WASHINGTON — Farmers, bankers and international policymakers find themselves in the same camp as President Donald Trump’s international trade war gathers pace: confused, freaked out and lobbying for clarity — if not a carve out.
Just this week, after Trump signed an executive order introducing 50 percent tariffs on most goods from Brazil, a leading Democratic senator met with a handful of concerned Brazilian counterparts, among them a friend from the senator’s literally stellar contact book.
“I’ve met with eight Brazilian senators in my office, and one of them is a guy I’ve known for 30 years, who was the only Brazilian astronaut,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a former U.S. astronaut himself, told Raw Story at the Capitol.
“I worked with him for over a decade. So he brought a bunch of people, because we have a [trade] surplus with Brazil and [yet] … they were told 50%.
“They don’t know what to do. Because usually, [tariffs are imposed on] a country where you’ve got a trade deficit. This is the opposite.”
Kelly was a U.S. Navy aviator and flew combat missions in the first Gulf War before becoming a NASA astronaut and taking part in four space missions.
His Brazilian astronaut friend, 62-year-old former air force pilot Marcos Pontes, completed a mission to the International Space Station in 2006.
In 2019, Pontes became Brazil’s Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation. In 2022, he was elected as a federal senator for São Paulo.
Trump announced punitive tariffs against Brazil July 9. On Wednesday he put his order into effect. Some Brazilian products were exempted — including orange juice, some aircraft, wood pulp and energy products.
But a U.S. government fact sheet explicitly linked the tariffs to what it called “the Government of Brazil’s politically motivated persecution, intimidation, harassment, censorship, and prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and thousands of his supporters.”
Bolsonaro and seven associates are on trial regarding his attempt to stay in power in 2022, which opponents call an attempted coup similar to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump incited in an attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.
In his fact sheet on Wednesday, Trump claimed the current Brazilian government, under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known simply as Lula, was guilty of “serious human rights abuses that have undermined the rule of law in Brazil.”
Kelly gave that short shrift.
“There’s this whole political component that has to do with Bolsonaro and this prosecution, trying Bolsonaro, but they [Brazilian politicians] can’t interfere with their judicial process,” the senator said.
“They can’t interfere. Lula’s not going to interfere with their judiciary.
“That’s just something that we do. This administration.”
Raw Story asked: “So [your Brazilian friends are] kind of freaked out” by Trump’s tariffs?
Kelly said: “Yeah, they’re like, ‘Hey, have you got any advice?’ So I reached out to the Secretary of Commerce [Howard Lutnick] on this because they’d like an extension to try to figure [this] out, so this doesn’t get put in at all. And they’re good trading partners.
“If these tariffs go into effect, prices are gonna go up on a lot of things. Depends on the country. Using Brazil as an example, I think something like a third of the coffee in the United States comes from Brazil, so you’re gonna see higher coffee prices.”
Raw Story asked: “Are we gonna see now individual nations do like Brazil, ask for a carve out?”
Kelly said: “I think everybody’s gonna try to ask for something. And I think some of these might benefit us, but the big picture is incredibly chaotic and haphazard, and not the way you’re supposed to run trade policy, and the American people are going to be on the losing end of this.
“But I was trying to, you know, help out my friend of 30 years.”