The president’s latest 'humiliation' shows the 'catastrophic failure' of Trumpism

In early April, the world was treated to the strange spectacle of Vice President JD Vance attempting a phone call to President Donald Trump from the stage of a campaign rally for embattled Hungarian President Viktor Orban.

“Let’s hope he actually answers,” Vance told a crowd of thousands, “or this is gonna be very embarrassing.”

Trump didn’t pick up. The American president had sent his second in command to stump for Orban, hoping to drum up support for the latter’s floundering campaign to maintain power after 16 years of “illiberal” leadership. Orban’s far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-democratic policies had garnered him superstar status among the American GOP, but now he was flagging in the polls, and Trump and his allies worried that his loss would prove the limitations of their ideology and portend the end of MAGA altogether. So Trump went all-in on supporting an Orban win.

But then he lost in a landslide. And according to Greg Sargent of the New Republic, this is no mere “humiliation” for Trump, but proves the “catastrophic failure” and “deep unpopularity of Trumpism.”

As an example of this, look to JD Vance’s speech.

“It was packed with MAGA-right buzzwords, claiming Orbán must be elected to save ‘Western civilization’ from mass migration and the ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’ — the European Union and the woke, globalist enemies of national ‘sovereignty,’” wrote Sargent. “Obviously that message failed.”

Vance appealed to a sense of international solidarity between far-right authoritarians, but this fell on the deaf ears of Hungarian voters who had seen their quality of life diminish dramatically after nearly two decades of Orban leadership. As Sargent explains, they’d realized that “right-populist hostility to international alliances and multilateral institutions, both in Hungary and the United States, has proven disastrous.” They’d witnessed the failures of Orban’s American backer’s policies and how “after only one year, every pillar of his nationalist agenda — the tariffs, the deportations, the ‘America First’ imperialism and conquest — has already proven” to be unpopular and unworkable. They’d experienced firsthand the extreme version of far-right restrictions on free speech, association, media, and human rights that MAGA hopes to impose in the U.S.

“The Hungary results show that determined authoritarianism can lose to challengers who campaign on democracy, the rule of law, and an embrace of internationalist institutions,” concludes Sargent. “Between that and the catastrophic failure — and deep unpopularity — of Trumpism at home,” Democrats have a real chance of ending the MAGA project once and for all.