Post-Truth Won’t End With Trump

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

One of the ironies of the low-trust society—and that is the kind of society we are building, to our detriment—is that its deficit of trust is mirrored by a surplus of gullibility.

 

What Umberto Eco wrote (describing the view of G.K. Chesterton) about God is true about lesser authorities as well: that when men stop believing, “it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

 

You know what I am talking about: The same people who go on and on (and they do) about how they don’t trust “Big Pharma” are ready to believe anything they see on the internet about ivermectin or raw milk or drinking water with borax dissolved in it. (Please do not drink borax.) Certain people who believe that climate change is a hoax accept at face value wild claims about Satanic pedophile rings operating out of Washington pizzerias, people who reject evolution as a fanciful hypothesis believe that aliens from distant planets secretly walk among us, etc. You can read essays calling for “evidence-based government” or “science-based” health tips in the Washington Post and then check the horoscopes.

 

The mess of distrust and gullibility gets very tangled: At my gym, I have spoken to at least a half-dozen young men who 1) are constantly engaged in betting on professional sports and 2) believe that professional sporting matches are rigged. I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would permit this sort of thing to happen where his financial interests are concerned?” The response: “He’s in on it, obviously.” And I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would put at risk billions of dollars of his own wealth and many billions more worth of intellectual property he controls in exchange for whatever paltry sums he might get from entering into a conspiracy—a conspiracy requiring the cooperation and disciplined silence of dozens of hot-tempered, high-testosterone, notoriously talkative 24-year-old men whose financial interests would in fact be much better served by betraying any game-fixing conspiracy they were invited to join—to make a little side money gambling? And do you really think that the people who run the gambling businesses would allow themselves to get taken that way? Because if you do believe that, I can tell you why Jerry Jones is rich and you are not.” And the response invariably will involve some half-remembered series of supposedly unlikely fourth-and-long coincidences communicated via whatever it is the kids who are over TikTok are watching today. I further inquire: “If you think it is rigged, why on earth are you betting on it?” And then they usually lapse into junkie thinking: They are somehow special and can intuit what direction the rigging is going—not that their bankrolls reflect any such special talent.

 

The political world has always attracted its share of conspiracy cranks, from those peddling profoundly silly accounts of international economics (often seasoned with antisemitism, as taste dictates) to “intelligent design” charlatans. Cranky people often develop boutique political interests: There is a reason so many on the American right are at most one degree of separation from the Moonies while the left has thrown up a series of cults over the decades, from the Democratic Workers Party to MOVE. (Many cults crossed the political aisle over the years: The Lyndon LaRouche cult began as a left-wing movement before it was John Birch Society-adjacent, while the Children of God has had both hippie and more traditional fundamentalist aspects in its various iterations.) American celebrity culture exhibits its own cult-y enthusiasms (Scientology, the Esalen Institute, a parade of Hollywood gurus) while many cults and cult-adjacent groups (Synanon, NXIVM) have come out of the great American self-improvement tradition. Wealth and celebrity can produce cultlike devotion (Donald Trump,  of course, but also Taylor Swift) or inspire fever dreams of Luciferian conspiracies (George Soros, Charles Koch, Bill Gates) or both at the same time, depending on whether the subject in question comports with one’s own cultural preferences. Cults fill a longstanding demand in the marketplace: They tell people who they are.

 

In a similar if less dramatic way, quackery is aesthetically conditioned and comes in flavors tied to cultural affiliations and identity markers: The people who believe very deeply in the healing power of crystals or the wisdom of horoscopes are almost never 40-year-old married men with hunting licenses and season tickets for their local college football team; the people who will lecture you about the supposed benefits of an all-meat diet are almost never Jewish grandmothers. Our conspiracy theories, quackery, and other irrational beliefs generally have less to do with considered views about how the world works than they do with implicit assertions about ourselves, about what kind of people we are, and which communities we feel that we belong to—and which communities we reject, compete with, or hate.

 

Put another way: The problem of social trust is, at a certain level, a problem of diversity.

 

There is a considerable political science literature on trust and diversity, which you most often will hear cited by conservatives as a reason a Scandinavian-style welfare state could not work in the United States: That kind of thing, the argument goes, works only in small and relatively homogeneous societies, to the extent that it works at all. There is a good deal to that, of course, though it is, as any intelligent person would expect, more complicated than the maxims would imply: Singapore, for example, is small (6 million) but diverse, and it has some features that would please American free-market champions (relatively modest social spending) and some that would confound them (state ownership of 90 percent of the land). Germany is a large country that once exhibited very high levels of social cohesion (not always to the betterment of the world, or of Germany) but more recently has seen its sense of social solidarity decline as it has become more diverse, to such an extent that formerly muted concerns—e.g., that the German welfare state is too expensive—are now part of the ordinary political conversation.

 

But even if ethnolinguistic homogeneity were the solution to the problem of building or rebuilding social trust, homogeneity is not a practical option for these United States, and it never has been, not even at the beginning. We had 13 different colonies for a reason. Of course there are political principles that can partly mitigate the challenges associated with American scale and diversity—federalism, subsidiarity, etc.—but here the generally unspoken American superstition that all social problems can be solved by passing better laws runs upon the rocks. But if you tell Americans that what is necessary is a change of the national heart and a renewal of the national spirit, they will (go and check the comments section) try to turn that into a simple, simpleminded, and simply beside-the-point question: “Okay, but who should I vote for?”

 

The relevant concerns here are prior to elections.

 

Populists—in Europe and the United Kingdom as much as in the United States—have contributed to building the destructive, low-trust political environment through the ordinary means of natural bumptiousness and weaponizing (or monetizing, in the case of Fox News and right-wing influencers) class resentment and social anxiety; elites, in turn, have done their part by abusing the privilege of their position to pursue narrowly self-interested policies (as though the working poor were crying out in the night for solar panel subsidies, college loan relief, and a more generously compensated support staff for the associate dean of students) and to structure the political discourse in such a way as to try to exclude nonconforming views associated with despised social groups, for example by pretending that the disputes involving climate and transgender issues are scientific questions, subject only to expert advice, rather than democratic political disagreements about tradeoffs and priorities and the distribution of burdens.

 

The electoral success of populists, autocrats, and demagogues from Donald Trump in the United States to Alternative für Deutschland is the result of collapsing trust, not the cause of it. The work of populism is less like what happens in a policy shop and more like what happens in a dress shop: It is a species of fashion, not very much subject to rational evaluation as a series of public policy proposals. Donald Trump has been on every conceivable side of almost every possible issue—whatever it is his devotees see in him, it did not come out of a white paper.

 

None of this is exactly new. It is an old thing that is getting worse and more common, like comedy podcasts or antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. Hannah Arendt considered the problem in the context of totalitarianism:

 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and that the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

 

Our situation is still more antinomian than totalitarian—more chaotic than coherent—but it is easy to see how the former clears the way for the latter.  The destruction of the idea of truth and that truth-affirming sense that Arendt wrote about creates a kind of epistemic vacuum—an opportunity for the talented political entrepreneur with grander and darker ambitions than the merely grasping, lowbrow caudillo politics of Donald Trump and his gang. Crankery and quackery are not mere organic craziness arising naturally from the ferment of our affluence—they are instruments for creating identities and for mobilizing them.

 

What is important to understand here is that there is a reason socially entangled phenomena such as conspiracy theories, diet fads, and medical quackery tend to spread in ways that are largely (though by no means exclusively) congruent with the lines of political allegiance. Ivermectin is not about health care policy, and raw milk is not about casein. “We could pay for all the good things if only the billionaires would pay their fair share” is not about balancing the federal books. These are attempts, however desultory or incompetent, at mythography—morally charged stories intended to provide a sense of social orientation to people who feel lost and disconnected and who cannot identify any obviously trustworthy and authoritative party to whom they can turn for guidance or judgment.

 

The great institutions—the churches, the government, the press, the universities, the professional communities and organizations at the commanding heights of business and culture—have given many people substantial reasons to doubt them, and the great demagogues—in the churches, the government, the press, the universities, etc.—have encouraged that doubt, often inflaming it beyond what is reasonable, in the pursuit of their own interests. Social capital accumulated over decades and centuries is not easily replenished once depleted to the critical level, and trust squandered is not easily reestablished.

 

If you think this problem is going to resolve itself by some mysterious self-actuating means at noon on January 20, 2029, then you are going to be disappointed.

Lions Led by Donkeys

By Eliot A. Cohen

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

The trope that the British soldiers of World War I were “lions led by donkeys” is somewhat unfair. But the phrase can and should be applied to the current Iran war, at least insofar as the United States is concerned. The U.S. is waging a struggle against an unquestionably malign enemy, using a military that is highly competent but in some respects under-equipped, and with the worst wartime political leadership America has ever had.

 

Admittedly, some of the criticism of America’s leadership is wide of the mark. The notion that it has no objectives, or that those objectives are unclearly articulated, is exaggerated, because the depressing truth is that in wartime, objectives are usually muddled, occasionally implicit, and always changing. Take, for example, the most recent supposedly clear-cut case of goal setting in war.

 

George H. W. Bush’s four stated objectives for the Gulf War fall apart on close examination. They were: ensuring the safety of American citizens in the Gulf (a reference to hostages held by Iraq, who were released before the war), driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, restoring the legitimate government of Kuwait (a monarchy representing perhaps a quarter of the population), and ensuring the safety and stability of the Persian Gulf. Only the second of these was actually achieved. There were also unstated objectives such as the elimination of the Iraqi nuclear program (pretty much finished off by postwar inspections, not air strikes) and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s rule, which occurred 12 years later, after another war. Most important, there were unintended consequences. America extended a degree of protection to Kurdish and Shia minorities, imposed continued inspections and unpopular sanctions on Iraq, and sustained a large American military presence in Saudi Arabia. War is about politics—and therefore, objectives, which are particularly political, are often ambiguous and subject to change.

 

Some of the Trump administration’s goals are clear enough—destroying or severely damaging Iran’s navy, its military industries, its missile- and drone-launching capability, and its residual nuclear program. Others, such as overthrowing the leadership of the Islamic Republic, are aspirational. Still others, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz in the face of Iranian threats to mine it, may be emerging—or not, depending on President Trump’s mood.

 

In and of themselves, these uncertainties and changes are more or less normal aspects of wartime leadership. What is not normal, and what is stunningly incompetent, is just about every other facet of the administration’s conduct of the war. It is impossible to excuse the failure to explain the war to the American people, aside from a presentation by the president in his summer home while he wore an unserious white baseball cap. Or the failure to bring Congress into wartime decision making, or at least secure its approval for the war. Or the failure to bring allies along with a minimum of surprises and a maximum of persuasion to support the war.

 

But the egregious failures do not end there. The best wartime political leaders attempt to minimize internal friction and feuds. Not Trump, who, in the midst of a war with a state sponsor of terrorism, has persisted in picking fights over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. He has likewise made doomed attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and to meddle in states’ election administration, moves that seem almost calculated to enhance internal divisions. The very notion of national unity in a time of war seems utterly beyond this president, who follows his capricious instincts and continues, as ever, to spray venom at domestic opponents (and, for that matter, allies) when they are needed to wage and win the war.

 

His advisers are, if anything, even worse. Rarely has a president been surrounded by such an array of toadies and lickspittles, operating beyond their competence in an atmosphere of organizational chaos. A deliberate National Security Council process might have included interagency planning for wartime risk insurance, diplomatic outreach to allies, and planning for supplemental defense appropriations. But no such process exists, and therefore those things did not happen.

 

Never has the United States had a secretary of defense less capable, more egregiously belligerent, or less suited to provide civilian direction of a war than Pete Hegseth. He, like Trump, cannot unify, deciding in the middle of this war to turn down the promotions of four officers—two Black, two female—for reasons that do not seem to transcend mere prejudice. He can strut and hurl bombast; he has yet to show that he can do the more serious business of directing a war.

 

The civilian leader of the Department of Defense, in a war with an Islamist power but in which the U.S. has partnered with other Muslim states, has decided to place his own, peculiarly militant Christian beliefs at the center of his public rhetoric, a decision of unconscionable stupidity. More serious yet: It is an open secret that the senior echelons of the U.S. military hold in contempt this bullying and posturing former National Guard major whose military and civilian careers (except as an incendiary television commentator) were failures. When things go badly during a war—and they always do—it is essential that the civil-military dialogue be based on mutual respect even in the toughest moments. Hegseth has forfeited that.

 

The president’s other key advisers—Vice President Vance, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby—have all avoided leadership in this war as best they can. Vance is an isolationist, Colby an Asia-firster, Rubio a Latin Americanist by instinct. And so they are all silent. Diplomacy has been handed over to the president’s real-estate friend Steven Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, neither of whom know the first thing about war.

 

The only positive thing one can say about Trump and Hegseth as war leaders is that they have few compunctions about talking about winning. But even here, they endanger and degrade their own cause. The use of childish internet and video-game memes to describe violence is coarse and unworthy of the men and women who go in harm’s way.

 

On October 1, 1939, a month into World War II, Winston Churchill gave a speech in which he described the Royal Navy hunting U-boats “night and day, I will not say without mercy—because God forbid we should ever part company with that—but at any rate with zeal and not altogether without relish.” Less than a month into the Iran war, Hegseth cried, “No quarter, no mercy, for our enemies.” Quarter is the technical term for sparing the lives of enemies who have surrendered. Denying it is a war crime. The first of those remarks was delivered by a resolute and, when necessary, ruthless but principled statesman; the second by a thug, who proclaims a faith of meekness even while he celebrates cruelty and killing.

 

There is a reason that even those of us who fully recognize Iran’s menace and are pleased with the elimination of much of its military capabilities, and who hope for the eventual fall of this brutal and dangerous regime, find it impossible to advocate for what is, in many ways, a just war. With political leadership so feckless, so dysfunctional, so incapable of planning, so willing to betray friends and allies for short-term advantage, so willing to lie and advocate criminal behavior, our military is simply not in responsible hands. It may yet succeed, and even succeed greatly, but that will be a tribute only to the lions, not the donkeys.

Why Trump Didn’t Predict the Gas-Price Spike

By David Frum

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

On March 16, two weeks into his Iran war, President Trump assured reporters that he had the Strait of Hormuz problem well in hand. “And we’re hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, with more than 30 mine-laying ships destroyed,” he said. “We hit, to the best of our knowledge, all of their mine-laying ships.”

 

On March 31, the national average price of gasoline at the pump surpassed $4, the highest level since the post-pandemic shocks of 2022. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas usually flows through the strait, but hasn’t since Iran began impeding the waterway in early March. Yet Trump continues to insist that Iran’s partial closure of the strait isn’t a problem. Markets don’t agree with Trump, and neither do his poll numbers.

 

How did Trump get Hormuz so wrong? The answer reveals one of Trump’s most characteristic and most fateful mistakes: his steadfast refusal to acknowledge that Americans live in a world economy.

 

Here he is on March 16 again: “You know, we get less than 1 percent of our oil from the strait. And, uh, some countries get much more. Japan gets 95 percent. China gets 90 percent. Many of the Europeans get quite a—quite a bit.” These specific numbers are, as you might suspect, wrong. China gets about 40 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Still, the general point is correct. Gulf oil flows mostly to Asia, and vanishingly little goes to North America. But what Trump fails to understand is that these geographic details matter little to world energy markets.

 

Trump wishes for a United States economy walled off from the rest of the world. That’s why he loves tariffs so much—and why he refuses to think about what they mean to American producers, who now must pay more for inputs such as aluminum.

 

But with energy, there is no walling off. Most of America’s oil and gas is produced in the United States. American imports come overwhelmingly from Canada and Mexico. But American oil can be put on a tanker and sent to Japan or the European Union if the price across the ocean rises. The global process of buying and selling equalizes prices worldwide. Walling off the U.S. would mean America would have to stop exporting and importing oil. Trump does not want to do that. In fact, he endlessly urges other countries to buy more American oil and gas. As he said in his March 31 comments: “Buy from the U.S.; we have plenty.”

 

Trump’s inability to comprehend the relevance of Persian Gulf supplies to American motorists may explain how he stumbled into his Iran war in the first place. A threat to the Strait of Hormuz may be the most war-gamed problem in the whole U.S. military inventory. It’s thorny enough to have deterred American presidents from attacking Iran for nearly 50 years, no matter how provocatively Iran behaved.

 

“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” Trump announced as the first bombs dropped on February 28. But why did Trump go where every other leader had declined to tread? Maybe he was the first president to see this war as an answer because he was the first who did not understand the question.

What the No Kings Protests and Tea Parties Have in Common

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

I am not very comfortable being in the middle of the road, politically. It’s not where I grew up, personally or professionally. My instincts are not quite contrarian per se (contrarianism purely for contrarianism’s sake is one of the highest forms of asininity), but my instincts lead me to a certain contrariness all the same, because I often think the received or conventional wisdom is wrong in important ways.

 

I’ve written a lot about what we might call false centrism, or centrism wrongly understood. In my underrated second book I wrote:

 

The point is that sometimes the extreme is 100 percent correct while the centrist position is 100 percent wrong. But there’s something about being not as wrong as one of the other extremes that some people just find so enticing and seductive. I just don’t get it.

 

If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist, I’ll tell you that the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does. The extremists have a serious disagreement about what to do. The independent who splits the difference has no idea what to do and doesn’t want to bother with figuring it out.

 

I still believe that. And it’s often how I like to argue about things. Indeed, I’m really trying to resist going on autopilot and railing against the rhetorical trickery of the false choice, or the great snipe hunt of American politics, the vast reserve army of socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters, or dozens of my other standard go-tos. 

 

But I won’t.

 

I’m starting out this way because, in all honesty, I still feel some embarrassment and hypocrisy for lending aid and comfort to a very popular understanding of centrism that I dislike. For instance, I never loved Arthur Schlesinger’s mid-century “Vital Center” liberalism formulation because he—and his fans—smuggled in all sorts of assumptions about the infallibility of his own worldview by placing it between fascism and communism. Of course, if the choice is between those extremes, I’m signing up for the “Vital Center” of liberal democratic capitalism as he defined it. But the claim that the further you got from agreeing with him, the closer you got to one form of totalitarianism or another left me cold.

 

Damn it, there I go again. Must … resist … the self-baiting.

 

So, let’s get to it.

 

On Monday, I saw a segment on Fox News’ Special Report about the No Kings protests.

 

My old friend Bret Baier opened the segment by noting that a “network” of some 500 groups was behind the protests and that “some critics are doubting the sincerity of that movement.” Fox Digital reporter Asra Nomani conceded that there were some “well-intentioned people” in the protests, but claimed the “command and control” of the protests were these 500 groups with a supposedly shocking combined “$3 billion budget.” (This averages out to a less-than-shocking $6 million budget per organization, by the way.)

 

In some follow-up commentary, Brit Hume came on—introduced by a clip of some idjit commie kids chanting about “communist revolution”—to opine on the No Kings protests. With his hallmark sarcasm, Brit said we have to count these protests as a “great success.” After three of these No Kings marches, “We don’t have any kings … and so they’ve won.” He went on to note the “absurdity” of these protests and dismissed with a chuckle the suggestion that Donald Trump might have any kingly ambitions.

 

So, in short, the gist of the report and commentary was that the No Kings protests were of dubious sincerity, ideologically silly on the merits, infiltrated by dangerous radicals using the protests as cover for more nefarious and in some cases violent ends, and largely funded by a network of shady organizations and sinister billionaires. In short, it was a dismissible exercise in astroturf politics, reflective of a tiny and negligible “minority” of Americans.

 

I’m open to all of these claims.

 

For starters, it’s fine to question the sincerity of some of the No Kings crowd in at least one regard. If a Democratic president were abusing the system comparably to how Donald Trump is, the composition of these protests, if they happened at all, would be very different. Partisanship is obviously part of the motivation, and Hume is surely correct that a major driver of these protests is anti-Trump sentiment, not a serious objection to executive power run amok. 

 

To which I say, “Okay.”

 

But rather than mock the protests, I think it would be much better for the country and conservatism to encourage the protesters to think through their newfound horror at presidents exceeding their authority.

 

It’s a bit like the progressives who suddenly discover the merits of federalism when Republicans are in office. Rather than bebop and scat on their hypocrisy, it would be better for everyone to foster some buy-in to the idea that might last into a future Democratic administration.

 

Second, as a rule, I don’t like protests. (At least not in the democratic West. Protests in authoritarian countries are very different.) A big part of my dislike is not ideological or political but psychological and aesthetic. Finding comfort in large mobs of people is, simply put, a bit creepy to me. I’ve written about the seduction and false transcendence of crowds many times.

 

Regardless, what struck me watching the combined segments was how familiar they felt. I thought, “Wasn’t this pretty much exactly how the mainstream media covered the tea party protests?” Instead of George Soros (who was name-checked in the Fox report) the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. harped incessantly about how the tea parties were funded by the Koch brothers and various astroturf right-wing organizations. They’d “question the sincerity” of the tea parties—or outright deny it.

 

These outlets also focused on the freaks, weirdoes, cranks, and characters who inevitably sign up for any mass movement and suggested they weren’t marginal but representative. As the Los Angeles Times noted back then, “At MSNBC, commentators Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews wrote off the demonstrations as the work of nothing more than crackpots or political stooges.” Others insisted that the tea parties literally fit the textbook definition of fascism. Some haven’t let go of this conviction.

 

The symmetry isn’t perfect. Mainstream media and various progressive groups were obsessed with the idea that the tea parties were racist, sometimes even likening the tea party to the KKK and Herman Cain as an heir to the Klan.

 

There hasn’t been anything like that, that I’ve seen, from the right with regard to the No Kings demonstrations. Though Scott Jennings did do a bit of amusing opportunistic nutpickery.

 

But the claims that the No Kings protests were a Trojan horse for communists just doesn’t feel all that different from the claims that tea parties were cover for fascists.

 

As for the scorn for the idea that “No Kings” is a silly slogan—which I’m marginally sympathetic to—I think it’s worth noting that the whole idea behind a movement built around the ideas that inspired the Boston Tea Party is not so very different. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against, well, a foreign king. There was other stuff involved of course, but conceptually the similarities are far more obvious to me than the differences.

 

And if we’re scoring for hypocrisy and insincerity, where the fudge are all the tea partiers these days? Trump’s fiscal incontinence, crony capitalism, and fetish for bailouts and taxes are certainly no better than Barack Obama’s. I attended many tea party events where speakers waxed eloquent about the Constitution and attendees carried little pocket Constitutions. If the No Kings crowds are hypocrites because they didn’t mind Joe Biden or Obama’s excesses but hate Trump’s, the same charge of hypocrisy works the other way around.

 

I mean, Trump has literally levied taxes on tea! He’s done so without the consent of Congress. Strictly speaking, this is taxation without representation. That Trump has levied taxes on a bajillion other things without constitutional authority doesn’t lessen the irony. The fact that he’s also launched a couple wars without congressional authority makes the “No Kings” argument stronger, not weaker.

 

Here’s another data point. The Ruthless podcast promoted its latest episode on social media by lamenting how “Democrats’ normalization of fringe characters, like Hasan Piker, shows you who is driving their party. We review insane clips from No Kings rallies that show the same problem—there’s no such thing as a moderate Democrat.”  

 

Now, in the linked video clip I agree entirely with Josh Holmes that it’s outrageous for the New York Times to be platforming Hasan Piker, a terrorism-supporting left-wing poltroon.

 

But, here’s the thing. The right is suffused with right-wing versions of Piker. They might not be getting softball treatment from the right-wing equivalent of the New York Times, but that’s because there is no right-of-center equivalent of the New York Times (which is why everyone should subscribe to The Dispatch—editors).

 

But you know where there are plenty of ideological freaks? In the Trump administration. One of the most obvious, Joe Kent, just resigned as the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. But there are plenty of inmates running the asylum, from you know, the president of the United States, to the secretary of health and human services. Stephen Miller has his talons in everything.

 

Indeed, the administration is infested with social media propeller beanie white nationalists, spewing “Heritage American” bilge. The vice president, who dismissed “I love Hitler” chat groups by Young Republicans as boys-being-boys hijinks, recently gave an interview to Benny Johnson, “MAGA’s Chief Content Creator.” Johnson is not the New York Times, of course, but that’s the point. The scandalousness here runs the other way. Johnson is an election-denying, ridiculous, plagiarist grifter who insisted that Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl appearance was a pro-Biden “psyop,” suggested that Nicolás Maduro was abducted to prove Venezuela’s role in rigging the 2020 election, and took money from Russia—“unknowingly”—to spread bilious divisive nonsense. He claimed he was the victim of the scheme.

 

Worse gargoyles man every parapet of the broader MAGA infotainment complex, many of whom are granted special access to the White House. I don’t need to call the roll, because it’s such a familiar story now. But if you think Piker being a guest on a New York Times podcast is evidence that the Democrats have caved to the sinister fringe, you might want to take into account the fact that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones et al. host podcasts, some of which often get more downloads than the Times and all of which are respected platforms in the GOP echo-system. The Young Republicans, an arm of the Republican Party, has been infiltrated and in many places, taken over, by groyper acolytes of admitted racist and Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes. At the latest CPAC, a Texan politician said that we need to deport “100 million people.” Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, sees “Zionists” along similar lines to Piker. He also recently explained to Benny Johnson that a “whistleblower” told him the U.S. military is forcibly breeding space aliens with migrants to create hybrid beings for … reasons.

 

My point here is not to say the right is worse than the left, or that Republicans have surrendered more to their fringe than the Democrats to theirs, or that right-wing media is more morally or politically corrupted than left-wing media—or vice versa. Such arguments, however valid, miss a simpler fact: Both sides have little right to get on a high horse about how terrible the other is. They all have splinters in their eyes. They all sit atop horses sunk to their haunches in mud.

 

Pointing all of this out doesn’t make me a centrist or moderate in the way I discussed at the beginning. But it does put me in an uncomfortable place all the same. I get grief from people all the time for making “both sides” arguments and complaints. So be it.

 

When I say I’ve never been more politically homeless but I’ve also never been more ideologically grounded, this is what I mean. Do I think the median Republican politician is more likely to be right on a given policy issue? Sure. Though it obviously depends on the specific question. But do I think Republicans are in any position to righteously lament how crazy the Democrats are in order to insinuate that the GOP is the party of sanity and probity? Hell no. And the fact that apologists for the fringe right—or full-fledged members of it—run Congress and the White House, not to mention so much of the right-wing media infrastructure, makes finger-pointing at the “liberal media” or even Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders et al.—however awful they might be—seem utterly insincere.

 

But I don’t think it’s insincere, at least not in many cases. Fish don’t know they are wet. And people inside partisan bubbles have trouble seeing what is obvious to those outside of them.

 

It’s not just that I’m disgusted with the ideological fringes on both sides, I’m frustrated to the point of being frequently appalled by the inability or unwillingness of the non-fringers in both parties to acknowledge the obvious truth as seen from outside the fishbowl. This puts me in an uncomfortable middle, or muddle.

 

In formal logic, the law of the excluded middle says that a proposition is either true or not true. In law, the jury either finds the defendant guilty or not guilty, but there’s no third option. In science, the object is either alive or dead, the light bulb is either on or off. This is how I often think about policy stuff.

 

But the law of the excluded middle doesn’t apply to politics, despite all of the “binary choice!” dogmatism we’ve been drenched in. If one party sucks, that doesn’t mean the other doesn’t. A stunning number of people really struggle to understand this, which is why all of those cliches about the most dangerous place to be is the “middle of the road”—because that’s where you get run over by cars on your right and left. But I guess I’m with Dwight Eisenhower, who was called a moron by the left and a secret communist by the fringe right. “People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable,” he said. “The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”

Carry On, Patriots

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, March 01, 2026

 

The most interesting political data I’ve seen lately has nothing to do with the economy or immigration or Iran. It has to do with bureaucrats’ job satisfaction, a subject conservatives aren’t naturally disposed to care much about.

 

The Office of Personnel Management asks federal workers each year how things are going at their agencies—or at least it used to, until the Trump administration canceled the 2025 survey. Fortunately, a nonprofit picked up the slack by creating its own questionnaire that replicated some of the topics traditionally probed by OPM.

 

What it found, per Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark, was a total collapse in federal employees’ confidence that the leaders of their departments will carry out their duties ethically.

 

Asked whether their superiors behave with high standards of integrity, 62.9 percent of workers across all agencies said yes in 2024. A year later, 11.2 percent said so. Asked whether they’re confident they could report a violation of a law, rule, or regulation without facing retaliation, 71.9 percent surveyed two years ago said they could. That declined to 22.5 percent last year.

 

Some of that can be chalked up to sour grapes over DOGE’s war on the administrative state and some of it to partisan disgruntlement at seeing a Democratic administration replaced in 2025 by a Republican one. But there’s no way around this: In matters ranging from war to policing to criminal justice to petty corruption, Donald Trump’s government has in fact created a culture of impunity unlike any in the history of the United States.

 

It’s an ethical disaster so grotesque that even MAGA influencers occasionally feel obliged to admit it. Federal workers now serve in a system that’s not so much amoral as immoral, where they stand a higher chance of being punished for exposing crimes committed by a presidential ally than that ally does for committing them. America’s bureaucratic culture has never been as comprehensively sick as it is right now. Go figure that federal workers might have noticed.

 

I thought of the survey yesterday while reading about Pete Hegseth’s latest attempt to destroy the U.S. military’s sense of honor.

 

On Saturday two Apache helicopters flew over a “No Kings” protest in Tennessee before swinging by the nearby home of MAGA darling Kid Rock, where the musician saluted the pilots and appeared to receive a salute in return. The aircraft were on a training mission, according to the Washington Post, and had no orders to monitor or disrupt the protest. Despite that, “one of the helicopters flew by demonstrators six times,” at one point descending as low as 625 feet and briefly circling an area where people were gathered.

 

It sounds like the crew thought it’d be fun to scare anti-Trump American citizens by buzzing them, even if that meant deviating from their assigned task. Military officials naturally ordered a disciplinary review and suspended the pilots. And Hegseth just as naturally un-suspended them immediately, no questions asked.

 

“No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots,” he wrote on Twitter, approvingly retweeting a video posted by Kid Rock of his encounter with the Apaches. I doubt any writer anywhere has distilled the corrupt essence of the Trump administration so succinctly. If you’re a presidential ally, i.e. a “patriot,” not only will you not be punished for misconduct, you won’t even be asked to explain yourself. That’s how the Justice Department handled things in Minneapolis too, you may recall.

 

It’s not noteworthy that Hegseth, a longtime apologist for war crimes, would leap to absolve service members for behaving ruthlessly toward the president’s political enemies. Nor is it noteworthy that he would pass on an opportunity to demand accountability for misconduct in a minor incident, if only to keep up appearances that the Pentagon is still enforcing discipline in the ranks. To build a proper culture of impunity, extending that impunity to petty malfeasance is important: It entices the grunts to start small in abusing their power, making them comfortable with the concept.

 

What is noteworthy is the timing. The president’s approval has declined sharply over the last month and will continue to do so as the economic fallout of the Iran war accumulates. If ever there were a moment when you might think toadies like Hegseth would be more circumspect about parading their arrogance and corruption, a spell of intense public discontent is it.

 

They should be chastened by events, wary of antagonizing the public further. In reality, the president and his team are behaving more imperiously than ever.

 

Seems ominous!

 

Unchastened.

 

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday designed to limit voting by mail in America, no matter how our 50 state governments might feel about it. “Trump’s order directs the Homeland Security Department, in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to create an approved list of absentee voters,” Politico explained. “The U.S. Postal Service would be directed to only send mail-in ballots to voters on that list.”

 

There’s an extortion component, too, of course. Any state that refuses to comply will have its federal funding withheld, whether Congress approves of that or not.

 

Take this prediction for what it’s worth, as it’s coming from the worst lawyer on The Dispatch staff, but that order is headed down the judicial toilet. The Constitution grants the legislature, not the executive, the power to big-foot states’ voting protocols, and the Supreme Court demonstrated very recently in a dramatic way how serious it is about not letting the president usurp Congress’ Article I powers.

 

Trump doesn’t expect the order to be upheld, though, unless he’s even more deluded by the information bubble he’s in than I assumed. He signed it to signal that his plot to game the midterms in Republicans’ favor by hook or by crook will continue, undaunted, in increasingly aggressive ways. The fact that his job approval now stands at 35 percent in some polls did not and will not deter him from his dubious mission.

 

This morning, he became the first president in U.S. history (as far as anyone knows) to attend oral arguments before the Supreme Court as the justices at last took up his executive order ending citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born on American soil. That one’s also destined for the constitutional crapper, for much the same reason that his order on mail-in voting is. Even if the court finds that the 14^th Amendment doesn’t guarantee birthright citizenship absolutely, it will assuredly hold that only Congress has the power to make the relevant rules. (It’s right there in Section 5.)

 

Maybe Trump knows that, maybe he doesn’t. Either way, it feels significant that he’d undertake to intimidate Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett into voting his way this time by staring them down in person. (You owe me, you can imagine him thinking, shooting daggers at both.) To be sure, it’s an idiotic tactic: Insofar as the president’s power play has any effect, it should make the justices less willing to rule in his favor to spare themselves lest they be accused that he successfully bullied them into doing so.

 

But I think his appearance has symbolic value. Venturing onto the court’s turf and confronting the justices personally might be his way of signaling that he’s preparing to confront them by infringing on their turf constitutionally if they rule against him. After the bitter disappointment of the tariff decision, Trump might treat an adverse decision in the birthright citizenship case as the moment to cross the Rubicon by ordering ICE to deport the children of illegal immigrants whether the Supreme Court likes it or not.

 

Even popular presidents didn’t dare risk a public backlash by defying court orders or rejecting the authority of Marbury v. Madison. Yet it seems plausible that a guy who’s at 35 percent might try it.

 

We’re not done. As I write this on Wednesday morning, Trump is promising to use his Oval Office address this evening about the Iran war to discuss his “disgust with NATO.” It sounds like the alliance is finally over: When asked yesterday if he’s reconsidering America’s participation in it, he replied, “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”

 

The president might be about to ask the country to support him in exiting a security pact that polls at 60 percent or better because member nations don’t want to participate in a war that, uh, Americans don’t want us participating in either. This too would be lawless, almost needless to say, as the NATO treaty isn’t a mere “suggestion” to the president. It’s a binding commitment that was codified in federal law when it was ratified by the Senate decades ago. Who’s going to give the order to defend Poland from Russia if he refuses, though? Sonia Sotomayor?

 

Then there are the monuments.

 

Never, surely, in American history has a leader been more consumed with glorifying himself than Trump is right now. The Trump ballroom, the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump international airport, Trump’s face on coins, Trump’s signature on the currency, and soon-ish a Trump presidential library-slash-hotel featuring a giant golden statue of the president that distinctly resembles sculptures of Kim Il Sung in North Korea.

 

And that list is not exhaustive.

 

All of it would be deeply, autocratically weird even for a president with massive popular support. For one who’s hemorrhaging approval, teetering on the brink of a full-blown energy crisis and stagflation, “weird” doesn’t begin to capture how disconnected it is from public opinion. From foreign policy to trade, the economy to immigration, Americans hate what he’s doing—yet the attitude of his administration in virtually every respect remains “Carry on, patriots.”

 

It’s Nero-esque, down to the quasi-gladitorial combat for the emperor’s amusement that will take place at his palace a few months from now. And maybe that’s no coincidence.

 

Self-correcting.

 

A president behaving more imperiously as he grows less popular is a confounding development in a democracy.

 

After all, democracy is meant to be self-correcting. A candidate makes promises, gets elected, then undertakes to govern. If his policies are bad, public opinion will sour and incentivize him to change course.

 

Sometimes presidents refuse to change course because they believe devoutly in a particular policy they’ve championed. Barack Obama promised health care reform as a candidate, for instance, and proposed a plan for it after taking office, only to discover that the public hated it. Polling at the time gave him a choice between abandoning the program and recovering or seeing it through and accepting the dire consequences. He chose door No. 2. Voters responded with an historic red wave in House races that fall.

 

What’s unusual about Trump isn’t that he’s sticking with an unpopular policy to which he’s deeply committed, like tariffs. What’s unusual is that he keeps making new and unexpected moves that he has every reason to think will deepen his unpopularity at a moment when he’s already unpopular.

 

The Iran war is the supreme example. Yes, he’s been rhetorically belligerent toward the Iranian regime for many years, but few believed that a guy running as the “peace candidate” in 2024 would start a war that’s now on the verge of involving ground troops and will compound a cost-of-living crisis that already has Americans at wit’s end. A popular president, like George W. Bush post-9/11, could reassure himself that he had political capital to spend in launching a questionable war of choice. Trump didn’t have the same capital—but spent it anyway.

 

Obama was sufficiently chastened by his party’s obliteration in 2010 that he felt obliged to negotiate the following year with the new House Republican majority on a grand bargain on entitlements. Trump will not be as compromise-minded if the House changes hands this fall, I suspect. “Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!,” he declared recently.

 

If we haven’t yet reached a point of democratic breakdown in which the country’s highest-ranking official stops caring about public opinion entirely, we seem to be approaching it. Why?

 

Democratic inefficiencies.

 

I think there are three reasons. One, of course, is that the president and his movement exist in an exquisitely curated information ecosystem designed to exclude discouraging feedback. Scroll through the replies to this tweet, showing a sharp shift toward Democrats in party ID over the past nine months, for an example of how MAGA true believers cope with data that contradicts their assumptions.

 

Like any market, democracy works best when it efficiently assimilates information, good and bad. Trumpist democracy is not efficient. The president won’t change course now that he’s conditioned himself and his supporters to treat every adverse data point as “fake news.”

 

Another inefficiency with Trumpist democracy is that the leader plainly does not give a rip about the long-term fate of his party and therefore lacks the usual motivation to avoid unpopular actions when he’s not on the ballot. We saw that in Georgia after the 2020 election, when Trump’s selfish paranoia about vote-rigging cost his party not one but two Senate seats. We’re seeing it again in Texas, where the president has held off on endorsing John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary despite the fact that he’d stand a better chance of holding the seat than uber-corrupt Trump crony Ken Paxton would.

 

Again, the Iran war is a prime example. In no sphere of reality does a conflict in the Middle East destined to disrupt oil markets make political sense nine months out from a midterm with affordability the most pressing issue in America. It’s a heavy anchor around Republican lawmakers’ necks. Yet as much as Trump might prefer to have them in control of Congress next year, his own desires will always take precedence over their political welfare. Look no further than the reason he gave to aides who warned him against attacking Iran: “I just want to do it,” the president reportedly said.

 

He just wanted to do it. In the same way that Europeans will have to deal with the economic consequences of the war Trump wanted to fight, Republican members of Congress will have to deal with the electoral consequences. The president doesn’t serve the party. The party serves him.

 

The greatest inefficiency of Trumpist democracy, though, is also the most obvious. Like all authoritarians, the president reveres democracy only to the extent it delivers the power he craves. He sees no special moral legitimacy in being supported by a popular majority, I suspect; if you told him that he could successfully gain or hold power only through anti-democratic means, no civic qualms would stop him.

 

In fact, we’ve seen that movie before, haven’t we?

 

By definition, a president who sees greater virtue in his right to rule than in the American people getting their way will not be chastened by negative feedback to his policies. The opposite, perhaps: If Trump is growing more imperious as his popularity declines, it may be that he’s begun to lean further into determined autocracy to shore up his position as he senses resistance mounting.

 

His new order restricting mail-in ballots and the pressure he’s putting on Senate Republicans to make voting more onerous are signs that he’s getting more aggressive about interfering with the midterms to prevent an impending blue wave. If those orders are struck down, another emergency order asserting presidential power to mandate voter ID and ban voting by mail is probably next. If (or when) that gets flushed, who knows?

 

But it’s a cinch that he’ll get more aggressive, not less.

 

The prospect of Trump conniving to try to suspend or cancel the midterms is realistic enough that a populist as diehard as Marjorie Taylor Greene now allows for the possibility. Last year, when Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House, the president said of Ukraine’s lack of recent elections: “During the war you can't have elections? So let me just see—three and a half years from now, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. That's good.”

 

Maybe he was joking. Or maybe he was doing something else.

 

The point of Pete Hegseth’s exhortation to “carry on, patriots,” and the reason so many federal bureaucrats now fear reporting misconduct, is that traditional norms of civic propriety are defunct. In which case, why would anyone assume that elections are an exception? An America where soldiers can intimidate civilians who hold political views they dislike, where Caesar’s face and name are on everything, and where nearly the entirety of federal policymaking is run out of the West Wing via illegal royal decrees is an America where the people in charge will feel no compunction about trying to retain power by any means necessary.

 

The less popular the president becomes, the more fervently he and his minions must “carry on.” Patriotism requires nothing less.

A Hormuz Handoff?

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

President Trump gave a speech to the nation that, at times, could have been ghostwritten by Curtis LeMay.

 

He talked with passion and relish about the devastating U.S. attacks on Iranian military capabilities and threatened more to come, perhaps targeting the Iranian electricity grid and the country’s oil facilities if there isn’t a deal soon.

 

For all that Trump boasted about U.S. power and threatened to use it in even more fearsome ways, he adopted a posture of relative impotence regarding the Strait of Hormuz. He urged the Europeans to open it or, he said, it would open up naturally when the conflict ends.

 

This is not a trifling matter. Since its earliest years, the U.S. has regarded maintaining the freedom of the seas as a vital national interest.

 

We have also long rejected “excessive” maritime claims (which would include the imposition of transit fees) by coastal states. The U.S. recognizes that the Strait of Hormuz is in Iranian and Omani waters but maintains that, under international law, they must be open to traffic, an uncontroversial argument — outside Tehran and other bandit lairs. We hear a great deal from Europeans about the importance they attach to international law. Now would be a good moment for them to show that they mean it.

 

As so often with President Trump, his handling of our European allies over the Iran war has included home truths, gratuitous insults, and profoundly dangerous ideas. The surge in the price of oil and certain other commodities caused by this war has been a windfall for the Kremlin. Denigrating NATO, as Trump has done — let alone threatening to leave it — adds further to Putin’s strategic haul. That is not in this country’s interest, and neither is suggesting that the U.S. might leave the Europeans to sort out the Strait of Hormuz for themselves.

 

The president has, quite rightly, been “encouraging” Europeans to pay more for their own defense, with results far exceeding those achieved by many of his predecessors. But Europe’s defense buildup is still a work in progress. For now, despite Trump’s exhortations, there is only so much that — either acting alone or assisted by Japan and other interested parties — it can do to restore and preserve the flow through the strait. If they tried and were unsuccessful, the result would be a deep economic crisis across a large swath of the globe, with economic and geopolitical effects from which we would not be immune.

 

The American economy’s direct reliance on products — aluminum comes to mind — transported through the strait is greater than often understood. For the U.S. to really leave it to others to sort the strait out would be an invitation to chaos and an act of profound self-harm. Even floating the idea, as the president has repeatedly now, sends the wrong signal.

 

Any outcome to war short of the strait’s again being free for navigation would be inconclusive at best and a strategic setback at worst. Trump should be clear-eyed about this.

 

The ideal solution to the crisis would be the fall of the Iranian regime, but that is outside our direct control. The result of Tehran’s savage crackdown earlier this year — and the years of horror that preceded it — is that many of those who might have led a revolution against the mullahs are dead, incapacitated, exiled, or imprisoned. The attacks on Iran’s machinery of repression may have created some space for an uprising, but that seems unlikely in the near term.

 

If the regime hangs on, it will continue to be toxic domestically, regionally, and globally. As demonstrated by the recent launch of two ballistic missiles with a range that Tehran had said was beyond its capabilities, any pledges it gives with regard to its arsenal, nuclear or otherwise, are worthless. Destroying Iran’s weaponry and weakening its short-term capacity to replace it have been worthwhile efforts, as Trump emphasized in his speech. But absent dramatic changes within Iran, they will probably have to be repeated. Containment is a long and not always peaceful process.

 

In the meantime, unless the United States takes the lead on the strait, the Iranians will remain in control. The strait is out-of-area for NATO, so the force to keep it open will have to be a coalition of the willing, comprising countries inside and outside NATO, including some from a region that has been painfully reminded just how bad a neighbor the Islamic Republic can be.

 

Of course, some potential members of the coalition of the willing have proved strikingly short of willingness to date. But an emphasis on the preservation of international law in the Strait of Hormuz ought to — along with a sense of self-interest sharpened by today’s shortages and price squeezes — persuade some to enlist, even if the most intense phase of combat has to end first.

 

If Trump wants the war to be the national and personal triumph he envisions, and to enhance the country’s deterrent the way he hopes, the strait can’t be left unaddressed.

Against Misery: Moonshot Edition

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

As a child, I was obsessed with the American space program, which, along with the country’s unparalleled collection of rollercoasters, was one of the many things that initially attracted me to the United States and convinced me that it was better than everywhere else. I can remember reading about the Apollo missions in awe, but also being shocked to learn that, by the time of the later excursions — Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17, in particular — the general public was no longer interested. This, frankly, astonished and annoyed me. Naturally, nothing was going to beat Apollo 11 in the popular imagination, and, for obvious reasons, Apollo 13 had its own grim televisual appeal. But these were manned missions to the moon! How could the whole world not have been transfixed during every single one?

 

The best case I could come up with was that, in 1971 and 1972, Apoll0 11 had been recent. Amazing, yes. But amazing a couple of years ago. Humans are impatient, complacent, and easily bored, and the moon landing was so 1960s. Oh look, Dick Cavett’s on!

 

But what, pray, is the excuse for indifference now? Today, from Cape Canaveral here in Florida, NASA is sending humans back to the moon. This time, they’ll “only” orbit it. A few missions hence, they’ll land on it. Such things are no longer recent. This will be the first time since the Nixon administration that a person has left low earth orbit. That’s more than half a century ago!

 

Does anyone care? I am fully aware that I cannot tell people what they should be interested in. But I find it remarkable that this is not the sole topic of discussion in America. The press is quiet on the matter. Not a single one of my casual acquaintances has mentioned it. Heck, my son’s baseball coach has scheduled a practice during the launch. It’s just not a big thing — at least not relative to other apparently crucial subjects for conversation, such as whether NBA players should be allowed to be Christians and whether a pretty standard midterm-year correction in the stock markets signals the end of the world. Are we crazy?

 

In the most recent issue of the magazine, I made a plea against misery:

 

It is, of course, virtuous for a free people to attempt to improve the country they inherited. But it is a grave mistake to believe that anything short of the establishment of heaven on earth represents failure. What we have in the United States right now — it’s not a matter of if or when or after or before, but right now — is a miracle. This country — as it is. This economy — as it is. This culture — as it is. This constitutional order — as it is.

 

After all, though “Americans have become convinced that, outside of their own enclaves, the United States is a hellscape,”

 

in the year of our Lord 2026, the United States is no such thing. In fact, it is the best place in the world by far. It has a durable constitutional order that, more than two centuries since it was ratified, continues to protect individual rights to an extent that remains unique in the West. It has the largest and most dynamic economy and the highest standard of living of any large nation. It has the most impressive higher-education sector; the best scientists, engineers, and doctors; and the lion’s share of the global technology industry. It boasts massive natural resources, including enough oil to remain energy-independent, vast tracts of arable land, and abundant fresh water. It has the most fearsome military, the world’s reserve currency, and the most important financial markets on earth.

 

And we’re going to the freaking moon!

 

 

Is This Really Orbán’s Last Stand?

By John Gustavsson

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

Recently, a bombshell report by the Washington Post alleged, among other things, that Hungary had leaked confidential information to Moscow. With Hungarian voters heading to the polls to elect their next government in less than two weeks, the timing of the report’s release could not be much worse for the current government. It may seem that this could be the final nail in the coffin of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was already trailing badly in the polls against opposition party leader Péter Magyar. However, the seemingly concerted effort to remove Orbán could yet backfire.

 

WaPo’s revelations have shook not just Hungary, but the EU as a whole — including neighboring countries typically sympathetic to Hungary. According to the report, Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has, for years, routinely called his Russian equivalent Sergey Lavrov during breaks during closed-door Council of the European Union meetings, offering Moscow real-time information on what EU leaders were discussing and providing recommendations on how Russia should act in response.

 

Szijjártó has partially confessed, admitting that he had discussions with Moscow before and after meetings, though he argues that this was “completely normal” and that he also spoke with other countries.

 

Furthermore, WaPo uncovered a plot by Russia’s foreign intelligence service to stage a faked assassination attempt on Viktor Orbán — an attempt that would presumably be pinned on Ukraine in an attempt to rally support behind Orbán. Within the European Union, Hungary remains the staunchest critic of aiding Ukraine, and Orbán is currently holding up a €90 billion loan package, using his country’s veto in the European Council. His opponent, Péter Magyar, is more supportive of Ukraine.

 

Parallel to the WaPo revelations, independent Hungarian media outlet Telex uncovered a Watergate-style operation against Magyar’s party Tisza, which involved state intelligence services placing moles inside the party to gain access to its IT system. Even prior to these revelations, the EU had for the first time activated the rapid response mechanism of the controversial Digital Services Act to force social media platforms to flag and remove disinformation (including deepfakes of Magyar) related to the upcoming election. Péter Magyar has embraced the help and reporting, promising to investigate both political leaders and high-ranking government employees involved in these plots, even going as far as to threaten Foreign Minister Szijjártó with life in prison for treason.

 

As justified as this may be, it is a dangerous strategy. In the end, the EU may be what preserves Orbán’s grip on power. Hungary’s history has rendered it adverse to any semblance of foreign interference: Hungarian voters are always on guard against would-be leaders whom they suspect could turn out to be puppets of a foreign power, much like the despised Hungarian Socialist Workers Party who were Moscow’s patsies during the Cold War and aided the subjugation of Hungary to communist rule. A flawed champion of self-determination will therefore always be preferred to a marionette.

 

And this brings us to how many Hungarians view Viktor Orbán. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Orbán started as an anti-Soviet activist, at one point being arrested by communist authorities for his fight for Hungarian sovereignty. He was the architect behind the country’s EU and NATO accession, and he also played a great role in the country’s recovery from communism. For this, many Hungarians who do not support his policies still very much respect him. The fact that Magyar has repeatedly promised that he, if elected, will govern as an “Orbán of 1998” plays to this: Hungarians respect the leader Orbán was, but not so much the one he is today.

 

It may seem strange that somebody who fought the Soviet Union would later cozy up to Russia. This, however, is to misunderstand what Orbán is doing: Thinking of Hungary as a “buffer zone” between Europe and Russia, Orbán is arguably trying to safeguard his country’s independence by playing both sides (Russia and the West) against one another, keeping one foot in each door.

 

To Orbán, the EU represents at least as great of a threat to Hungarian sovereignty as Russia does, with intrusive regulations encroaching on matters previously reserved for national governments. This feeling of resentment toward the EU is shared by most other Eastern European member states.

 

Yet this in no way excuses his actions, especially with regards to Ukraine. Given his pro-national sovereignty beliefs, Orbán ought to have been Ukraine’s most fervent supporter in its fight to fend off the Russian invasion. That he is instead using Ukraine as a bargaining chip against the EU is petty to the point of being villainous. Last Wednesday, Orbán upped the stakes even further by announcing he would gradually cease natural gas deliveries to Ukraine, until Ukraine restores a Russian pipeline carrying oil through the country to Hungary and Slovakia that was damaged two months ago (ironically in a Russian attack).

 

Since the beginning, Orbán and his party Fidesz have attempted to portray Péter Magyar as a stooge of the EU who would sell out Hungary’s independence and even bring the country to war with Russia. Magyar’s discipline and triangulation have so far rendered these attacks ineffective.

 

After the stream of revelations, and the DSA measures taken by the EU, the Orbán camp is now hard at work claiming that this is a coordinated foreign effort to derail the prime minister’s reelection campaign and usurp the government. Péter Magyar embracing the scoops and promising repercussions could prove to be a bad move, tarnishing his moderate image.

 

While current polls break decisively in Magyar’s favor, it is worth keeping in mind that polls in the last election underestimated support for Fidesz by ten points. The Hungarian opposition would do well to steer clear of foreign help during the closing two weeks of the campaign.

 

Magyar’s election, in any case, would likely prove anticlimactic to many in Brussels who for years have been wishing for Orbán’s replacement. Magyar has promised to not block any non-military aid by the EU, but maintains that he will never contribute Hungarian arms, and much less so troops, and he (correctly) opposes accelerating Ukraine’s accession to the EU. On migration, he and Orbán are virtually identical, with Magyar pledging to keep the border security policies that have so enraged Brussels (he also rejects the EU’s migration pact). Like Orbán, Magyar views increasing fertility rates as a top priority, pledging to dedicate even more funding toward pro-natalist policies. He and his party have mostly been silent on “culture war” issues, though frequently voting with Fidesz against the EU in the European Parliament, not least on social issues.

 

Anybody in Brussels expecting a continental-style mainstream liberal will be greatly disappointed. That is not who Magyar is, and however much they may wish otherwise, that simply is not Hungary.

 

Should Viktor Orbán beat the odds and prevail, the consequences for Hungary would almost certainly be dire. First, such an outcome would immediately raise suspicions of cheating, suspicions that would appear more credible given the revelations by WaPo and others. Social unrest cannot be ruled out. Second, the EU would almost certainly seek to activate the “nuclear option” Article 7, which allows the EU to suspend Hungary’s voting rights in the European Council and Council of the European Union. This move would effectively prevent Hungary from using its veto to stop aid to Ukraine, or on any other issue.

 

While there is no mechanism to formally expel a member, this — combined with new, draconian sanctions ending remaining EU funding critical to Hungary — would be the closest. Hungary would go from unofficial to official pariah state, and the likelihood that Ukraine would repair the pipeline delivering oil to Hungary from Russia would be almost zero. All in all, this would almost certainly cause a recession or stagflation.

 

Orbán may hope that other, increasingly Ukraine-skeptic member states (such as Slovakia) would block Article 7, which requires unanimity, but it appears increasingly unlikely that any European leader would sacrifice political capital to save Hungary. Especially considering that, without funding for Hungary, there’s more left for everyone else.

 

For now, however, political leaders who secretly or openly wish for the end of Orban’s government would do well not to overplay their hand, as the EU is arguably doing with its heavy-handed use of the DSA. It would be a supreme irony if the very institutions and outlets most eager to topple Orbán instead ended up saving him by turning the election into a proxy battle between Brussels on one side, and Budapest on the other. If the opposition cannot resist the temptation of seeking outside help and validation in these final weeks, they may learn a hard truth: Hungarians would rather tolerate a flawed guardian of sovereignty than install a successor who appears a bit too comfortable subordinating it.