The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, arrived at the White House on Thursday to meet with Donald Trump in a meeting characterized by the bilateral tensions that have built up over more than a year and by the shadow of Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of Trump who is currently in prison.
Lula arrived at the presidential complex shortly after 11:10 AM local time in an official convoy, coming from the residence of the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, where he had stayed overnight.
The correspondent at the White House David Alandete described the visit as unusually secretive: "Strange visit from Lula to the White House. Trump received him privately, without the press. Both have entered the Oval Office, and the media appearance is already more than half an hour late, with the press waiting outside."
The working lunch was also held behind closed doors. Alandete reported that "they are asking the press to disperse for now, the meeting between Trump and Lula during the lunch is taking place behind closed doors."
This is the third in-person meeting between the two leaders since the beginning of Trump's second term, and the second on U.S. soil, following their interactions at the UN General Assembly in September 2025 and at the ASEAN Summit in Malaysia in October of that same year.
The visit was originally scheduled for March 2026, but it was postponed due to the joint war of the United States and Israel against Iran, which Lula had publicly criticized before traveling to Washington.
The meeting is fraught with tensions. In July 2025, Trump imposed tariffs of 50% on Brazilian imports, explicitly linking the measure to the legal proceedings against Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison by the Supreme Court of Brazil for leading an attempted coup after losing the 2022 elections. Brazil described the measure as "offensive and unacceptable."
In March 2026, tensions escalated when Brazil prohibited entry to Trump's advisor, Darren Beattie, who intended to visit Bolsonaro in prison.
On April 30, the Brazilian Congress approved a law that reduces penalties for crimes against the democratic state, overriding Lula's veto, which could potentially shorten the former president's sentence by up to twenty years.
Brazil was also excluded from the "Shield of the Americas" summit that Trump organized in Miami with leaders from ten Latin American countries in March 2026.
The agenda of the meeting is primarily economic and geopolitical: tariffs, the PIX instant payment system—accused by Washington of being anti-competitive against Visa and Mastercard—a potential agreement on critical minerals and rare earths, and the eventual designation of Brazilian criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations, which Brasília rejects.
The analyst Oliver Stuenkel, from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, notes that Lula aims to strengthen his personal relationship with Trump to prevent U.S. interference in the Brazilian presidential elections in October 2026, in which the 80-year-old president is polling in a tie with Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the imprisoned former president.
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