MAGA and Putin bet big on Hungary's election -- it backfired

[B.See]

Remember how MAGA shirts at Trump hate fests proclaimed how they'd "rather be Russian than Democrat?"



Well, seems on Sunday, Hungarians responded with a resounding, "WE don't think so."

They woke the fuck up. High time for America to do likewise.

MAGA and Putin bet big on Hungary’s election — it backfired - Salon via MSN

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 that nation’s doomed Trumpian 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.”

... he said with a straight face.

As Hungarian journalist Ivan L. Nagy puts it, Orbán survived for so long through an ingenious pattern of “shadowboxing” against an ever-shifting cast of “make-believe enemies,” telling the conservative and nationalistic elements of the Hungarian public that only he can save them from dark-skinned immigrants, European bureaucrats, meddling American liberals, the globalist plots of Hungarian-born George Soros, LGBTQ activists, “gender ideology” and wokeness. It isn’t entirely fair to say he built his regime on veiled or coded racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia and trans panic; for the most part, it wasn’t coded at all.

Like the MAGA movement itself, Orbán’s Hungary had the distinct flavor of a con job. He built a garden-variety authoritarian state much as despots of the past have done, with a few 21st-century innovations. He has inexorably ground down press freedom, political opposition and the rule of law, but without quite canceling elections, shipping dissidents to the gulag or otherwise directly violating the European Union’s wobbly political and social norms.