JD Vance gets weird in Budapest as the far right's bromance with Viktor Orbn heads for the rocks

[marmar]

MAGA and Putin bet big on Hungary’s election. Will it pay off?
JD Vance gets weird in Budapest as the far right's bromance with Viktor Orbán heads for the rocks

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published April 12, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) In an episode of MAGA gaslighting so absurd that the most avowedly neutral observers around the world found it irresistible, Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary last week to deliver a campaign speech for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It was “disgraceful,” Vance said — in his patented sad-but-outraged mode, suggestive of a junior college debate team’s second-best performer — that “outside forces” were trying “to put their thumb on the scale” of Hungarian politics.

“What has happened in the midst of this election ⁠campaign,” Vance later told a Budapest press conference, without the slightest glint of ironic self-awareness, “is one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.”

Well, OK then! As a Reuters report put it, everything about Vance’s Hungarian visit “broke with the norms of prior U.S. presidential administrations of not openly campaigning in foreign elections, especially for a government that has maintained close ties with Putin.”

....(snip)....

On the most basic level, there’s not much mystery. Orbán has ruled Hungary for 16 uninterrupted years, for most of that time with an unassailable legislative supermajority. As reporters have told us endlessly over the past decade or so, he was “Trump before Trump,” and the truism is at least partly accurate.

....(snip)....

This time around, it appears possible or likely that Hungarians are more concerned about their stagnant economy than about invisible gay Ukrainians under the bed. There are valid concerns that Orbán may try to cling to power after this weekend’s election, Jan. 6-style, but for the moment he faces apparent defeat against an opposition coalition led by Péter Magyar, a younger and more dynamic figure but a long way from anybody’s idea of a European progressive. Magyar only left Orbán’s Fidesz party amid a corruption scandal two years ago, and has largely avoided discussing Putin, Zelenskyy or inflammatory culture-war topics. In the most generous interpretation, he promises something like a return to boring, technocratic center-right normalcy. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/12/maga-and-putin-bet-big-on-hungarys-election-will-it-pay-off/

[underpants]

1. J. V. travels to foreign land to decry outside forces interfering

🙄

[callous taoboy]

2. J.V.

[dickthegrouch]

3. Ummm, JD, are you, or are you not an "outside force"?

And trying “to put your (their) thumb on the scale” of Hungarian politics?