Politicians start operating only while Carnival ends, Brazilians joke. This year, explosive tweets from the president, Jair Bolsonaro, were not on time for the severe commercial enterprise of reforming pensions and cleaning up crime and corruption. On March 5th, the president posted a video of one Carnival reveler urinating on any other in the act of performance artwork. “This is what many Carnival road events have emerged as,” he lamented. Some Brazilians cringed, but the tweet got 87,000 likes. Then, on March 10th, Mr. Bolsonaro excoriated a journalist from Estado de S. Paulo, investigating his son, Flávio, a senator from Rio de Janeiro. EstadãoMentiu (“EstadoLied”) has become the pinnacle trending subject matter on Twitter in Brazil. The bar association criticized the president. But he has no longer taken down either tweet.
