Tomorrow's election merits your attention

Friends,

The biggest authoritarian monsters of our time — Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping — have bred smaller monsters who seem less dangerous than the big ones but are causing almost as much chaos and cruelty.

I’m talking especially about Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungary’s Victor Orbán. Both have held their offices by clinging to bigoted, authoritarian, homophobic, anti-Muslim views and actions that are poisoning much of the Middle East and Europe. Netanyahu continues to wage war, which is keeping him out of jail and his right-wing coalition in power; Orbán continues to consolidate control over state institutions, rewrite electoral laws, and crack down on independent media.

Both Netanyahu and Orbán also have the support of the Trump regime and its white, Christian, nationalist cultural warriors.

But Trump’s war in Iran has made it harder for white Christian nationalists to maintain their “America First” isolationism, given the obvious contradiction between crusading for white Christianity abroad while also promoting xenophobic nativism at home. This contradiction has eroded American support for Netanyahu and Orbán at a critical time for both.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson had been among Netanyahu’s and Orbán’s strongest cheerleaders in the U.S. But Carlson opposes Trump’s war in Iran and recently stepped up his criticism, calling Trump’s obscenity-laced Easter Sunday message on Iran “vile on every level” and labelling Trump’s threats to bomb civilian energy and transportation infrastructure a war crime.

Carlson also echoed growing sentiment in the MAGA right that Trump’s decision to go to war was a result of undue influence by Netanyahu. “The Israelis have him in a hammerlock,” Carlson said.

Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene charges that “Trump has gone mad as he wages war against Iran, a broken campaign promise. I fought alongside Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens and Alex Jones to help get Trump elected. We never changed. Trump did.”

Trump calls all these cultural warriors who have criticized his war “stupid people” whom “nobody cares about …. They’re not MAGA, they’re losers. As president, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on world and country affairs.”

Behind this petty war of words are serious shifts in power and influence.

Trump’s war in Iran has contributed to Netanyahu’s Israel becoming a pariah state in the world. And because the war has exposed confusion and ambiguity among the MAGA faithful when it comes to foreign regimes, it has also indirectly undermined support for Orbán’s Hungary.

With the Hungarian presidential election looming, JD Vance last weekend stumped for Orbán in Budapest, lamely explaining he’d come there “because of the moral cooperation between our two countries” — each engaged in a “defense of Western civilization” based on their common adherence to “Christian civilization and Christian values.”

Trump has endorsed Orbán. Putin is also doing what he can to help Orbán. Netanyahu sent a message last month to the the annual U.S. CPAC conference in Budapest, hailing Orbán as a leader who can “protect against this rising tide” of Islamic terrorism. “Orbán means safety, security, stability.”

Rubbish.

Tomorrow, the good people of Hungary will have an opportunity to push Orbán out of office. It’s possible. Hungary still has enough remnants of democracy to do the job — although it may not for very much longer if Orbán remains in power.

Hungarians seem most upset with Hungary’s struggling economy, high prices, poor hospitals, and underfunded railway. Orbán’s opponent has focused on these bread-and-butter issues while noting that Orbán’s cronies have grown richer as ordinary Hungarians have become poorer.

Orbán’s removal would send a timely signal to the rest of the world about to deal with the monsters, large and small, who are now threatening global peace, prosperity, and stability while also destroying whatever moral authority the West still possesses.

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JD Vance was right: Illiberal kleptocratic Christian nationalism is on the ballot in Hungary this Sunday, just as it will be on the ballots that Americans will cast in November. Here and there, may it be massively repudiated.