Three years into the Presidency of Donald Trump, even those Americans who, in a state of bruised dismay, have become accustomed to his vanity, his mendacity, and his distemper have been astonished by his public performances during the coronavirus pandemic. But, while Trump’s behavior is egregious, that of his chief imitator, the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former military officer who has been in office for fifteen months, trespasses most identifiable moral boundaries.

Bolsonaro’s efforts to emulate Trump have included the appropriation of his campaign slogan, reconstituted as “Make Brazil Great Again,” and making routine accusations of “fake news” against the news media. He regards environmentalism as an invention of communists, and has introduced a bill to allow miners and loggers into protected indigenous reserves in the Amazonian wilderness. He frequently delivers remarks that express his misogyny, racism, and homophobia. Another trait is his habit for losing his temper, especially with reporters, and he has lately made a habit of giving them the Italian arm-and-elbow gesture that translates to “fuck you.” Except for Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines, it is difficult to think of another head of state as vulgar as Bolsonaro.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Bolsonaro has wandered even further from acceptable norms, dismissing the illness as mere “sniffles,” and, much as Trump did until recently, denouncing it as a “pretext” ginned up by his political enemies to “get” him. Bolsonaro himself was tested for the coronavirus after several of his closest aides fell ill with COVID-19 following a dinner and reception that Trump held, in early March, at Mar-a-Lago. In all, twenty-four members of Bolsonaro’s entourage have tested positive for COVID-19 since returning to Brazil. Bolsonaro says that he tested negative, twice, but he has refused to reveal the test results, leading to widespread speculation that he also contracted the virus. (As a consequence of the Brazilian hullabaloo, Trump was also tested, but found to be negative. Less fortunate was Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, who met with Bolsonaro’s delegation, and tested positive, but has now recovered and is out of quarantine.)

In the past week, against the advice of his own health minister, Bolsonaro has not only refused to take national action to prevent widespread contagion but launched an official campaign, #BrazilCannotStop, encouraging Brazilians to carry on with their normal lives. Making himself the poster boy for his campaign, Bolsonaro has repeatedly and defiantly gone out on public walkabouts, shaking the hands of supporters and posing for selfies. Twitter removed some videos that showed him meeting and greeting people, and promoting untested treatments, explaining that they violated a company policy to block false or misleading information about the virus.

Bolsonaro doesn’t seem likely to reform his delinquent behavior. “I’m sorry, some people will die. They will die—that’s life,” he said, in an interview on Friday. In the same interview, echoing Trump’s questioning of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s request for thirty thousand ventilators a few days earlier, Bolsonaro challenged the statistics coming out of São Paulo, which is the epicenter of Brazil’s epidemic, saying that the numbers seemed “too large,” and suggesting that a “numbers game to favor political interests” was under way. (There are more than a thousand reported cases and more than a hundred deaths in the state.)

The irony is that it is Bolsonaro’s own words and deeds that have galvanized his opponents. Pot-banging protests, staged from apartment balconies and windows, have become a nightly occurrence in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro, and, on Monday, an array of Bolsonaro’s leftist rivals launched a public campaign to demand his resignation. Leftist-opposition legislators have also begun to look into impeachment proceedings, but Marcelo Freixo, a charismatic Rio de Janeiro state representative for the Socialism and Liberty Party, said that he thinks that option lies some distance down the road. It is more important right now for Brazil’s Congress to vote on urgent measures to alleviate the suffering of ordinary citizens, he said, and he pointed out that Bolsonaro’s approval ratings during the pandemic remain high, at thirty-five per cent—a significant number in a nation of political coalitions. For an impeachment to get under way, it would be necessary to seek out allies across the political spectrum, and that process, Freixo said, is only just beginning.

Meanwhile, several of Bolsonaro’s former allies, including a number of governors, have broken with him, repudiating his calls to ignore the pandemic, and instituting their own quarantine regimes. One of them, João Doria, the influential governor of São Paulo state, confronted Bolsonaro in a widely viewed videoconference last week, and is seen as a leading rival for the Presidency. On Monday, another former Bolsonaro ally, Wilson Witzel, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, extended a fifteen-day stay-at-home order that he had previously issued, declaring that he doesn’t want “the blood of thousands of people on his hands.”

Health professionals fear that the coronavirus will claim many victims among the millions of people who live in the crowded, unsanitary slums known as favelas. Last week, Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, the criminal gang that controls Rio’s City of God favela, said that it would enforce a strict curfew, vowing punishment for violators. (Numerous indigenous communities, out of fears due to their historic susceptibility to diseases brought by outsiders, have isolated themselves in the past week.)

On Sunday, a Brazilian friend, the historian Gunter Axt, e-mailed me to say that he has moved to his mother’s home, in the small mountain resort town of Gramado, in southern Brazil. “The mayor is reasonable and has established quarantine,” he wrote. “Everyone is at home and stores are closed. But, although the city is small and rich, the local hospital is poorly equipped.” He added, “Instigated by President Bolsonaro, Canela, the city ‘next door,’ has decided to suspend the quarantine. This is bad, because the cities are close, so if the contagion advances next door, it will also affect us. There are many wealthy and influential people living in Canela, so maybe they can reverse that decision. Do not know. But this gives you an idea of the climate of division that we are experiencing.”

Another friend, Petra Costa, the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Edge of Democracy”—which Bolsonaro famously called “garbage,” without having seen it—e-mailed me on Tuesday. “The governors are doing a great job, taking steps to protect the health and lives of the population,” she wrote. “The National Congress also approved very important economic measures, despite resistance from the federal government.” She added that the Minister of the Economy, Paulo Guedes, has recommended “insufficient economic measures to face the social crisis that threatens millions of Brazilians. It reveals the ideology of the government that has selfishness as its core, that is against any type of social investment.”

It seems likely that Bolsonaro’s gambit is less one of willful ignorance than of political calculation, one in which, again like Trump, he is betting on his reëlection chances. The next Presidential elections are in 2022 and, if he can keep the economy running, and Brazil’s mortality rates remain low, his chances at winning a second term are decent. But, of course, his prospects will drop significantly if the economy, which is heading toward a recession, doesn’t recover, or if the epidemic proves catastrophic. Either way, he is wagering Brazilian lives as his collateral. On Sunday, in a new walkabout around Brasília, the capital, Bolsonaro repeated his latest mantra, telling people he met, “We are all going to die someday.”

A Guide to the Coronavirus