On Oct. 25, President Donald Trump saw his string of consecutive election victories in Latin America broken. After what looked to be a resounding win for Trump’s ally, far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, in the first round of voting for Brazilian president, incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a stunning comeback to win his fourth term in office. Lula, who has been a mainstay of Brazilian politics since the 1980s, won by more than 3 percentage points.

But the drama didn’t end there. Bolsonaro suddenly found himself exposed to ongoing criminal investigations that were dogging him throughout the campaign. Rather than fight the charges, he fled to the United States with his family. Trump granted the Bolsonaro family a visa to stay on U.S. soil, and one of Trump’s aides reportedly helped charter the jet that took the Brazilian politician to Miami. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In January 2023, Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father, absconded to Florida after getting bested by Lula months earlier. He later returned, was arrested and eventually convicted for trying to prevent Lula from entering office.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s own self-imposed exile comes at a tricky time for relations between the United States and Brazil, the Western Hemisphere’s two largest economies. Part of the trouble comes down to personality. Washington and Brasília are led by two men who are strong-headed ideological opposites, have an altogether different conception of what a healthy bilateral relationship looks like and spent the last two years taking shots at the other. That dynamic might........

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