I think there’s plenty of danger to democracy. Trump’s just more a symptom than the cause of much.
Our concerns should go towards the neoconservative AKA neoliberal colossus that straddles the two major parties and likes its usually soft-spoken, blue-suited killers–its Bidens and Obamas and Bushes and Clintons and Reagans. Our concerns should go to the alpha agencies that act with neither Constitutional nor popular checks and balances, to the marriage of big wealth and organized crime.
Trump was no fighter against any of that, particularly. But he was less smoothly aligned with all of it probably just because he is just such a difficult person personally. But no other living president has stood against anything like that, even a little. They have served it, some adeptly.
So I am suspicious to read of a “Trump-like” insurrection with no acknowledgement that it almost certainly has not Biden-like but Biden support, and not just the support of Biden, but of an administration and of funders and of more or less the entire community of Democratic and Republican elected officials. It strikes me as a marvelous feat of propaganda that journalists and wonks can still indirectly support Bolsonario, whether or not this is their aim, by supporting his supporters by blaming him on Trump.
If the US sanctions Brazil, it will not be for Bolsonario, but because Lula institutes social programs.