Three leaders prove Trump has abandoned America's role as democracy's champion: analysis

President Donald Trump has forfeited America’s longstanding stature as leader of the free world, a conservative commentator argued on Monday — but three non-American world leaders are stepping up to fill that void.

“Under the Trump administration, we’re no longer the leader of the Free World,” The Bulwark’s William Kristol wrote on Monday. “Indeed we’re barely on the side of the Free World.” Citing the Trump administration’s human rights violations and isolationist foreign policy, Kristol claimed that Trump’s administration is not championing democracy and human rights, in stark contrast to every president before him since World War II. In lieu of Trump, Kristol pointed to three other world leaders who are instead championing the cause of freedom through the globe.

“Seven years ago, in April 2019, an entertainer who’d never held elective office, Volodymyr Zelensky, was elected president of Ukraine,” Kristol wrote. “What his nation has done in defending its national freedom against the brutal assault of a much larger and dictatorial neighbor has surely been the twenty-first century’s finest hour.” Kristol then quoted New York Times columnist David French, who said that “for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. . . . It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.”

In addition to Zelensky, Kristol argued that Pope Leo XIV is standing up for the free world by criticizing Trump’s anti-immigration and pro-war policies.

“For all President Trump’s belittling of him, People Leo XIV has turned out to be a formidable enough figure that Trump is sending his secretary of state to Rome this week to pay his respects,” Kristol wrote. “This is not quite Henry IV journeying to Canossa—but it’s not nothing.”

By denouncing the Pope so vehemently, Trump also tapped into America’s deeper history of anti-Catholic prejudice, historian Dr. Christopher Shannon told AlterNet last month.

“Anti-Catholicism is baked into Anglo-American political culture,” Shannon told AlterNet. “During the Revolution, patriot leaders from [future president] John Adams to Thomas Paine repeatedly denounced British oppression in language drawn directly from earlier denunciations of the Catholic Church. For example, in Common Sense, Paine likened monarchy to ‘popery.’”

The conservative finally praised Péter Magyar, who recently defeated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by turning “the election into a referendum on illiberalism. . . . Presented with a clear, stark choice between reactionary conservatism and national liberalism, Hungarians chose liberalism.”

In fact, as journalist Steven Greenhut wrote for the libertarian magazine Reason last month, Orbán was widely admired by the far right for creating a government in Hungary they insisted could serve as a model for other nations.

"Legions of conservatives — including the sitting vice president — have flocked to Hungary to champion the wonders of Viktor Orbán's self-described 'illiberal" government," Greenhut wrote. "If you're not up on political lingo, the term 'illiberal' does not refer to modern liberalism, but to the classical liberalism of our founders. Right-wing post-liberalism is about replacing limited government with something like elected autocracy…. Hungarian voters handily rebuked him and his Vladimir Putin-friendly Fidesz party…. despite President Donald Trump's fawning support."