Brazil’s new proto-fascist president has struggled to control the narrative during his first month in office. Jair Bolsonaro has issued several controversial decisions only to retreat shortly thereafter; his vice president has publicly contradicted him on several occasions; and he badly botched his first international appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The latter was particularly humiliating for a country like Brazil that craves international recognition.

By all accounts, Davos’s rarefied crowd of plutocrats and philanthropists were unimpressed by Bolsonaro’s shockingly brief and stilted remarks. Heather Long, a Washington Post correspondent at Davos, called Bolsonaro’s performance a “big fail,” noting that “he had the entire world watching and his best line was to tell people to come vacation in Brazil.” Another journalist shared the reaction of a friend present for Bolsonaro’s speech: “Never experienced anything like that with a President here. . . .  Really bizarre.” Investors eager to capitalize on Brazil’s new business climate had hoped for a firm commitment to reforming the country’s pension system, among other regressive measures, but were left wanting by the president’s amateurish presentation. Bolsonaro, instead of attempting to fix the damage, took to Twitter to celebrate news of the openly gay leftist congressman Jean Wyllys fleeing the country in fear of his life.

While Bolsonaro stumbled abroad, political scandal mounted at home. Reports of suspicious financial transactions involving the president’s wife and an aide to one of his sons, a recently elected senator, had been lingering in national headlines since before Bolsonaro’s inauguration. Then, as Bolsonaro schmoozed with prominent businessmen and politicians in Switzerland, one of Brazil’s main newspapers linked his son Flávio to members of a Rio de Janeiro death squad known as the Office of Crime. The same militia was allegedly involved in the assassination of Marielle Franco, a leftist Afro-Brazilian city councilwoman murdered in March 2018.