BREAKING: Trump Sends Vance to Hungary to Prop Up a Losing Authoritarian Days Before His Election
With Viktor Orban’s grip on Hungary slipping fast, the Trump administration dispatched VP JD Vance to Budapest in a last-ditch effort to rescue Europe’s most notorious nationalist leader just days before a pivotal Sunday election.
Most polls have Orban’s Fidesz party trailing the opposition Tisza movement by double digits, but that didn’t stop Vance from standing beside him and declaring victory before a single vote was cast.
Vance showered Orban with praise, calling him “one of the only true statesmen in Europe” and relaying a personal message from Trump: “He loves you and so do I.” He took direct aim at European Union officials, accusing them of trying to tank the Hungarian economy to influence the outcome, and held Orban up as a model the rest of the continent should follow.
The visit fits squarely within the Trump administration’s stated foreign policy goal of aligning with what it calls “patriotic European parties,” a label critics and many European governments read as a green light for hard-right, anti-democratic movements.
For Orban, the stakes could not be higher. He has ruled Hungary unchallenged since 2010, but his grip on the media landscape and political machinery has apparently lost its hold on voters now rallying around Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist turned opposition leader
What makes the trip particularly striking is who else wants Orban to win. Moscow has been openly working to tilt the election in Fidesz’s favor, supplying discounted Russian energy and amplifying Kremlin-friendly narratives. Just a day before Vance landed, the Kremlin backed a suspiciously timed claim that Ukraine had planted explosives near a gas pipeline running through Serbia into Hungary, a charge Magyar immediately dismissed as pre-election panic-mongering by Orban’s government.
The United States and Russia rooting for the same candidate in a European election is not a coincidence. It is the logical conclusion of a foreign policy that has abandoned democratic allies in favor of strongmen who share MAGA’s hostility toward liberal institutions, multilateral cooperation, and an independent press.