The new US tariffs on Brazil aren’t about Brazil

What, exactly, is the Trump administration thinking? A well-worn question finds fresh fodder this week as the White House prepares to impose a sweeping new set of tariffs on Brazil. Again.

The new measures will hit Latin America’s largest economy with 25% duties on a range of products, including timber, clothing, sugar, paper, and shoes. In all, about $10 billion worth of trade is affected, about a fifth of Brazil’s total exports to the US.

The White House says Brazil has employed “unfair trading practices” in a number of areas, including local financial services and agriculture.

But there’s a political angle too. Announcing the tariffs, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a shot at Brazil’s leftwing president Luiz Lula Inácio da Silva. “For the past year,” Rubio posted on X, “Lula has put his own ego ahead of making a deal.”

All of which makes it even stranger that one person who is arguably thrilled about these new tariffs is Lula himself.

“These are a gift for Lula,” says Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at the FGV School of International Relations in São Paulo. To understand why, we have to briefly rewatch the previous season of the current US-Brazil telenovela.

Last year, Trump slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil as part of his broader “Liberation Day” trade war salvo. At the time, the White House had two aims. First, to force Lula, a leftwing stalwart, to stop the prosecution of Brazil’s far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who was on trial for the coup he plotted after losing the 2022 election to Lula.

And second, to gain US access to Brazil’s rich reserves of rare earths and critical minerals, part of a larger strategy of trying to break China’s global stranglehold on the industry.

It didn’t work. Bolsonaro, whose family had lobbied Trump for those tariffs, was convicted anyway. He is now serving a 27-year sentence. Meanwhile, the aging and increasingly unpopular Lula caught a fresh political wind by standing up to the gringo bullying. And Trump, worried about stubborn inflation at home, dropped most of the tariffs entirely. Despite a brief bilateral swoon between the two men – their “29-second romance” became famous – no new bilateral deal was reached, in part because US demands ran afoul of Brazil’s own trade laws and agreements with other blocs.

Now, months later, with nothing to show for the previous tariffs, the US is taking another run at Brazil.

This time, however, things are a little different. For one thing, the US – under pressure from industry lobbies – has already exempted major Brazilian exports to the US, including coffee, beef, orange juice, and airplane parts. That shields US industries and consumers, but also blunts the overall impact on Brazil.

But most intriguingly, Brazil is now just months away from a high-stakes presidential election pitting Lula against Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio, a more moderate but (far) less charismatic version of his father.

Lula currently enjoys a slim polling lead over Flávio, who is clearly the preferred candidate for Trump.

The strange part is: the tariffs actually stand to help Lula. The perceived attack on Brazil’s sovereignty “is useful campaign material,” says Stuenkel, “but at the same time, it’s really not that bad from an economic point of view.”

That’s not only because of the exemptions, but also because Brazil has already been steadily decreasing its reliance on the US market. Over the first half of this year, Brazil’s US-bound exports fell to their lowest mark ever, accounting for less than 10% of Brazil’s overall exports.

Meanwhile, polls show just over half of Brazilians place the blame for the tariffs on Flávio, who has visited the Trumps several times in recent months. Never mind that Flávio himself seems to have actually lobbied for a delay in the measures, fearing that they would help his opponent. More than 40% of Brazilians now say the new economic attack by the US would make them vote for Lula.

So why is Trump imposing tariffs that could hurt his preferred candidate? That might, experts say, be the wrong question entirely.

“This has nothing to do with the election,” says Chris Garman, top Brazil expert at Eurasia Group, who has followed the politics of the tariffs closely in both Brasilia and Washington.

It may not even be about Brazil.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration suffered a major defeat to its trade agenda when the Supreme Court struck down the legality of the “Liberation Day” tariffs of 2025.

Since then, the White House, still committed to using tariffs to get what it wants in foreign policy, has sought to put its policy on a firmer legal footing, using a different part of the trade code known as “Section 301,” which permits the president to impose tariffs on countries that use “unfair trade practices.”

Brazil is the first major economy to get hit with 301-based tariffs since the SCOTUS ruling. Coming just days after Trump announced fresh tariffs on Canada under a different section of the trade code, the broader pattern is coming into view.

The Trump administration is simply making an example of Brazil, along with Canada, to send a wider signal, says Garman.

“If you don’t strike a deal with the US, you’re still gonna get whacked.”