28 October—After losing Brazil’s presidential election Sunday (although he hasn’t conceded) and fleeing the country yesterday, Flávio Bolsonaro arrived in Miami this morning, along with his wife and daughters. Just like that. Certainly reminiscent of Kosta Diamantis’s allegedly unpremeditated powder to Greece last month, but quite possibly—if not probably—contingently premeditated and with the alacritous collusion of Donald Trump, who just happens to be an admirer and defender of Flávio’s papai, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who’s in prison for five of the offenses Trump should be in prison for but isn’t.

(The five offenses Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of, by the way, are: taking part in an armed criminal organization; attempting to violently abolish democratic rule of law; plotting a coup d’état; damaging government property; damaging protected cultural assets. Trump clearly is guilty of all five—and not just for what he did 6 January 2021—even though he’s unlikely ever to face the consequences.)

Flávio Bolsonaro has been accused of and investigated for corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, and illicit financial ties. Sound familiar? So he needed to be elected for the same reason Trump needed to be re-elected and Benjamin Netanyahu still hopes at this writing to keep his job as Israel’s prime minister and prolong his war with Hamas and Iran.

The State Department doesn’t normally issue visas of any kind at a moment’s notice—on demand, you might say—and it hasn’t volunteered what kind of visas the Bolsonaro clan have been granted. But it pays to have a corrupt friend in the highest place and lots of toadies to do his malevolent bidding. So Flávio Bolsonaro and his family got their U.S. visas pretty soon after the Brazilian election results came in and even though the country’s supreme court had publicly ordered him to surrender his three passports—personal, diplomatic, and Italian (since 2023)—and evidently canceled the Brazilian ones just in case he didn’t.

Not that it mattered, mind you, because Brazil’s membership in the Mercosur group—Mercado Común del Sur, a South American trade bloc and customs union—would have allowed any Brazilian citizen to cross various borders using only a national identity card. Flávio, wife, and daughters flew to Argentina, a Mercosur member, and thence to Ecuador, an associate member. And thence, of course, to Miami.

Don’t ask why Brazil’s Supremo Tribunal Federal didn’t cancel Flávio’s national ID card—because it wouldn’t have made a difference in the circumstance.

And if Donald Trump weren’t out stumping for what we hope are losing Trumpublicans, it’s not unlikely he’d have been at Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport to greet the chartered Gulfstream G400 that delivered Flávio and fam to the Sunshine State.

What about extradition, then? Get serious. At least while Trump is abusing the presidency . . .