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The Felon's Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran

Another day and the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the price of oil remains elevated, and the Felon still lacks any exit strategy from his war of choice that seems to have been doing the bidding of Benjamin Netanyahu (who seemingly wants a never ending war) despite the warnings and reservations of numerous advisors.  The Felon continues to bloviate with his statements ranging from threats of genocide against Iranian civilians to claiming that negotiations with Iran are "going well" - causing the stock market to gyrate with hints of insider trading. Recently, polling has shown that lately only 15% of Americans believe the Felon's claims on Iran while the majority seems to understand that America is caught in a quagmire thanks to the Felon's foolish war of choice even as America's standing in the world has been greatly diminished.   At this point, the Iran war looks like a huge strategic failure not to mention a moral failure with heavy "Christian" nationalist messaging that increasingly depicts the war as a war of religion laced with claims of good versus evil. A piece in The New Yorker looks at the Felon's huge failings:

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. . . . Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his Presidency, posed an emergency to both his country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. . . . Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024 campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate . . . . These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac.

And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s abandonment of that deal, in 2018. For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

[T]he theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. . . . . And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known. 

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Trump Has Become What He Most Despises: A Loser

This morning, Iran is saying it has again closed the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian gunboats have reportedly fired on tankers, claiming the American naval blockade violates the ceasefire terms. Meanwhile oil prices were down, they will likely begin increasing again.  Both are indicators that der Trumpenfuhrer, a/k/a the Felon, continues to twist on a rope of his own creation and that while Iran's military capabilities have been seriously degraded, the Felon has not won the war, making his desire for a gigantic triumphal arch all the more ridiculous.  In short, the Felon has become a "loser" who sense of his own exceptionalism and unrestrained ego - and perhaps dementia - set the stage for the Iran debacle that has sent gasoline prices soaring at home and is inflicting real harm of America's onetime allies in Asia and Europe. And try as he might, in the final analysis, the blame for the situation rests on the Felon and the Felon alone.  Meanwhile his grievance filled base is discovering that enhanced feelings of white supremacy and white privilege do not help them at the gas pump or grocery store checkout. A piece in The New Republic looks at how the Felon has become a loser:

The last two weeks have been disastrous for the Trump administration. In Europe, Vice President JD Vance made the extraordinary move of campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose illiberal far-right regime is a beacon for authoritarian conservatives around the Western world. Vance framed the election to Hungarians in stark terms.

“Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels?” he asked them at a campaign rally. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán!” Vance was apparently not very persuasive: Hungarians backed the anti-Orbán party by such an overwhelming margin that it will have enough seats in the country’s Parliament to enact far-reaching constitutional reforms.

[The Felon's] President Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran continues to disrupt shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery. A ceasefire last week reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the strait among other concessions, leaving the world with the distinct impression that the U.S. had effectively lost the war. Trump himself, however, was unconcerned. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters on Saturday.

This is what happens when losers are elected to lead the world’s only superpower.

“Loser” is the president’s favorite insult. He has used it to describe, at various times, Rosie O’Donnell, John McCain, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Graydon Carter, Russell Brand, Bill Barr, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron DeSantis, Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, George Conway, Hillary Clinton, as well as ABC and CNN. This is only a partial list, but I think you get the picture.

[A] loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance criticized his fellow conservatives for going soft on their own constituents. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives,” he wrote. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” His implication is that it is your fault if you’re a loser.

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. . . . To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Trump, for example, often describes migrants in eugenic terms, claiming that they are “low IQ” or bring “bad genes” into the country. Conversely, he often describes himself as highly intelligent on genetic grounds.  . . . In 2020, The New York Times reported, he described a largely white crowd at a Minnesota rally as having “good genes.”

Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only through force can they restore and revitalize themselves. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failures.

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

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Trump Is Flailing on Multiple Fronts

The price of oil is hovering this morning around $90/barrel, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and allies - many of which have be insulted and denigrated by the Felon - have refused to join in the Felon's war of choice despite his demands that they do so.  As the felon twists on a rope of his own creation he continues to lash out and make threats with no one seemingly safe from verbal attacks and denigration be it the Pope, other foreign leaders, or right wing talking heads on the far right who have aligned against the Iran war.  For now, the U,S, stock market has recovered as investors - perhaps foolishly - cling to a belief that the Felon was somehow end the war on some undefined positive note. Yet this belief does not solve other problems besieging the Felon, many of his own making, that continue to drive his poll numbers ever lower as Republican hopes to at least hold the U.S. Senate fade. It goes without saying that if Democrats regain control of Congress, the Felon's life will become even more unpleasant, with hearings and investigations likely to proliferate.  A column in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's flailing on a number of fronts. Here are highlights:

You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.

Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now [the Felon] President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.

[The Felon] Donald Trump has long ruled by fear. He demands complete fealty from fellow Republicans; he pushes around world leaders. He’s a political escape artist. But this time, he has boxed himself in without an obvious way out. The war in Iran was a conflict of his choosing, but it has not gone at all how he expected. Trump believed that it would resemble the military blitz that effortlessly snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, that it would be a surgical strike lasting days or maybe just a couple of weeks. Instead, the conflict is approaching the 50-day mark. Iran is battered but emboldened, and now has greater control of the vital strait—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—than it did before the war, wielding it like an economic vise to squeeze the rest of the globe. Trump has demanded it be reopened, even threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization if the regime did not comply. But Tehran didn’t quake in terror. Trump’s usual intimidation tactics aren’t working.

By the closing months of 2025, the momentum of his first six months in office had dissipated and his party had suffered a series of electoral losses. He looked to some like an early lame duck. But the Caracas military operation, White House aides felt, righted the ship. Trump, though never restrained, was transformed into pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who saw an opportunity to further expand executive power. And he fell further in love with the might of the U.S. military, telling advisers that it was an unstoppable force. Greenland. Iran. Cuba. His legacy, he believed, would be redrawing the world’s maps.

But Iran didn’t surrender. Trump had overestimated the capacity of the Iranian people to rise up, and he had not understood the extraordinary pain that the hard-line theocratic regime was willing to accept to maintain its grip on power. Thirteen American troops have been killed. Tehran maintained the ability to strike at its Gulf neighbors and damage their energy facilities. And even though much of its navy was destroyed, it was able to seize control of the strait by wielding the threat of mines, fast-attack boats, and armed drones. Giant oil tankers avoided the danger, and prices around the world began to rise.

This is when Trump ran into the limits of his power. He was outraged that such a makeshift force would intimidate the shipping companies, demanding that they “show some guts” and force the passage. But companies balked. He urged European nations to step in, noting that they benefit more from the oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz than the United States does. But Europe refused, having not been consulted before the war began and declining to bend to Trump’s wishes just weeks after he strained transatlantic ties by demanding that the U.S. be given Greenland. They were finally standing up to the president who boasted to my colleagues that “I run the country and the world.”

Back home, some Republicans were also finally saying no. A few loud, isolationist voices—Tucker Carlson, Steven Bannon, Megyn Kelly—declared that a new war in the Middle East broke Trump’s “America First” promises. . . . . Polls showed that Americans, who never approved of the war, were deeply opposed to a ground attack. Instead, Trump went on social media the morning of Easter Sunday and unleashed an unhinged threat, demanding that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” before adding “Praise be to Allah.” Muslim leaders denounced the post as blasphemous. Two days later, he went further, threatening that “a whole civilization will die.”

Members of Trump’s inner circle had counseled him to avoid issuing deadlines; he had now set several, and looked weaker each time one passed. His post was threatening actions that would amount to war crimes—and a genocide. The president was flailing, several people close to him told me. His usual maneuvers had not worked, so he believed that his only play was to escalate. But it wasn’t strategically employing unpredictable behavior to get his way; it was desperation. He looked erratic. . . . The plan was to apply pressure on Iran to open the strait and on Europe to aid the U.S. So far, neither result has been achieved.

In private moments, most Republicans have been saying for months that holding the House is likely beyond their reach. The GOP’s margin is slim, and the party out of power tends to do well in midterm elections. But at least, Republicans thought, the Senate was safe. That’s no longer the case. Democrats are looking at the map and see possible pickups in North Carolina, Maine, and even Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. Republicans’ poll numbers are falling while prices—particularly of gas—are rising. . . . Before the war erupted, the White House had planned for Trump to hammer home an economic message. But now the president is distracted—and he doesn’t have good economic news to share anyway.

Last summer, the West Wing’s plans to tout the economy were interrupted by questions surrounding Trump’s ties to the dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein scandal has been one of the few areas in which Republicans have felt comfortable breaking with Trump, who wants the matter closed. But once again, the financier was thrust back into the headlines—this time by the first lady. . . . It’s led to speculation that the first lady was trying to get ahead of some sort of damaging Epstein-related story; so far, nothing has materialized. But her call for Congress to give Epstein’s victims a public hearing ensures that the story won’t die any time soon.

Hungary has added to the president’s losing streak. On Sunday, just days after Vice President Vance made a campaign appearance in Budapest with Orbán, the ruling party was routed at the polls. . . . . Trump had invested much in Orbán’s reelection: Secretary of State Marco Rubio also made a Budapest appearance, while the president repeatedly endorsed Orbán and suggested that more U.S. funding would be on the way to Hungary if the prime minister won. The voters of Hungary had other ideas.

And then the president picked a fight with the pope. Pope Leo XIV has been judicious in speaking out about political matters but has been unsparing for months with his criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. When the Iran conflict broke out, the pope (as pontiffs tend to do) spoke out against war. Popes and presidents don’t always see eye to eye, but most commanders in chief opt against attacking the vicar of Christ for fear of alienating the tens of millions of Catholics in the United States—or, perhaps, to avoid any potential for divine retribution.

But [the Felon] Trump, of course, is not most presidents. He does not take criticism from anyone, and those close to him believe that he felt threatened by another powerful American voice on the global stage. . . . unbowed, he chided the pope again on social media late last night.

The pope, for his part, has said this week that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration. He is far from alone.

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The Felon's Latest Meltdown and Deteriorating Mental State

The Felon has long been a malignant narcissist with delusions of grandeur and a belief he can do no wrong regardless of how insane and untethered from reality he and his actions appear to others who are in touch with objective reality.  For far too long many, including lazy "journalists" and spineless congressional Republicans have shrugged their shoulders and basically said the insane behavior is merely the Felon being the Felon.  Yet anyone serious about the welfare of America should know that the Felon's latest behavior is blaring out a warning that he is increasingly unfit for office and has made America's position in the world far less secure.  Indeed, there is more talk of the use of the 25th Amendment as a mechanism to remove the Felon from office as he becomes increasing unhinged and insulting everyone from the Pope to once longtime allies. What we are witnessing is NOT normal behavior and looking the other way or muttering in private disapproval will only make the situation more dangerous as the Felon has meltdown after meltdown.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the unhinged commander-in-chief.  When will more Republicans open their eyes to what is going on? Here are highlights: 

On many recent nights, [the Felon] Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.

Judging from those posts, the commander in chief is in distress. No one can say for sure what is causing the president’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he is always successful in everything he undertakes is feeling the sting and strain of multiple public failures, including the collapse of his campaign to dislodge the Iranian regime, plummeting approval ratings, the decline of the U.S. economy, and, on Sunday, the crushing defeat of one of his favorite fellow authoritarians, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

But whatever is driving this decline in [the Felon's] Trump’s self-control, Americans must not shrug off the president’s latest implosion. They should recover their ability to be outraged; more to the point, they must demand that their elected representatives ask questions about the course of the war and whether [the Felon] Trump still has the capacity to fulfill his constitutional duty as commander in chief. Too much is at risk to dismiss his outbursts as just another idiosyncrasy: U.S. forces have been at war for almost six weeks, and China is reportedly helping Iran rearm. Even if all other problems, including the economy, were holding steady—and they are not—America cannot keep ignoring the dysfunction of the commander in chief, the sole steward of the codes to a massive nuclear arsenal.

Trump has always gotten lost in his own public statements, splashing about like a poor swimmer trying to reach the shore of a fast-moving river. But the [Felon] president is now flailing in blacker and deeper waters. Genocidal threats against the the Iranians, with whom America is at war, are bad enough, but his defenders will excuse them as part of the Trumpian bulldozer approach to international negotiation; aiming long screeds at the pope, as if he, too, is an enemy of the United States, is not only unhinged but entirely pointless. Trump’s fusillade against the first American pope was not only politically incomprehensible—20 percent of Americans are Catholics, and most of them voted for Trump—but it was yet more evidence that the president is sinking into rage and confusion.

Why was Trump angry with Pope Leo? For the same reason that Trump ever gets mad at anyone: The Holy Father dared to criticize him.  Last week, the president of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat—on Easter Sunday, no less—to destroy the ancient civilization of Iran. His supporters wrote this off as a clever gambit to bring an end to the war (which it has not). Leo called the threat “unacceptable,” blasted the “delusion of omnipotence” that led to the war, and said: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”

Of course, Trump wasn’t going to take that kind of talk from some former Chicago science teacher just because the guy is now the Bishop of Rome. So a few minutes after nine on Sunday night, Trump posted a salvo of more than 300 words on Truth Social. . . . The [Felon] president accused the pope of being “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons.” He said that Leo “wasn’t on any list to be Pope” and that he likes Leo’s brother Louis much better because “Louis is all MAGA.” . . . . And so it went, sentence after sentence of boorishness and whiny self-regard.

But [the Felon] Trump wasn’t finished. He had recommendations for the pontiff about how to be a better Vicar of Christ, saying he “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” Again, Trump is not a Catholic—he has referred to Communion as a “little wine” with some “little crackers”—and his track record both as a president and a person is replete with the seven deadly sins (and probably a few more that haven’t made the list yet). He is also now officially the most unpopular modern president ever, so the pope might understandably pass on accepting either his secular or spiritual advice.

This one screed against the leader of a billion and a half Catholics was worrisome enough, but for [the Felon] Trump, it was just the beginning of a long night. Only 45 minutes after flaming the pope, Trump—now back at the White House—posted an AI-generated image of himself as (apparently) Jesus Christ, healing a sick man while soldiers and nurses and other worshipful white people gaze in awe and military jets fly overhead. You have to see the image to really grasp its weirdness, and to take in how offensive, even heretical, it might be to Christians of any mainstream denomination.

This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader. Pope Leo, for his part, said he has “no fear” of the administration and will continue to preach the messages of the Gospel. The rest of us, however, should be very worried about a commander in chief who is trying to govern the country between social-media binges, who attacks religious leaders in narcissistic frenzy, and who imagines himself as a deity. If an elderly parent did such things, most people would be concerned. The president doing such things is far more alarming.

The American people must not look away, as they have done so often in the past. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.

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Message to Trump: Authoritarianism Is Not Inevitable

At times it is easy to become demoralized and to fear that the anti-democracy forces in America cannot be stopped and Americans watch the Felon's efforts to destroy longstanding norms and pro-democracy institutions. Add to this the Felon's efforts to silence critics in the media and his so-far failed efforts to prosecute the Felon's political opponents and critics and it can be depressing.  Yet, the election in Hungary on this past Sunday demonstrated that even with a highly stacked deck against democracy, it is still possible to defeat would be authoritarians and dictators if politicians promote the right messages and are able to convince the larger population that voting can and will make a difference.  In Hungary the voter turn out was almost 80% of voters - something that should embarrass America's lazy and indifferent voters who by staying home basically vote for those most adverse to their social and economic interests.  While the differences between Hungary and America are stark in numerous ways, the take away lesson is that authoritarianism and dictatorship are not inevitable and that it is possible to topple corrupt , pro-Russia, anti-democratic regimes like that of Orban and the Felon. A piece in The Atlantic looks at what can be learned from Hungary's election:

In the end, the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, required not just an ordinary election campaign or new messaging but rather the construction of a broad, diverse, and patriotic grassroots social movement. And by building exactly that, Hungary’s opposition changed politics around the world.

Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the MAGA movement, as well as the belief—also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric—that illiberal parties are somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the “real” people. As it turns out, history doesn’t work like that. “Real” people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy. Illiberalism leads to corruption. And if Orbán can lose, then his Russian and American admirers can lose too.

Péter Magyar, the opposition leader and likely next Hungarian prime minister, has now won by a substantial margin, giving him and his party, Tisza, a constitutional majority. To do so, they had to overcome obstacles not usually present in European democracies. After 16 years of what Orbán himself described as an illiberal regime, the Hungarian leader’s political party, Fidesz, had come to control much of the judiciary, bureaucracy, and universities, as well as a group of oligarchic companies that in turn controlled a good chunk of the economy.

Orbán used his control of the state to build an extraordinary web of international illiberal and far-right supporters, and funding mechanisms to support some of them. In the last weeks of the campaign, these friends and beneficiaries rallied round. Orbán received visits or verbal support from Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen (the leader of the French far right), Alice Weidel (the leader of the German far right), and other illiberal leaders from Argentina, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, and more. Both Hungarian and American news organizations reported that a Russian intelligence team had set up in Budapest to amplify Orbán’s social-media campaign, and perhaps to stage provocations.

By contrast, Magyar had very little access to Hungarian media, the overwhelming majority of which is owned either by the state or by Fidesz oligarchs. He and his party had limited access even to billboard space, both because they had less money than the ruling party and because many advertising spaces are controlled by the government. Tisza leaders and supporters faced personal obstacles as well. . . . Even three weeks ago, many Tisza leaders in Budapest would speak only off the record.

Magyar and his team fought back on the ground. Knowing he could not win if he stuck to Budapest and other large cities, Magyar has been traveling the country since 2024, visiting small towns and villages, many more than once. In the last few days of the campaign, he was holding five or six election meetings every day. He avoided the themes that Orbán chose to promote—global politics, the war in Ukraine, the conspiracy that Ukraine was somehow colluding against or might even invade Hungary—and focused his campaign speeches and social media on the economy, health care, and schools. . . . He portrayed himself as a part of the European, democratic, law-abiding center-right. He waved a lot of Hungarian flags, as did his supporters.

Despite enormous restrictions and both financial and political pressure, the tiny number of journalists who were still able to report in Hungary also made a difference. In the past few weeks, the investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, along with his colleagues at the website Direkt26, one of the few independent outlets in the country, patiently debunked Orbán’s anti-Ukrainian propaganda, producing leaked transcripts and audio that revealed Orbán and his foreign minister colluding with Putin and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

For years Orbán has claimed to be fighting shadowy foreign forces—George Soros, the European Union, migrants—but in fact he was himself dependent on foreigners all along.

Those stories resonated, especially with younger Hungarians. At a rock concert in Heroes’ Square in central Budapest on Friday, tens of thousands of them started chanting “Russians, go home”—the same chant that their grandparents used when Soviet soldiers invaded their country in 1956.

Although results are not final, Tisza appears to have won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. That would give Magyar a constitutional majority that should allow him to pick apart some of the damage that Orbán has done to the Hungarian constitution and to public life. In his victory speech, he called for the resignation of the president, the prosecutor general, the president of the constitutional court, and other institutions. He said he would rejoin the European legal system. In response, according to one witness, Hungarians at his rally chanted, “Europe, Europe, Europe.” . . . .Some in the opposition are still expecting dirty tricks in the next days and weeks, before Orbán formally hands over power.

But whatever happens next, this election represents a real turning point. For most European governments, this result is a relief: We can’t know yet what kind of government Tisza will create, but it won’t be one that functions as Russia’s puppet in Europe, blocking EU funding for Ukraine or European sanctions on Russia. Nor will it be a regime that serves as a model for Americans or Europeans who want to capture their own states, or take apart their own checks and balances, or impose their own illiberal ideologies on people who don’t accept them.

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Orban: Hungary Ousts an Autocrat

For years Viktor Orban has been the darling of many on the political far right in America who seek either an autocracy in America or a very much truncated democracy. And - much like the Felon - Orban constantly was a thorn in the side of the NATO, the European Union and Ukraine and a reliable ally of Vladimir Putin.  With a landslide election sending Orban into defeat - unlike the Felon he conceded defeat - his replacement, Peter Magyar is promising a reversal of many of Orban's pro-Russia policies and positions and a crackdown on the corruption rampant under Orban's regime.  He has also pledged that Hungary would be a strong NATO/EU ally - something Putin is likely to detest.  The Felon saw Orban as a role model of how to destroy a democracy and make oneself a dictator and he even dispatched JD Vance to campaign with Orban as a last ditch attempt to save his regime.  Thankfully, that effort was a spectacular failure.  May Hungary's rejection of strong man rule  be an inspiration for American voters in November.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at Orban's defeat:

Friends danced on one another’s shoulders. Fathers embraced their children. A teenage girl wept. Beer flowed. After 16 years, Hungarians had voted their strongman leader, Viktor Orbán, out of office. “I knew it was possible,” Balázs Nagy, a warehouse worker, told me this evening in Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. “Hungarians are stubborn, and we don’t give up on each other.” To his wife, Szilvi, the evening’s results had reaffirmed a truth less geographic than metaphoric. “We’re in the heart of Europe, and that’s where we belong,” she said.

The couple stood in a throng of people waiting for Péter Magyar, who led the opposition to victory. Three hours after the polls closed in national elections, they watched as he marched through the crowd holding a Hungarian flag. “Fellow Hungarians, countrymen: We have done it,” he said. “Together we have replaced the Orbán system. Together we have liberated Hungary.”

Voters rejected Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in favor of Magyar’s new faction, Tisza. In the process, they set a new national record for turnout. Magyar is a onetime Orbán loyalist who turned on the prime minister two years ago and managed to do what past opposition leaders couldn’t—overcome the incumbent’s enormous advantages. Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten election rules and removed independent checks on his power. He has suffocated civil society while extending his control over the media. And he has presided over patronage networks that have enriched his friends and family while impoverishing his society. State contracts helped turn the prime minister’s childhood friend, once a gas retrofitter, into a billionaire, but salaries for everyday Hungarians have languished at less than half the EU average.

The European Parliament calls Hungary an “electoral autocracy”—voting still takes place, but under fundamentally undemocratic conditions. That makes elections harder to contest but, as Hungarian voters proved, not impossible to win. Today, an election toppled a government whose advantages included support from the governments in both the United States and Russia. Echoing a chant in the crowd, Magyar declared in his victory speech, “Russians, go home.”

Efforts by foreign governments to prop up Orbán gave his defeat implications that extend well beyond this small country of fewer than 10 million people. The prime minister has been a scourge to international institutions and a source of inspiration to far-right politicians throughout the West. He was demonizing immigrants and dictating talking points to friendly media before Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. Trump desperately tried to keep Orbán in power, issuing multiple endorsements and dispatching his vice president, J. D. Vance, to campaign with the prime minister in Budapest last week. Among Hungarians, however, sympathies had shifted dramatically. . . . . “I vote for European values and against Russian influence.”

Magyar, meanwhile, vowed to recoup funds frozen by EU institutions over rule-of-law violations, impose a wealth tax, and imprison Fidesz officials he accused of pilfering public coffers. “We will not be a country of no consequences,” Magyar told his supporters as he claimed victory.

Consistently, independent polls showed the opposition with a sizable lead, but Western diplomats in Budapest cautioned me not to underestimate Orbán’s ability to mobilize voters at the last moment, or to manufacture circumstances justifying a state of emergency. They said Magyar would need a blowout, which is exactly what he got.

His party is set to command the two-thirds legislative majority necessary to amend the constitution, as well as to reconstitute influential bodies such as the Constitutional Court and to change so-called cardinal laws governing areas including media regulation and family policy. In his victory speech, Magyar said his party would have a “mandate to build a functioning and humane home.”

A police officer who had traveled 70 miles with her family to listen to Magyar told me that Hungarians had used the last chance available to them to remove Orbán, whom she called a “dictator.” She regretted only that her mother, who died recently, hadn’t lived long enough “to see this ghost of Orbán go away.” . . . . It’s April again in Hungary, but where armed struggle once failed, democratic elections have now succeeded.

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Four Ways Trump’s War of Choice Is Weakening America

The negotiations with Iran to end the Felon's war of choice in Pakistan have collapsed, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and it is unclear what the Felon's next move will be as oil prices remain high and are driving up other consumer prices. The Felon has threatened to use the U.S. Navy to blockade the Strait of Hormuz to cut of Iran's inflow of funds from oil sales, yet that would seemingly make the reduction in oil shipments even worse. The only things that are clear are (i) that the planning for the Felon's war of choice was a spectacle of total incompetence where warnings from various experts and career diplomats were ignored, and (ii) the war has weakened America, not strengthened it, despite the Felon's bombastic claims.   Moreover, if the war continues, the weakening of America will likely only be increased.  A long main editorial in the New York Times looks at four ways in which the Felon's impulsive and poorly thought through war have harmed the nation. Indeed, America's enemies must be rejoicing - if not outright laughing - as the Felon finds himself in a mess of his own petulant and hubris filled creation with seemingly no good exit strategy.  Even the Felon admitted today to Fox News, that gas prices could be higher by the time of the 2026 mid-term elections.  Here are column highlights:

When [the Felon] President Trump attacked Iran on Feb. 28, we called his decision reckless. He went to war without seeking congressional approval or the support of most allies. He offered thin and contradictory justifications to the American people. He failed to explain why this naïve attempt at regime change would end better than earlier attempts by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In the six weeks since, the recklessness of his war has become clearer yet. He has disdained careful military planning and acted on gut instinct and wishfulness. After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel predicted to Mr. Trump that the attacks would inspire a popular uprising in Iran, the director of the C.I.A. countered that the notion was “farcical,” The Times reported. Mr. Trump proceeded nonetheless. He was so confident that he assembled no plan to respond to an obvious countermove available to Iran: causing a spike in oil prices by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Nor did he develop a feasible strategy for securing the enriched uranium that Iran can use to rebuild its nuclear program.

Last week he careened from illegal and immoral threats about erasing Iranian civilization to a last-minute cease-fire that accomplishes few of his announced war aims. Iran continues to defy a central part of the deal and block most traffic from crossing the Strait of Hormuz. [The Felon's] Mr. Trump’s irresponsibility has left the United States on the cusp of a humiliating strategic defeat.

As we have emphasized, Iran’s regime deserves no sympathy. It has spent decades oppressing its people and sponsoring terrorism elsewhere. . . . Its navy, air force and air defenses have been degraded, and its nuclear program has been set back. Its murderous network of regional allies — including Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria’s fallen government — has been eroded.

Yet these successes cannot mask the ways in which the war has weakened the United States. We count four main setbacks for America’s national interests that are the direct result of [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s carelessness. These setbacks likewise weaken global democracy when authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere were already feeling emboldened.

The most tangible blow to the United States and the world is the increased influence that Iran has secured over the global economy by weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz. About 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flows through the strait, which is next to Iran’s southern shore.

Before the war, Iran’s leaders feared that blocking traffic would invite new economic sanctions and a military attack. Once the attack happened anyway, Iran closed the strait to nearly all traffic except its own ships. The policy is inexpensive because it mostly involves a threat, namely that a drone, missile or small boat may blow up a tanker. Forcibly reopening the strait, by contrast, would require an enormous military operation potentially including ground troops and an extended occupation.

[The Felon's] Mr. Trump’s lack of foresight about the strait reveals glaring incompetence. . . . . The war has shown Iran’s leaders that controlling the waterway is a real possibility. Eventually, other countries are likely to develop alternatives, including pipelines, but those solutions will take time. For now, Iran appears to have won diplomatic leverage that it could have only dreamed of six weeks ago. The only apparent way to change the situation would be for a global coalition to demand the strait’s reopening — the sort of coalition that Mr. Trump is distinctly unsuited to lead.

The second setback is to America’s military standing around the world. This war, together with recent U.S. assistance to Ukraine, Israel and other allies, has burned through a substantial portion of the stockpile of some weapons, such as Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors (which can shoot down other missiles). Experts believe the Pentagon used more than one-quarter of its Tomahawk missiles just in the war against Iran.

The war has also revealed that the U.S. military is vulnerable to new ways of warfare. America used billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech munitions to destroy Iran’s traditional air and naval forces, while Tehran used cheap, disposable drones to halt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and hit targets in the region. The world saw how a country that spends one-hundredth of what the United States does on its military can seek to outlast it in a conflict.

The war’s third big cost is to America’s alliances. Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and most of Western Europe refused to support the United States in this war — unsurprisingly, given Mr. Trump’s treatment of them. When he demanded their help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, most allies declined. These countries will remain allies in important ways, but they have made clear that they no longer consider the United States a reliable friend. They are working to build stronger relationships with one another so that they can better resist Washington in the future.

The fourth setback is to America’s moral authority. For all the flaws of this country, it remains a beacon to many around the world. When pollsters ask people where they would move if they could, the United States is consistently the runaway No. 1 answer. America’s appeal stems not only from its prosperity but also from its freedom and democratic values. Mr. Trump has undercut those values for his entire political career and perhaps never more than in the past week, when he made odious threats to erase Iranian civilization. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, made a series of bloodthirsty remarks, including a threat to offer “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Those would be war crimes. Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have embraced a brutal approach to armed conflict that the United States led the world in rejecting after World War II. By doing so, they have undermined the foundations of America’s global leadership, which claims to place human dignity at the center of an argument for a freer and more open world.

When America is weaker and poorer, as this war has made us, authoritarianism benefits.

The best hope now may sound naïve, but it remains true. Mr. Trump should at long last recognize the ineptitude of his impulsive, go-it-alone approach. He should involve Congress and seek help from America’s allies to minimize the damage from his war.

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Orban: He Was Trump Before Trump and He's In Trouble

Since returning to the White House, the Felon has been working to implement his own version of the corrupt system that Victor Orban has constructed in Hungary. This effort has included seeking to silence political rivals and critics, granting special sweetheart deals to friends and family members, attacking liberal universities and pushing anti-LGBT culture wars, and generally being a pain in the side of western European democracies and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. Some aspects of Hungary under Orban, including undermining the European Union parallel aspects of Hungary's history which includes undermining the Austrian imperial government and war efforts to benefit Hungary at the expense of the rest of the empire during WWI as described in the book, "Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in WWI." Now, facing a re-election campaign after 16 years of policies benefiting the few at the expense of the many - sound familiar? - Orban could face defeat in tomorrow's voting.  Should Orban be defeated, it will be a defeat for far right movements, including MAGA that has previously regarded Orban's regime as the blueprint for a far right America.  Indeed, the Felon even dispatched JD Vance to campaign for Orban in Hungary. A long piece in the New York Times looks at Orban's potential defeat and what it could to weaken ill-liberal regimes elsewhere. Here are highlights:

The Danube Institute, located in a refurbished villa in Budapest’s wealthy castle district, is one of several government-supported think tanks and foundations in Hungary that cater to foreign conservatives. At a panel discussion on Thursday evening, three days before Hungary’s elections, the mood was grim. The speakers, a mix of Americans and Europeans, hadn’t abandoned hope that Prime Minister Viktor Orban might eke out a victory, but all agreed that his party, Fidesz, was facing the most serious challenge to its rule in the 16 years since Orban returned to power.

“Here’s the problem,” said John Fund, a writer for National Review. “You have to have some kind of positive campaign.”

Orban, seeking a fifth term amid an economy widely seen as terrible — with high unemployment, virtually no growth and threadbare social services — is running on fear. Much of his pitch revolves around the fantastical claim that his center-right opponent, Peter Magyar, is going to drag Hungary to war in Ukraine.

Hungary’s capital, Budapest, is blanketed with posters of side-by-side mug-shot-style photos of Magyar and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the words “They Are Dangerous! Stop Them!” In the past, Orban has succeeded by positioning himself against demonized opponents — he pioneered many of the right-wing conspiracy theories about George Soros — but this time, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Heading into the election, most polls show Magyar’s Tisza Party well ahead, and some indicate it’s on track for a landslide. As the speakers at the Danube Institute understood, an Orban defeat would have serious implications for the conservative movement worldwide.

Under Fidesz, Budapest has become a sort of Disneyland for reactionaries disenchanted with their own governments. American and British conservatives are constantly passing through the city on Danube Institute fellowships. As The Atlantic recently reported, Orban has made Gladden Pappin, a MAGA influencer close to JD Vance who doesn’t speak Hungarian, head of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, which does the same sort of work as the policy planning staff at the State Department.

Crucially, it’s not just material support that Orban provides to the international right. Orban has long held out the system he created in Hungary, which he calls “illiberal democracy,” as a workable Christian nationalist alternative to Western liberalism, and its example has proved enormously influential. In 2022, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” More than any other politician, Orban showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned “homosexual propaganda” in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies. Steve Bannon once described Orban as “Trump before Trump.”

Now Orban faces a possible rebuke from his own citizenry. And in a poetic coincidence, he’s faltering at the same moment that the intellectual vanguard of the MAGA movement is cracking up under the weight of Trump’s destructive, humiliating war in Iran. For at least the past decade, right-wing enemies of liberalism around the world have seemed to have momentum and energy on their side. They were daring and transgressive, while the old center-left parties that tried to stand in their way appeared exhausted and a little stunned. But today, both Orban, the progenitor of the modern populist right, and Trump, its apotheosis, are flailing.

In 2022, the conservative populist Sohrab Ahmari was an author of a fulsome endorsement of Trump arguing that he alone offered Americans “a chance to confront and chasten their failed elites.” After less than two years of unbridled Trumpian governance, Ahmari misses those elites desperately.

Fidesz’s rule hasn’t been as ruinous as Trump’s — Hungary didn’t have nearly as far to fall — but it’s been a failure on its own terms. Hungary is now one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and according to Transparency International, tied with Bulgaria for most corrupt. Orban’s government spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on benefits for families, with the aim of increasing fertility, but in 2025, the birthrate fell to 1.31 children per woman. “Depopulation is now progressing at its fastest rate to date,” according to a 2025 report from the Center for Eastern Studies.

Of course, the victory of Magyar, Tisza’s leader, isn’t assured. In the past, polls have undercounted support for Fidesz; the last time I was in Hungary, for the election four years ago, surveys showed a competitive race, but Orban’s party won in a landslide. Hungary’s electoral districts are deeply gerrymandered, so he could win a majority of seats in Parliament even without a majority of votes. . . . No one knows what other dirty tricks the election’s final days might bring.

But Tisza’s lead looks as if it could be robust enough to overcome both Fidesz’s structural advantages and its potential cheating. As Fund acknowledged, Orban’s campaign feels enervated and uninspired. Two weeks ago, he was heckled at one of his own rallies, a scene some compared to the pivotal moment when Romanians booed the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who tried to flee the country the next day.

Even if that happens, Hungary will likely remain a conservative country, because Magyar, a former Fidesz official, is no progressive. Until two years ago, he was a regime insider, the ex-husband of the former Fidesz justice minister Judit Varga. He left the party in a rather spectacular fashion. That February, Orban’s government was shaken by a major scandal when it was revealed that the country’s president, Katalin Novak, had pardoned a man imprisoned for covering up the sexual abuse of minors at a children’s home. . . . The Hungarian political analyst Peter Kreko compared the impact of the episode to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, demonstrating the “moral collapse of a moralizing government.”

After the story broke, amid widespread speculation that others in the government were implicated in the pardon, Magyar took to Facebook to condemn the regime. He expanded his denunciations on the independent YouTube show Partizan, saying, “When you feel that half the country is already in the hands of a few families, then I think, what are you waiting for?” Orban’s allies aren’t known for breaking ranks, and the effect of his interview was electric; he was heralded as a truth-telling dissident.

He has centered his campaign on one thing: opposition to the Orban regime’s epic corruption, which has made Orban’s allies spectacularly rich even as social services are so frayed that people have to bring their own toilet paper when they go to the hospital. “The only policy he’s talking about is that there needs to be a systemic challenge to what has become a kleptocracy that is undermining Hungary and Hungarianness,” said David Pressman, who served as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Hungary.

Neither Trump nor Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, wants to see this challenge to kleptocracy succeed, and both are trying hard to shore up Orban. In addition to being an inspiration to the American right, Orban is a stalking horse for Russian interests in Europe: Under his leadership, Hungary has blocked European Union sanctions on Russia and aid to Ukraine.

Russian intelligence suggested staging an assassination attempt on Orban to get Hungarians to rally around him. That hasn’t happened . . . . Just after this ostensible plot came to light, Vance arrived in Budapest to campaign for Orban, echoing Orban’s accusations of Ukrainian interference. This convergence of Russian and American interests is particularly perverse given that, until Tuesday, the United States was at war with Iran, which was, U.S. officials have said, getting targeting help from Russia. But ordinary American geopolitical interests appear to pale in comparison to Orban’s symbolic importance to the American right.

The fact that Trump is working to help a Putin-aligned autocrat demonstrates just how thoroughly he’s inverted American foreign policy. But it also shows why an Orban loss would be so seismic. The most powerful autocrats in the world want Orban to win; in addition to Putin and Trump, he has the endorsement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the likely support of China, since Orban has embraced the Belt and Road initiative, China’s investment in global infrastructure.

If Magyar beats him anyway, it will be an inspiration to small-d democrats around the world, proving that even in a country where the government has captured most major institutions and tilted the electoral playing field, a popular movement can prevail.