Blue Danube

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, April 06, 2026

 

Life is stressful for Republicans right now, and when life gets stressful it’s natural to yearn for one’s happy place. For Lindsey Graham, that’s Disney World. For J.D. Vance, it’s Disneyland—specifically “Christian conservative Disneyland,” a.k.a. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

 

The vice president will arrive in Budapest tomorrow for a two-day visit during which he’ll meet with the Hungarian prime minister and “deliver remarks on the rich partnership between the United States and Hungary.” (“Rich” is the right word, but more on that later.) As it happens, the country is set to hold parliamentary elections on Sunday; according to one recent poll, Orbán’s Fidesz party trails its rival, Tisza, by nearly 20 points.

 

In other words, the VP is going overseas to hold a campaign event for a fading candidate in the home stretch of a foreign election, hoping to pull off the second miraculous rescue operation by the U.S. government in less than a week. (Orbán preferred to have Donald Trump, no doubt, but the president is famously averse to associating with likely losers.) For a few reasons, this is curious.

 

It’s curious as a matter of priorities. I understand why Vance would rather be anywhere than Washington at the moment, having largely disappeared from view over the past month to avoid having to take sides between his boss and his anti-war fan base. But the optics will be awkward if America starts “blowing up everything” in Iran tomorrow night while the VP is halfway around the world, clinking champagne glasses with Orbán.

 

Also curious is how his visit contradicts what he told Volodymyr Zelensky when Zelensky visited the Oval Office last year. Vance accused the Ukrainian leader of having traveled to Pennsylvania in the fall of 2024 to “campaign for the opposition,” referring to his appearance with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro at a munitions plant to thank workers there for helping to arm Ukraine. (Zelensky met with Trump and with Kamala Harris on the same trip.) A foreign official shouldn’t be putting his thumb on another country’s electoral scale—unless, it seems, it’s Vance’s thumb and the scale is Hungary’s.

 

But the most curious thing is that Vance has always been understood to be the White House’s supreme “America First” apostle, a principled nationalist laser-focused on domestic problems while Trump and Marco Rubio gallivant around the globe in search of imperial glory. He’s the guy at the Cabinet meeting who’s supposed to shut down conversation about any foreign leader’s political plight with a righteously indignant, “Sorry, but how does this benefit the American people?”

 

Now here he is, volunteering to be an Orbán surrogate in Hungary’s election. That’s a direct betrayal of his “America First” ethos, isn’t it?

 

Not really. I’d say it’s an expression of it.

 

The ur-Trump.

 

Vance isn’t the first top Trump deputy dispatched to Budapest to try to save Orbán’s skin.

 

As a senator in 2019, Marco Rubio co-signed a letter complaining about the decline of democracy in Hungary under Orbán’s leadership, citing “a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law, and quality of governance according to virtually any indicator.” As Trump’s secretary of state in 2026, he now supports all of that stuff. So he stopped by the country in February to slobber on the prime minister, telling him, “President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success.”

 

Between that and the VP’s upcoming trip, the White House really wants Orbán to win. And because it does, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Orbán’s opponent must be some sort of communist who wants China to have bases along the Danube or whatever.

 

But he isn’t. Péter Magyar, head of the opposition party Tisza, is a center-right politician and former member of Orbán’s Fidesz. “He has promised to keep some of the prime minister’s policies he views as positive,” the Associated Press reports, “such as a fence along the southern border to keep out migrants.” He’s also taken care not to break too sharply with the famously anti-Ukrainian Orbán about the war next door. Magyar has ruled out sending weapons to Zelensky, for instance, and members of his party recently opposed a 90-billion euro loan to Kyiv in the European Parliament. “No one wants a pro-Ukrainian government,” he declared last month.

 

Sounds like a guy whom this White House can work with! So why is the administration so invested in seeing Orbán prevail?

 

Benjamin Harnwell, a crony of Steve Bannon, put it well in an interview with the Washington Post. “Orbán really is now one of the global leaders of the worldwide populist-nationalist movement, and it would be a massive psychological blow were he not to get reelected,” he told the paper. “Viktor Orbán was Trump before Trump.”

 

Orbán is the ur-Trump, the man who “proved” in 2010 that what voters in the post-Christian West truly desire is strongman postliberalism. Anti-immigrant, culturally reactionary, and ruthless about marginalizing its critics: Fidesz’s success was the smoking gun for fascists and proto-fascists in the U.S. and across Europe that history hadn’t ended after all. The backlash to liberalism they’d been expecting for decades seemed to have finally arrived in Budapest and then, six years later, in Washington. The future was traditional. And authoritarian.

 

For all its nationalist pretensions, postliberalism is plainly transnational in its ambitions. (How could it not be when the 20^th-century cultural trends it seeks to reverse were also transnational?) That’s why Vance is en route to Budapest to campaign for Orbán, why he’s supported other far-right European parties, and why last year’s National Security Strategy sounded more concerned about “civilizational erasure” in Europe than it did about Chinese expansionism. The postliberal goal is to rid America and Europe of liberalism, not to establish short-lived beachheads in individual countries that are lost to the tides of election cycles.

 

Once you realize that J.D. Vance’s “America First” yada-yada is mostly just ideological postliberalism dressed up in patriotic garb for domestic consumption, you’ll understand why the prospect of Viktor Orbán being tossed out of office makes him nervous. As long as Orbán keeps getting reelected, the postliberal revolution that’s supposed to conquer the West remains theoretically in motion. Whereas his defeat might mean the global nationalist tide is receding, a flash in the pan brought to ruin by its own illiberal pathologies before achieving durable change. That’s the “psychological blow” to which Harnwell referred.

 

Go figure that J.D. Vance, the man touted as the future of American postliberalism, might feel special anxiety about that future potentially evaporating, especially with support here at home for the government in which he serves disappearing into the toilet. He joined a revolution, went all-in, and now a counterrevolution looks poised to quash it before he’s had his chance to rule.

 

Russia, Russia, Russia.

 

Whether he means to or not, Magyar is leading that counterrevolution—and I do think he means to, as he’s repeatedly criticized Orbán’s friendly relations with Russia. That’s an acid test for skepticism toward postliberalism.

 

Despite his ambivalence about Ukraine, the Hungarian frontrunner has forthrightly identified Russia as the aggressor in the war and gone as far as to accuse Orbán’s government of “outright treason” for its cooperation with Moscow. If that sounds heavy-handed, bear in mind that Orbán’s foreign minister recently got caught making “regular phone calls to provide his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with ‘live reports on what’s been discussed’” during breaks in European Union meetings, according to the Washington Post.

 

Days before that came out, the Post reported that Russian intelligence had discussed staging an assassination attempt against Orbán to create sympathy for him and hopefully boost his election chances. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has personally promised to keep cheap Russian oil flowing to Hungary no matter how hairy things might get for the rest of the world in the Strait of Hormuz as a further inducement for Hungarian voters to stick with their current leader. Not even the president of the United States wants Viktor Orbán reelected as badly as the president of Russia does.

 

That’s because Hungary under Orbán has become a foothold for the Kremlin inside the EU, forming a postliberal pro-Russian mini-alliance within the broader liberal pro-Ukrainian continental alliance. Moscow is naturally keen to preserve it. “The story [of the election campaign] is less secret Russian interference than open Russian cooperation with our authorities on anti-Ukrainian messaging, energy cooperation, and hostility to the European Union,” one Hungarian activist complained to the New York Times. Magyar has made no bones about ending that arrangement, promising “to restore Hungary’s democratic institutions that have eroded under Orbán and steer the country back toward its Western allies,” per the AP.

 

“I think that Tisza will have an overwhelming electoral victory,” Magyar went on to predict, “because even Fidesz voters do not want our country to be a Russian puppet state, a colony, an assembly plant, instead of belonging to Europe.”

 

To a postliberal ideologue like J.D. Vance, a reversion in Hungarian opinion toward Europe and away from Russia can only be understood as a setback. Despite Russia’s pitiful military performance in Ukraine, all postliberals find Putinism attractive to some greater or lesser degree due to its ruthlessness toward enemies, macho contempt for Western liberalism, and cynical lip service toward Christian values. That’s the sort of culture they want to see migrate westward—and it did, in Orbán’s Hungary. Suddenly, it appears that the tide of Russification might be about to ebb.

 

There’s another, more venal reason Vance will be sad to see Moscow’s influence in Budapest diminish, though. Thanks in part to Russia, Orbán’s government has been a gravy train for the chud vanguard of American postliberalism, the sort of people to whom J.D. Vance looks for intellectual nourishment. The Washington Post explains:

 

As Orbán over the past decade took a forceful stance against migrants and refugees and proclaimed himself Europe’s champion of illiberal Christian democracy, Budapest became a magnet for American conservatives. Orbán’s government—bankrolled in part by cheap Russian energy supplies—poured money into a network of think tanks that became hubs for MAGA and nationalist ideology, and that in turn provided channels for the Kremlin to filter its talking points to American right-wing groups.

 

…

 

The numerous junkets funded by Budapest think tanks also played a role. Buoyed by his reputation as an anti-woke crusader, Orbán’s government was able to build influence by targeting those on the American right “who don’t do foreign policy and generating goodwill from the ground up,” the former official said, adding: “They’ve been doing trips where they invite congressional staff to Hungary, but they don’t bring the national security staff who know better.”

 

One American egghead who now runs a Hungarian think tank is political theorist Gladden Pappin, a man well-connected enough to have received an invitation to the vice president’s home last year when Vance hosted Orbán. According to The Atlantic, Pappin “once predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, at which point the pope would anoint Melania Trump, who is Catholic, to rule the United States as queen.” Pappin claims he was joking, but The Atlantic’s sources who heard the comment seemed not to detect the humor, and other remarks suggest Pappin’s tastes earnestly run toward monarchy and away from democracy.

 

That’s the sort of impossible-to-parody dreck in which the vice president is now immersed, and for which we have Viktor Orbán to thank for making it financially viable. (Magyar’s main critique of him has to do with corruption, not coincidentally.) American postliberalism is at least as much of a grift as it is an ideology, so Vance is doing what little he can to keep that grift going for his think-tank buddies by showing up in Budapest to try to reelect the man running it. When he says that our two countries have a “rich” partnership, he’s using the word advisedly.

 

In an administration that encourages everyone who loyally serves the White House to wet his or her beak, it’s nice that the VP hasn’t forgotten the nerds who supply the flimsy intellectual alchemy by which the president’s manic, violent, and autarkic impulses are transformed into an ideology called “Trumpism.”

 

Atonement.

 

If nothing else, visiting Budapest on the eve of the election might be Vance’s way of atoning to the anti-war right while it’s peeved at him for not talking Trump out of going to war in Iran.

 

The vice president can’t explicitly oppose the conflict without ending his career. But what he can do is physically separate himself from Trump and instead stand with the other great postliberal success story in Western politics over the last 20 years.

 

A joint appearance with Hungary’s prime minister is a way to reassure the Tucker Carlson faction that could make trouble for him in a 2028 primary that he’s still a proud member of Team Chud, an OG who’s returning to where it all began at a moment when his boss is in the midst of betraying “America First.” In a movement of warlike Trumpist zombies, he’s still an Orbánist at heart.

 

In that sense, it may be better for him that Orbán is poised to lose. Had Vance showed up with his friend Viktor poised to win, it would have been a straightforward case of him wanting to bathe in another politician’s glory when there isn’t much glory to bathe in at home. By showing up with Orbán likely headed to defeat, he’s signaling that his commitment to the postliberal cause is so pure that he’s willing to stand defiantly with his ally even in defeat.

 

If the polling holds, Sunday’s election will be Waterloo for authoritarian chuds everywhere—yet J.D. Vance is determined to fight to the last anyway. He’s leaving it all on the field. There’s probably some modest political benefit to him among the fringe right in doing so.

 

In any case, I’m looking forward to hearing his theory of why Orbán lost, if in fact he ends up losing. The premise of populist-nationalism is that Western governments have been “captured” by cosmopolitan elites who abuse power to serve their own interests, and that only by electing nationalists can the people reclaim their rightful authority. The fact that the Hungarian people are poised to rid themselves of the nationalist leader on whom their empowerment supposedly depends is an interesting challenge to that premise. I’m guessing the results of the November midterms will be as well.