Trump Says Brazil's Election 'Looked Like Another Rigged Election' as a Judge Pulls Flávio Bolsonaro's Passports

President Trump has now said out loud what millions of Brazilians are asking. Leaving for a rally in Mississippi on Monday, he was asked whether Sunday's presidential runoff in Brazil, won by leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was fair. "It looked terrible to me," Trump said. "I didn't take sides, but it looked like another rigged election, frankly."

He kept going. "Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked very bad to me. I didn't take sides. I didn't endorse anybody or anything. But I watched the election, and it looked so, so corrupt. So terrible."

Asked if he wants to do something about it, Trump drew a line. "Well, I'm not running Brazil. I'm running the USA," he said. "I like Lula. I get along with him very well. I just think it had a very bad look, the election, the way it was tabulated. The extension given was very strange."

The extension he's talking about

Brazil's polls closed at 5 p.m. Sunday. One minute later, Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin, who was Lula's personal lawyer until Lula put him on the court in 2023, granted a request from Lula's campaign and ordered two more hours of voting "in all polling stations in all of Brazil." Lula's campaign had complained that buses stopped running in cities where he draws big support.

Zanin doesn't even sit on the court that runs Brazil's elections. The president of that court, the TSE, Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, said afterward that no regulation authorized any extension and that nothing like it had happened in the court's history. That night, the TSE declared Lula the winner with 51.79% to 48.21% for Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Here's the catch Trump's word "strange" points at. By the time the order landed, almost every machine in the country had already been sealed, and a sealed Brazilian voting machine can't be switched back on. A g1 review of TSE machine logs found that only 5,326 of 497,897 machines, about 1 in 100, were still running at 7 p.m. or later. So the "nationwide" extension reached only the places that happened to still be open.

Think of a referee who adds two minutes of stoppage time after the final whistle, but only on the fields where the players hadn't left yet. Newsroom tallies of the logs count roughly 34,000 to 35,500 votes cast after 5 p.m., most in the first five minutes. Those counts come from outlets reading the logs, not from a TSE announcement, and they can't answer the question Flávio keeps asking: how many voters in towns that had already shut down never got the same two hours? "What happened in that stretch of time, nobody can understand, and it has to be cleared up," he said Monday. "Nobody knows exactly the impact of it."

Washington is holding its congratulations

Trump's remarks weren't the only signal. The State Department had a statement on the result drafted and ready to go, as it does after elections around the world, but it was told to hold off and "assess" the situation after Flávio said he wouldn't recognize the result, Folha de S.Paulo reported. Asked when it would come out, the U.S. Embassy in Brazil gave no date. Folha also reported that Trump officials reached out to Flávio's allies to learn whether he would concede before deciding what to say.

That's a sharp contrast with 2022, when the Biden administration was among the first to congratulate Lula. And it isn't new tension. In July 2025, Trump put a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods, with the White House citing Brazil's treatment of Jair Bolsonaro and its moves against American social media companies, and the Treasury sanctioned Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes under the Global Magnitsky Act. Three months later, Trump and Lula shook hands in Kuala Lumpur and patched things up, which is why Trump can say he likes the man and still say the vote looked bad.

Lula's camp: blame Meta

Lula himself stayed quiet. His top foreign policy adviser, former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, did not. "He's poorly informed. A contradictory statement, then he says he likes Lula," Amorim told g1. "Whoever tried to rig the election was Meta, obstructing and restricting our posts. Only if he's referring to Meta." Lula's campaign has filed a complaint accusing Meta of throttling Lula's content to help Flávio. Meta denies it.

Amorim also told CNN Brasil he hopes relations stay normal, "but if not, we'll be prepared."

The same day, a judge took Flávio's passports

While Trump was talking, the losing candidate was handing over his travel papers. Justice Moraes, the same justice the U.S. Treasury sanctioned last year, ordered Flávio to surrender any foreign passports and had federal police cancel his Brazilian ones, including his diplomatic passport, g1 reported. The order came in a money laundering investigation of Flávio and lawyer Willer Tomaz.

Flávio says police served him in the street outside his father's house, where Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest. "The Alexandre de Moraes decision was based on something Eduardo said on Oct. 23, that I should leave the country if I lost the election. I never said that," Flávio said in a video Monday. "I never thought of leaving the country. I'm going to hand over my passports and defend myself against this aberration, which is a clear attempt to intimidate me, but nobody will silence me."

What happens next

Flávio has changed tactics. On Sunday night he talked about annulling the election. On Monday his campaign thanked the nearly 60 million Brazilians who voted for him, named him leader of the opposition and said he will file an electoral investigation case, called an AIJE, for abuse of economic power, aiming to strip the Lula ticket of its win. "The election is over, but the fight for a different Brazil continues," the statement said. In his video, Flávio accused Lula of using public money for "the biggest vote-buying in history." "It wasn't me who lost," he said. "The system won."

That case goes to the TSE, which has until Dec. 18 to certify Lula. Lula is due to start his fourth term on Jan. 5, 2027. The questions are still sitting there, unanswered by the officials who could answer them: why a justice outside the election court changed the rules one minute after polls closed, why the court that runs the election says no rule allowed it, and how many voters were left out because their machines were already sealed. Trump just made sure the whole world heard them.

Brazil's foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, is still due in the U.S. next month for the G20 foreign ministers' meeting. Whether the State Department's statement ever comes out before then is the next thing to watch.