With the government shut down, with ICE terrorizing American cities, with the National Guard used as strong-arm intimidation cutouts, and with Donald Trump’s Department of Justice indicting his political enemies, America’s proposed $20 billion bailout of Argentina initially flew under the radar.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spun the move as a lifeline to Javier Milei, Argentina’s embattled president and Trump’s authoritarian pal. But the bailout would also help major U.S. hedge funds that made risky bets on the Argentine economy. During Milei’s October 14 visit to the White House, Trump clarified that Argentina would receive the $20 billion only if the ruling party of the chainsaw-wielding Milei won in the country’s elections on October 26. The next day, Bessent sweetened the deal by making it a potential $40 million bailout.

Something about this bizarre “deal” to incentivize a win for an authoritarian regime while helping out billionaires calls to mind Nazis. When a Nazi-looted painting was recently discovered in a Buenos Aires house owned by the daughter of a Nazi fugitive, it was a reminder that both Argentina and Brazil were Nazi havens: Argentina welcomed up to 5,000 Nazis after the war and Brazil between 1,500 and 2,000.

If Brazil’s 2022 national election had turned out differently and Jair Bolsonaro were still president, Trump would have another authoritarian buddy ruling a former Nazi haven. But Bolsonaro not only lost the election; he thought he could pull a Trump by attempting a coup. Despite Trump’s threats to impose sanctions and stiff tariffs on Brazil if it convicted his fellow wannabe dictator, Brazil’s Supreme Court did just that on September 11: it sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison. (Hence Trump’s 50% tariffs on our coffee.)

However shaky the rule of Brazil’s current president, the left-leaning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, it is truly amazing that Brazil could do what the U.S. Senate could not: convict a treasonous president and bar him from future election to office.

I’d been thinking about Brazil even before the news of Bolsonaro’s conviction. While at New York’s Film Forum in August, I saw a poster for an upcoming screening of Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian comedy that has drawn a cult following. The British film did very well in the U.K. when it opened but not so much in America. Though its plot has nothing to do with the country of Brazil, it takes its title from “Aquarela do Brasil,” the breezy samba song that became a pop hit in 1939, the year Hitler pulled a black cloud over the globe.

Brazil is neither explicitly violent nor funny in its violence even though everyone understands that citizens are regularly tortured to death and their survivors billed for the torturing. It’s an idiosyncratically retro, farcically analog world where the humor is silly, absurd, and never redeemed—all in a Monty Python shade of black. Gilliam thought that the best way not to date his dystopia was to create a society that felt old-timey yet futuristic, mixing familiar drudgery (grim, windowless, and entirely gray workplaces) with the colossal, anxiety-provoking fascist architecture of an unembodied state. The citizens seem to share the British propensity for privacy and manners, which comes in handy when everyone is constantly surveilled. It’s like a mashup of an Ealing comedy and George Orwell’s 1984. Except that the mind-numbing consumerism within the affluent class provides grotesque color. Aging women are expected to distort themselves with plastic surgery even at the risk of death.

Two scenes from Brazil have stayed with me for decades. In the first, Sam Lowry, the petty functionary protagonist played by Jonathan Pryce, is given a miserable new office only to realize that the tiny desk against the wall is shared by the occupant on the other side. Thus ensues a tug-of-war, with each man pulling more of the desk to his side. You might interpret this as quintessential communism, where everyone must share to the extent of always getting half. But it can also represent zero-sum capitalism, where every human interaction is reduced to conflict, with a winner and a loser.

The other scene is at a fancy restaurant where Sam goes with his vapid socialite mother to have lunch with one of her friends and a frumpy daughter they want to set him up with. While they are eating, a terrorist bomb goes off on the other side of the restaurant, with an array of bloodied and blown-apart diners. And yet anyone still intact behaves as if nothing at all has happened as the waiters carry over prissy decorative screens to block the unpleasantness. The bourgeois indifference to death and suffering is hard to shake.

Though the humor and gags are simple, Brazil is not a simple movie. The Matrix, by contrast, is incredibly simple: the brilliantly evil robots need catatonic human bodies to keep extending themselves, and only “special” humans can see this. In Brazil, it’s not even clear who or what is on the other side of this Rube Goldberg society. Though the authoritarianism appears more inept than brilliant, its storm troopers manage to keep the cowering masses performing their charade. The ineptitude and clownishness are part of the terror, whether intentional or not. We don’t know when or how this regime started or what came before it. We know there’s an active resistance, but it’s a resistance willing to blow apart innocent people.

I saw the movie when young and was unable to empathize with Sam Lowry. I expected the trope of the ordinary man made into a hero by either twist of fate or sexual desire. But heroism doesn’t really happen to Sam. His response to a world he abhors is a retreat into fantasy, which Gilliam populates with a (pre-CGI) metal-winged angel fighting a gigantic armored samurai. After all, daydreaming himself to be the heroic Archangel Michael is the only thing he can do that is not surveilled by the government. But even when reality intrudes, Sam can’t let go of the fantasy. The tragedy of Brazil is that Sam is already past caring for his fellow human beings. We learn the extent of his fantasy at the grim conclusion, when he is lobotomized into imbecility. Fantasy has always been his conscious choice.

What I didn’t realize in 1985 is that Brazil is entirely about complicit complacency. Robert De Niro’s wily American resistance fighter who tells Sam “We’re all in this together, kid” is just an element of Sam’s fantasy. And this is why “Aquarela do Brasil” as meme song ultimately makes sense. It promised the world of 1939 a sun-drenched paradise that was “real” only for those rich and powerful enough to exploit widespread poverty. It provided choose-your-own-escapism to a world on the brink of genocide and nuclear devastation. And when the unfathomable carnage was over, some of the most evil perpetrators were able to escape back into the Brazil of 1939, as if nothing happened.

The authoritarianism on the surface of the Trump regime would seem the opposite of Gilliam’s evil faceless state. With Trump, the combover dictator you see is the one you get. Trump’s ideal world is Mar-a-Lago and the bare-assed glitz of an Ipanema floorshow, not a Fritz Lang cityscape. But something about the buffoonish tragedy of American life right now reminds me of Brazil. Perhaps it’s the bizarre retro fixation. That’s all Trump is—retro, his mind locked in a horrendous 1980s Gilded Age cocaine island dictator swank. With Brazil, you get 1930s gossamer glamour mixed with dour German Expressionism. Both the man and the movie look to a pastiche of styles that have long ago run their course. Trump paving the Rose Garden, taking over Kennedy Center, and smashing the East Wing of the White House to smithereens to build his Third World dictator ballroom seem like Simpson gags from 1994. Trump being rendered immobile by a U.N. elevator reminds me of the movie’s slapstick humor, same for those TikToks of bungled ICE chases put to what everyone calls “Benny Hill music.”

Trump’s dementia being a DC open secret also reminds me of the unsettling paradoxes of Brazil. His chronic brain fog coupled with his chronic physical fatigue can make him appear an emasculated old man collapsing into himself. But his ruthlessness as the self-designated embodiment of the “state” is only expanding and accelerating. Before January 6, 2021, the mainstream media sanitized Trump as either a colorful “character” or too stupid to do much damage, like a Hogan’s Heroes Nazi. After the storming of the Capitol, the media temporarily opened its eyes to what Trump always was: a habitual abuser of women and children, a racist with open disgust for non-white people, a sociopath who doesn’t just want his enemies locked up but killed.

If you need confirmation that the reality TV star railing against “bad hombres” in 2016 was talking about himself, there is evidence aplenty. According to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, recommended her plastic surgeon to him when he wanted scalp reduction surgery (a gross procedure for balding men). Per Wolff, this doctor had already performed liposuction on Trump’s waist and neck when he put Trump’s bald head under the knife in 1989. Apparently the post-op pain was too much for Trump, who took out his rage on Ivana by raping her and literally pulling out hair from her scalp. This scalp rage period roughly coincided with the full-page add he took out in the New York Times demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five. We can see the same void of morality today when he speaks about murdering people in fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela: “We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.” And when his greed coalesces with his racism, the hate and contempt are startling, as evident in his 1993 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Native American Affairs, when he was trying to protect his Atlantic City casinos from competition at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. “They don’t look like Indians to me,” he said of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe.

The luridness of Trump’s partnership with Jeffrey Epstein goes beyond anything in Brazil, with the rulers of the world passing around children to be raped like they were pagers beeping when your table was ready. It would take mixing Eyes Wide Shut with The Hunger Games to get to this level of bad. Likewise, the image of Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, with her hair extensions and face full of blown-in insulation—plus a $50,000 gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona—standing in front of shirtless U.S. deportees crammed into three tiers of Auschwitz-style bunks at El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center defies description.

In Brazil, the state’s metaphoric monsters won’t let you go: even the bricks of buildings and sidewalks sprout arms that grab you by the ankle when you try to escape. And that’s how it is with Trump himself: this horrifying persistence, this stultifying omnipresence. For whatever reason, he has millions in his grip through obsessive and endless lie-telling and promotion of pure fantasy. He has willed into being the self-perpetuated myth of a successful businessman who hates immigrant freeloaders and promises never-ending bling to those real Americans who deserve it. He’s now spreading his fantasies faster than ever through AI slop videos he posts directly from White House accounts, whether it’s him going Apocalypse Now on the city of Chicago or him in a fighter jet dumping a payload of shit on No Kings protesters.

I suppose what most reminds me of Brazil is us, our complacency with each firing of Trump’s prosperity gospel teargas cannisters. Despite so much technological innovation, we rely even more on fantasy of all kinds (sudden Instagram fame, a big Draft Kings or cryptocurrency win, living vicariously in romantasy) to escape the physical limitations of being human. For decades, we’ve sought out dystopian stories to horrify and unnerve us. Given our diminishing attention spans, we require greater shock-and-awe brazenness and violence to hold our interest. What we haven’t noticed is how this dopamine quest has made us fantasy consumption addicts with no need but the buying power to make it all continue. We wince at the White House being stormed in the 2024 film Civil War, but when half of the monument gets demolished by the trashy real estate developer slumped daily in front of television cameras, we just add an extra poppin’ eyeball emoji to the thread.

In Brazil, it’s shocking when the torturer with the terrifying Asian baby mask reveals himself to be Sam’s friend (played by Michael Palin) but less so when the friend proceeds with his task. After all, even Sam knows that everyone is complicit. When he finally fells the gigantic armored samurai in his fantasy and removes the mask, it’s his own human face that he sees.

In late-2025 the America, the salvation from Trump’s version of the gigantic armored samurai appears to be the inflatable Portland frog and its menagerie friends. Those of us on Team Frog may be down at the moment, but we’re not staying home like Sam Lowry and getting lost in our fantasies. We understand the need to go outside, for there will come a time when justice and the rule of law again prevail in the United States, and the guilty will be held accountable. They may think they have an Argentina with Versailles ballrooms to escape to, but it will only be in their minds. §