President Donald Trump claimed Monday that Brazil’s presidential election, which leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won, looked like it was “rigged” without citing evidence.
“It looked like another rigged election, frankly,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. “I didn’t take sides, but it was a terrible look for the world. Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked really bad to me.”
In the same gaggle, however, Trump demurred on if there would be any consequences. When asked if he would “do something about the election,” the president responded, “I am not running Brazil, I’m running the USA.” He added that “I like Lula,” but it was a “bad look.”
Lula’s historic win securing a fourth term in office Sunday was a loss for Trump and his movement. The president never explicitly endorsed a candidate, but he had embraced right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro at times, as had the broader MAGA movement.
Trump has also publicly promoted his father, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
The comments mirrored those of the younger Bolsonaro, who claimed that the election was a result of foul play. The losing candidate pointed to a late-Sunday decision by a Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice that extended voting by two hours to account for transportation delays.
Reuters reported that fewer than 35,000 votes were cast in the extended hours, far lower than Lula’s 4 million vote margin, and Bolsonaro’s party also requested polls stay open in some regions.
Trump said Monday that the “extension given was very strange.”
Bolsonaro, like his father four years prior, has refused to concede and called for the results to be annulled.
Brazil has one of the most secure electoral systems in region, researchers tracking Latin American elections say, and requires adults younger than 70 to vote, grounds under which both campaigns were able to call for extensions after bad weather and transportation slowdowns hindered the ability of some voters to go to the polls.
A Brazilian official expressed confidence that the U.S. would eventually recognize Lula's victory, pointing to the voting numbers as being hard to dispute.
Besides, the official added, "So what if Trump doesn’t recognize? At the most, we can break diplomatic ties, to the benefit of China, but the U.S. will not invade Brazil to impose a puppet government. We are not a Venezuela. Our government will stand." The official was granted anonymity to candidly discuss a sensitive diplomatic issue.
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether the U.S. would congratulate Lula on his victory.
Lula's win suggested that there was a limit to the Trump administration's ability to impose America's will throughout the hemisphere, including its efforts to push Latin America's politics into a more rightward direction.
The Brazilian leader had not only defied Trump on issues such as tariffs, he also cast Sunday's vote about being key to saving the country's democracy and ability to make its own independent choices. That could include deepening ties with China even further if relations with Washington keep deteriorating.
The administration has oscillated between actively targeting Lula and maintaining a fragile truce with Brazil's left-wing government. In 2025, the administration imposed high tariffs as a way to coerce Brasília into ending prosecutions of former President Bolsonaro, who was investigated for his role stoking an aborted coup in the aftermath of the country's 2022 election.
But those measures had the unintended effect of bolstering Lula’s political standing, and that failure, coupled with back-channeling from business interests with ties to both countries, smoothed matters over for a while.
Lula’s win has spurred quick backlash from some in Trump’s MAGA camp, who have also espoused unverified claims of corruption, including Kari Lake, Trump’s nominee as ambassador to Jamaica who dismantled the Voice of America earlier in Trump’s term, and Steve Bannon, former close aide to Trump.
Bannon called on Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to cut off diplomatic relations, and “shut down everything with Brazil.”
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