This article was written for LAB partner Agência Pública and adapted and edited for LAB. Main image: www.coletividade-evolutiva.com.br/
Four Key Points for understanding Trump’s war against Brazilian justice
On Saturday 22 February, the video platform Rumble was suspended in Brazil following an order by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Anatel (the National Telecommunications Agency) notified more than 20,000 internet providers and operators.
Moraes had required Rumble to suspend accounts linked to Brazilian far-right influencer Allan dos Santos, currently a fugitive in the US, and to appoint a legal representative in Brazil. Rumble did not comply. However, Moraes was also responding to provocative moves by Rumble and Donald Trump himself last week. Just hours after former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was indicted by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) on 19 February, Trump vented his displeasure with a lawsuit. His company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which owns the social media platform Truth Social, filed a lawsuit against Moraes in a Florida court alongside Rumble, arguing that Brazil’s Supreme Court rulings violate the American right to freedom of speech—the well-known First Amendment.
The companies are asking the US court to rule that Moraes cannot dictate their actions since they are based in the US, even if they provide services in Brazil. The timing speaks volumes. Now, after Rumble’s suspension, the companies have requested an injunction to immediately and temporarily punish Moraes. If you already knew all this, let’s dive deeper into the nuances behind this battle.
A frustrating response
The first thing to note is that Trump’s lawsuit doesn’t come close to what Bolsonaro supporters were expecting, given his son Eduardo Bolsonaro’s repeated trips to the US to request economic sanctions in hopes of preventing his father’s arrest.
Incidentally, just days after the indictment, Eduardo popped up again in Florida, attending the CPAC conference, where he denounced so-called ‘censorship’ and ‘dictatorship’ and called for amnesty for Brazil’s 6 January rioters. Trump, in his speech, gave a nod to the Bolsonaro family – ‘a very good family’– calling Eduardo ‘my friend’ by name and saying: ‘Send my regards to your father.’ But there were no draconian tariffs or threats of sanctions from the US government.
A legally baseless lawsuit, but a powerful political tool
What we got instead was a sham legal action, lacking legal consistency, but that should be understood as: the manufacture of a political event, content production for extremist networks and a clear message from the American president like his ‘Say Hi’ to Bolsonaro at CPAC.
In typical MAGA fashion, the lawsuit includes conspiratorial insinuations that go beyond mere attacks on Moraes. For example, it notes that Moraes ‘was promoted to the Supreme Court after a plane crash that killed his predecessor, Justice Teori Zavascki’, who, in turn, ‘was leading Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash), a multi-billion-dollar anti-corruption investigation in Brazil’ – a suggestion meant as a dog whistle for conspiracy-theorists. It also states that Moraes took office ‘despite having no prior experience as a judge.’
Later, Trump Media takes the accusations even further, claiming that Alexandre de Moraes bypassed international co-operation mechanisms to enforce the platform’s suspension and instead ‘fabricated jurisdiction through coercion.’ Their main argument is that Rumble owes no explanation to Brazilian courts because it is based in Florida and should not be forced to have a legal representative in the country—a claim that disrespects the Brazilian legislation on which Moraes grounds his decision.
Notably, Trump’s lawyers refer to Allan dos Santos, the far-right influencer and fugitive in the US, as ‘Political Dissident A’. They also attempt to make a technical argument that wouldn’t fool anyone with a basic understanding of how the internet works. The lawsuit claims that ‘since Rumble’s infrastructure is globally integrated, suspending its service in Brazil would impair its ability to fully serve US users, disrupting freedom of speech.’
In reality, the suspension is merely a URL-block by Brazilian providers—it has nothing to do with Rumble’s ‘integrated system’! Similar reasoning is used to justify the participation of Trump’s company in the lawsuit. The petition argues that ‘Truth Social relies on Rumble’s cloud hosting and video streaming infrastructure to provide multimedia content to its user base. If Rumble is suspended, this suspension would necessarily interfere with Truth Social’s operations.’ Again, this is nonsense. If Truth Social wants to operate in Brazil, it should adopt a video platform that complies with Brazilian law.
A legal playbook for sanctioning Moraes
The most striking section of the lawsuit is where it compares Moraes’s decisions to the ruling of the International Criminal Court (ICC) calling for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity. Through Executive Order 14203, Trump ordered financial asset freezes and travel bans against ICC officials and even their families. Calling the Supreme Court rulings a ‘unilateral and illegal extension of Brazilian judicial authority into the United States’ and ‘extraterritorial censorship’, Trump’s lawyers lay out a roadmap for personally penalizing Alexandre de Moraes, using the ICC precedent.
‘Minister Moraes’s extrajudicial tactics also directly conflict with US public policy, as articulated in Executive Order 14203, issued by President Trump earlier this month. The EO opposes foreign judicial overreach that seeks to impose jurisdiction over US entities without consent. By coercing Rumble to appoint Brazilian lawyers and threatening punitive actions for noncompliance, Minister Moraes’s actions mirror the type of extraterritorial conduct condemned by the EO,’ the lawsuit states.
According to Trump’s lawyers, ‘the parallels between the ICC’s actions condemned in EO-14203 and Minister Moraes’s conduct are striking,’ the text continues. ‘The Executive Order further emphasizes that foreign judicial overreach is not merely a procedural issue but a substantive threat to the United States.’ They argue that ‘If left unchecked, Minister Moraes’s actions will set a dangerous precedent in which foreign courts could routinely impose their laws on US companies.’
Is Trump’s media company just a political front?
There’s another facet of this fight that matters—a lot. Our fourth point concerns Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), whose main business is the social media platform Truth Social. After reading its 2024 annual report and digging through the internet, it is clear that this corporation is designed to serve Trump’s political project, as it fails to be a viable business enterprise. Consider this: launched in 2021, it has just over 6 million active users. That’s minuscule compared to Facebook (3 billion), YouTube (2.5 billion), WhatsApp and Instagram (2 billion each). Even Rumble has over 50 million.
Trump himself—by far the only account that matters on the platform—doesn’t even reach 10 million followers, and his frequent posts barely get 2,000 to 4,000 likes. By comparison, he has over 100 million followers on Twitter, and Elon Musk has over 200 million—it’s no surprise that Trump started using Twitter again, despite once vowing not to.
Truth Social is, therefore, a resounding failure as a social network—because it has no people. Truth Social has strengthened its pact with Rumble in the lawsuit against Moraes as an indirect way for Trump to be a party to the legal process, for the purposes of intimidating Brazilian Justice. In his crusade for freedom of speech (or freedom to oppress), Trump appears to be using Truth Social as a judicial probe, testing out measures that could later be adopted by his government. Or, this might just be another manufactured spectacle, using the US legal system to create headlines that vanish into thin air.
