BRAZIL PERSPECTIVE

São Paulo and Brasília relay the episode with an interest tinged with familiarity: Brazil, too, knows battles over symbols and institutional memory. The Brazilian press describes the scene precisely: workers removed 'at dawn on Saturday' Trump's name from the Kennedy Center, 'less than six months after' it went up, complying with a ruling that the arts center 'cannot be renamed without the authorization of the US Congress.' Work began around 1:20 a.m. local time (2:20 a.m. in Brasília), hours after the Department of Justice announced it could not meet the deadline expiring at 11:59 p.m. Friday. Coverage stresses the visual and popular dimension — the removal of the prefix 'The Donald J. Trump and' in gold letters, accompanied by a crowd shouting 'take it off' and applauding. For a country that lived through, under Bolsonaro and Lula, sharp clashes over the political use of institutions and national symbols, the image of a president forced by the courts to erase his name from a public monument speaks directly. The Brazilian press, attentive to the power balance between executive and judiciary — a central theme of its own recent political life — reads the event as a demonstration that, even for the president of the world's leading power, courts can impose a limit. The implicit parallel with Brazil's judicial battles surfaces in the choice to cover so abundantly an affair that, elsewhere, might seem anecdotal.