Lula jokes with Trump: if he knew Lampião, he wouldn’t provoke him – 02/09/2026 – Politics

The president () joked this Monday (9), in a speech full of electoral tone, about his American namesake, and said that, if he “knew what Lampião’s bloodthirsty is in a president, he wouldn’t be provoking us”.

“There’s no point talking on television: ‘I have the biggest warship, I have the biggest submarine in the world, I have a plane, a ship a hundred times more important. I don’t want to fight with it. Am I crazy? I’ll fight and I’ll win. What am I going to do?.”

The PT member visited the headquarters of the Butantan Institute, in the west of São Paulo. The president announced R$1.8 billion in investments to expand the facilities and start training for professionals.

In his speech, Lula said he was “a very lucky citizen” and stated that, as long as he has possibilities, there will be no shortage of money for research in the country.

“Where is the reason for someone to discredit this country, not to land in this country. Celebrating the first dengue vaccine in the world, something of ours, created by us, researched by us, and who knows we can produce it in quantity to help other countries poorer than us”, said Lula.

The PT member, who has used the argument of national sovereignty since the president of the United States announced tariffs on Brazilian products, stated that “often we still manage to live with a mongrel complex.”

Lula also highlighted multilateralism, saying that this is what guarantees harmony between states and added: “I don’t want to have supremacy over Uruguay, over Bolivia, but I also don’t want to be smaller than the United States and China”, he stated.

The PT member arrived around 10 am and visited the vaccine factory before the event began. The state Secretary of Health, Eleuses Paiva, participated in the event, but the governor () did not appear on the agenda.

The vice-president, , and the ministers (Finance), (Health), the (General Secretariat of the Presidency), (Entrepreneurship) and (Agrarian Development) were with Lula.

The event was also attended by the director of the Butantan Institute, Esper Kallás, and the executive director of the Butantan Foundation, Saulo Nacif.

Minister of Health, Alexandre Padilha stated that Lula is the only president in history to have set foot at the institute. He also said that the investments represent a historic milestone and that they show that Butantan is committed to “saving lives and not just maintaining profits from the sale of inputs”.

The minister greeted the institute’s employees and recalled the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which both the servers and the vaccine were targets of disinformation by the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government. “There were fake news attacks, they said they were going to become an alligator, that they were going to have a chip implanted. But you [profissionais do Butantan] they resisted, they believed in science”, said the minister.

Padilha’s speech also highlighted that the SUS is an example of national sovereignty – a topic explored by the federal government after the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs and which became one of Lula’s showcases in his attempt to be re-elected to the Presidency.

The American president was cited as “anti-vaccine and denialist” by the minister. “Many researchers who are being persecuted or who have had resources cut off by the anti-vaccine movement in the United States, today, will come or are already collaborating with Fiocruz, Butantan, and other Brazilian institutions,” said Padilha.

The minister also poked governor Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans) by sending a hug to him, absent from the event, in his speech. Tarcísio supported Trump’s election and is Bolsonaro’s political godson, for whom he was minister during the pandemic.