wrote. “In other words, Bolsonaro considers supporting his impunity more important than preserving jobs in Brazil.”

On Brazilian social media, opponents of Bolsonaro’s rightwing movement quickly started making memes using a video clip of one of his possible successors, Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo, posted of himself on 20 January, proudly putting on a red Make America great again cap and calling Trump’s return to office “a great day”.

They remixed the original video of the governor with super-imposed text underscoring that Trump had imposed a massive tax on Brazilian exports to the US.

Trump puts transportation secretary Sean Duffy in charge of Nasa too

Amid concerns that a wave of staff reductions threaten the core missions of Nasa, Donald Trump just announced that he is asking the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, to also serve as interim administrator of the space agency.

Trump announced the appointment hours hours after Politico reported that the agency plans to get rid of nearly 2,000 scientists, despite the fact that it still has no administrator.

Duffy has no scientific background, but does have experience with transportation, as a former contestant on the MTV reality TV game show Road Rules, a Winnebago driving event.

Brazil’s president rejects Trump's effort to use tariffs to extract political concessions

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, firmly rejected Donald Trump’s demand that legal proceedings against former president Jair Bolsonaro be dropped and his claim that a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports was necessary to close a trade deficit that does not, in fact, exist.

In a statement posted on social media and his government’s website, the Brazilian president responded, point by point, to the claims made by Trump in a letter addressed to him earlier on Wednesday.

“Brazil is a sovereign nation with independent institutions and will not accept any form of tutelage,” Lula began.

He then pointed out that the charges against Bolsonaro, for allegedly plotting to remain in power after losing his bid for re-election, “fall exclusively under the jurisdiction of Brazil’s Judicial Branch and, as such, are not subject to any interference or threats that could compromise the independence of national institutions”.

The president also rejected Trump’s claim that Brazil’s efforts to regulate the operations of US social media platforms on its territory in accordance with its own laws are not, as Trump had claimed, a form of censorship.

“Brazilian society rejects hateful content, racism, child pornography, scams, fraud, and speeches against human rights and democratic freedom” Lula wrote. “In Brazil, freedom of expression must not be confused with aggression or violent practices. All companies—whether domestic or foreign—must comply with Brazilian law in order to operate within our territory.”

The Brazilian president, a former trade unionist who leads a workers’ party, then corrected Trump’s false claim that the US runs a trade deficit with Brazil. “Statistics from the U.S. government itself show a surplus of $410 billion in the trade of goods and services with Brazil over the past 15 years,” Lula noted.

Any increase in tariffs by the US, he added, “will be addressed in accordance with Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law”.

That law, passed in April, was written specifically to prepare for the possibility that Trump would impose tariffs on Brazil. It authorizes the legislative branch, in coordination with businesses, to “adopt countermeasures in the form of restrictions to the importation of goods and services or measures to suspend concessions in the areas of trade, investments, and obligations related to intellectual property rights, as well as measures to suspend other obligations foreseen in any of the country’s trade agreements”.

The response from Brazil’s president came after an indirect exchange through the media earlier in the week. After Trump claimed on Sunday that BRICS, a group of emerging economies founded in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, was an “anti-American” grouping he intended to demolish through tariffs, Lula was asked for his response at a BRICS summit in Rio. “The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor,” he said. “If he thinks he can impose tariffs, other countries have the right to impose tariffs too.”

The Trump administration plans to cut at least 2,145 high-ranking employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) with specialized skills or management responsibilities, according to documents obtained by Politico, the news outlet reported on Wednesday.

Most employees leaving are in GS-13 to GS-15 positions, senior-level government ranks, depriving the agency of decades of experience as part of a push to slash the size of the federal government through early retirement, buyouts and deferred resignations.

According to Politico, the documents indicate that 1,818 of the staff currently serve in core mission areas, like science or human space flight, while the others work in mission support roles including IT.

Asked about the proposed cuts, the agency’s spokesperson Bethany Stevens told Reuters: “Nasa remains committed to our mission as we work within a more prioritized budget.”

Since Trump returned to office in January, planning in the US space industry and Nasa’s workforce of 18,000 has been thrown into chaos by the layoffs and proposed budget cuts for fiscal year 2026 that would cancel dozens of science programs.

Last week, seven former heads of Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate signed a joint letter to congress condemning the Trump White House’s proposed 47% cuts to Nasa science activities in its 2026 budget proposal. In the letter, the former officials urged congress “to preserve U.S. leadership in space exploration and reject the unprecedented cuts to space science concocted by the White House’s Budget Director, Russ Vought.”

“The economics of these proposed cuts ignore a fundamental truth: investments in NASA science have been and are a powerful driver of the U.S. economy and technological leadership”, the former officials wrote to the House appropriations committee. “In our former roles leading NASA’s space science enterprise, we consistently saw skilled teams innovate in the face of seemingly impossible goals, including landing a car-sized rover on Mars with pinpoint precision, build a massive telescope that can unfold in the vacuum of space to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, design and operate a spacecraft hardy enough to survive temperatures of many thousands of degrees at the Sun, inspiring young and old alike worldwide by the stunning images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and pioneering the use of small satellites for science.”

They also warned that the cuts threatened to cede US leadership to China. “Global space competition extends far past Moon and Mars exploration. The Chinese space science program is aggressive, ambitious, and well-funded. It is proposing missions to return samples from Mars, explore Neptune, monitor climate change for the benefit of the Chinese industry and population, and peer into the universe — all activities that the FY 2026 NASA budget proposal indicates the U.S. will abandon.”

Nasa also remains without a confirmed administrator, since the Trump administration abruptly withdrew its nominee, the billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, in an apparent act of retaliation against Elon Musk, who had proposed his nomination.

In a social media post attacking Musk on Sunday, Trump wrote that he thought it would have been thought “inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA, when NASA is such a big part of Elon’s corporate life”.

Trump's letter to Brazil cites imaginary trade deficit

Leaving aside the heated political rhetoric, there is a glaring factual error in the letter Donald Trump released on Wednesday, imposing a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports, which is the claim that Brazil’s trade policies are causing the US to run “unsustainable Trade Deficits” with that nation.

In fact, the US runs a trade surplus with Brazil, thanks in part to a free-trade agreement expanded in 2020, during Trump’s first term.

Here is the latest data from the Brazil Trade Summary posted on the website of the United States trade representative, Jamieson Greer:

U.S. total goods trade with Brazil were an estimated $92.0 billion in 2024. U.S. goods exports to Brazil in 2024 were $49.7 billion, up 11.3 percent ($5.0 billion) from 2023. U.S. goods imports from Brazil in 2024 totaled $42.3 billion, up 8.3 percent ($3.2 billion) from 2023. The U.S. goods trade surplus with Brazil was $7.4 billion in 2024, a 31.9 percent increase ($1.8 billion) over 2023.

Trump demands Brazil drop charges against Bolsonaro, former president who tried to stay in office after election loss

Donald Trump’s enraged letter to his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, announcing that the US would impose a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil, said that the move was motivated in part by the treatment of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was barred from running for office until 2030 and is on trial for allegedly plotting to remain in office after losing his bid for re-election in 2022.

The culmination of Bolsonaro’s efforts to hold on to power was a riot by his supporters in the nation’s capital who tried to prevent the transfer of power to the election’s winner, Lula, on 8 January 2023.

Given that Trump still maintains that he was within his rights to plot to remain in office himself, after losing his bid for re-election in 2020, and the efforts culminated in a riot by his supporters on January 6 2021, it is not hard to see why Trump seems to be so dedicated to the idea that Bolsonaro did nothing wrong.

As our colleague Tiago Rogero reported last month, Bolsonaro denied masterminding a far-right coup plot during testimony in his trial before Brazil’s supreme court, but did admit to taking part in meetings to discuss “alternative ways” of staying in power after his defeat in the 2022 election.

In just over two hours of questioning, the 70-year-old said that after the electoral court confirmed Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s election victory, “we studied other alternatives within the constitution”.

Those options included the deployment of military forces and suspension of some civil liberties, Bolsonaro said, but he argued that such discussions could not be considered an attempted coup.

During his first term in office, it was obvious that Trump saw then president Bolsonaro – a far-right, climate-change denier – as a kindred spirit, and Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, cultivated close ties to Trump’s inner circle, and family, during visits to the US.

Eduardo Bolsonaro took leave from his post as a congressman in Brazil and has been living in the US since March, lobbying Trump and Republican politicians to impose sanctions on Brazil.

Brazil's currency plunges over Trump's punitive 50% tariff to avenge Bolsonaro

Brazil’s currency, the real, fell over 2% against the dollar late on Wednesday after Trump posted a letter online imposing a 50% tariff on imports and scolding the nation for its supposed mistreatment of its former leader, Jair Bolsonaro, who stands accused of trying to overturn his 2022 election loss through a coup.

Trump’s letter said his administration will start collecting the 50% tariff on products imported to the US from Brazil, “separate from all sectoral tariffs”, starting on 1 August.

Trump imposes 50% tariff on Brazil, citing 'Witch Hunt' against Bolsonaro

Donald Trump announced a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil in a letter posted on social media in which he began by complaining about the the prosecution of his ally, the former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Until now, Trump’s tariff letters have been nearly identical, changing little more than the names of countries and leaders and the tariff rates, but the intemperate letter addressed to Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was markedly different, beginning with a diatribe about the supposed “international disgrace” of the “Witch Hunt” against Bolsonaro, who is now standing trial before the country’s supreme court for his role in an alleged coup attempt on 8 January 2023, following his election defeat.

The pro-Bolsonaro riots at the seat of Brazil’s federal government in Brasília that day closely echoed the pro-Trump riot at the US capitol on January 6 2021.

“The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader during his Term , including by the United States, is an international disgrace. This Trial should not be taking place. It is a Witch Hunt THAT should end IMMEDIATELY!”, Trump wrote, employing the idiosyncratic writing style of his social media posts in a formal letter.

“Due in part to Brazil’s insidious attacks on Free Elections, and the fundamental Free Speech Rights of Americans (as lately illustrated by the Brazilian Supreme Court, which has issued hundreds of SECRET and UNLAWFUL Censorship Orders to U.S. Social Media platforms, threatening them with Millions of Dollars in Fines and Eviction from Brazilian Social Media market),” Trump added, “starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge Brazil a Tariff of 50% on any and all Brazilian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs.”

In addition to his outrage over the prosecution of Bolsonaro, over the failed coup attempt, Trump’s letter referred to the country’s decision to ban the former president from running in the next election, and to a dispute over a Brazilian supreme court judge ordering Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, and Rumble, a video-sharing platform JD Vance invested in, to remove the US-based accounts of a leading supporter of Bolsonaro.

As the Guardian reported in February, Trump’s company and Rumble, which is backed by the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sued the Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes over the orders in federal court in Florida.

'I want a deal, but not at any price,' says Netanyahu following Trump meetings

In brief remarks to the press earlier, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that following his second meeting with Donald Trump in two days: “President Trump and I have a common goal: we want to achieve the release of our hostages, we want to end Hamas rule in Gaza, and we want to make sure that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel any more.”

On the ceasefire negotiations, the Israeli leader, who was at the US Capitol for meetings with lawmakers, went on:

President Trump wants a deal, but not at any price. I want a deal, but not at any price.

Israel has security requirements and other requirements, and we’re working together to try to achieve them.

Donald Trump earlier told reporters there is a “very good chance” of a ceasefire in Gaza this week or next. He said

There’s a very good chance of a settlement this week on Gaza. We have a chance this week or next week.

Trump made it clear several times that his priority was achieving “peace” and getting the hostages back, but – like Netanyahu – he made no mention of other urgent matters like the desperate need to safely get aid to starving Palestinians in the strip.

Asked by a reporter whether pushing out Palestinians to third countries they have no connection to will make Israel safer in the long run, Netanyahu said:

We’re not pushing out anyone, and I don’t think that’s President Trump’s suggestion. His suggestion was giving them a choice.

He claimed Palestinians should have “freedom of choice” to leave Gaza, “no coercion, no forcible dislocation. If people want to leave Gaza they should be able to do so,” he said of the besieged territory, much of which his military has flattened to rubble.

Israel stands accused of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and has made clear its intention to seize parts of the territory and remain there indefinitely.

Benjamin Netanyahu at the Capitol on Wednesday. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Supreme court declines to let Florida enforce immigration crackdown

The US supreme court has maintained a judicial block on a Republican-crafted Florida law that makes it a crime for immigrants in the US illegally to enter the state.

The justices denied a request by state officials to lift an order by Florida-based US district judge Kathleen Williams that barred them from carrying out arrests and prosecutions under the law while a legal challenge plays out in lower courts. Williams ruled that Florida’s law conflicted with the federal government’s authority over immigration policy.

Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier and other state officials filed the emergency request on 17 June asking the supreme court to halt the judge’s order. Williams found that the Florida law was likely unconstitutional for encroaching on the federal government’s exclusive authority over US immigration policy.

The state’s request to the justices was backed by America First Legal, a conservative group co-founded by Stephen Miller, a senior aide to Donald Trump and a key architect of the administration’s hardline immigration policies.

Florida’s immigration measure was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and signed into law in February by governor Ron DeSantis. It made Florida one of at least seven states to pass such laws in recent years, according to court filings.

The American Civil Liberties Union in April sued in federal court to challenge the law. Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, in a statement issued after the challenge was filed said that Florida’s law “is not just unconstitutional - it’s cruel and dangerous”.

Williams issued a preliminary injunction in April that barred Florida officials from enforcing the measure.

The Atlanta-based 11th US circuit court of appeals in June upheld the judge’s ruling, prompting the Florida officials to make an emergency request to the supreme court.

On the same day that Florida’s attorney general filed the state’s supreme court request, Williams found him in civil contempt of court for failing to follow her order to direct all state law enforcement officers not to enforce the immigration measure while it remained blocked by the judge.

Williams ordered Uthmeier to provide an update to the court every two weeks on any enforcement of the law.