Trump’s ally Orban spells out Trump’s Ukraine plan
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: Donald Trump will not be giving "a single penny" to fight Russian aggression in Ukraine. That is his idea on how to end the war. pic.twitter.com/twB2EFI3Xc
Not that we didn’t know this was his plan to “end the war in 24 hours,” but it’s now been confirmed. He will hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and leave Europe to its own devices:
Donald Trump will totally stop funding Ukraine if he wins the U.S. election in November, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said following a meeting between the right-wing figureheads.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told Hungarian state media Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.”
In an interview following the meeting — during which Trump and Orbán discussed “a wide range of issues” — the Hungarian prime minister praised the Republican front-runner as a “man of peace” who would bring an end to the all-out war in Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waging since February 2022.
“If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over,” he said. “And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.”
He will also hand Gaza and the West Bank to the worst right wingers in Israel. And he’ll happily give Taiwan to China and probably South Korea to his good buddy Kim Jong Un, maybe even Japan.
He believes that simply allowing dictators and tyrants to take over the world makes him a “peacemaker.” He really believes that. But he’s actually just another tinpot fascist too cowardly to stand up to any one he knows has more guts than he does.
This stuff is not hyperbole and anyone who thinks “oh it won’t be that bad” if he wins because we got through the first term should remember that we lost many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, more Americans during the pandemic than we needed to because he was the incompetent moron in the White House telling people to use snake oil and refusing to adequately inform people of the dangers because he was afraid it would cost him the election. A whole lot of Trump voters died unnecessarily because he didn’t have the guts to come out and strongly push the vaccines because he was terrified that it would make him unpopular with his base. And he lost anyway.
He is a monster and if he becomes president again every last one of us is in grave danger. The threat of nuclear war will be front and center again because his “vision” is going to escalate an arms race the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It’s terrifying.
House conservatives are furious about the government funding bill negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson that sailed throughCongress last week, calling it a betrayal of Republican promises to cut spending and reshape the federal budget.
But in a twist, this time they aren’t threatening to overthrow the man in charge of cutting those funding deals with a Democratic-led Senate and White House, even as they’ve begun to paint him as a functionary for status quo policies.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good, R-Va., has blasted the first of two funding packages and said he doesn’t expect a better deal in the second one, which must pass by March 22 to avoid a partial government shutdown.
“Because the speaker doesn’t want to do that. He just wants to pass what the Senate wants so that we avoid any conflict,” Good told NBC News, saying that Johnson, R-La., wants to “join hands with the Dems” to “increase spending” and yield “no policy wins.”
“The speaker is unwilling to tell the Senate no,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what we offer.”
But Good didn’t have a solution when asked what the right flank can do about it, saying: “I’m open to ideas.”
When asked pointedly if that includes a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, Good, one of eight Republicans who used the tool to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, ended the conversation. “Thank you,” he replied.
They figured out that the only power they really have to force the entire government to capitulate to their extreme demands is to get rid of the Speaker and that didn’t really change anything. It took this for them to realize that they are just a [T]rump group with one crude tool and nobody really gives a damn about their hysterics, not even their fellow Republicans.
Now they’re just whining:
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a Freedom Caucus member and right-wing thought leader on fiscal policy, said the newly passed government funding bill was “more of the same games, a lot of smoke and mirrors.” And he predicted the next package of bills will similarly be “garbage.”
“It is business as usual,” Roy said, despite some “modest strides” toward a more normal process in developing the bills.
But when asked if he blames Johnson, Roy said, “I think the speaker reflects a conference that likes to give lip service to fiscal restraint and refuses to act on it. That’s what I think.”
As for a motion to vacate? Roy isn’t going there: “I think it’s a tool that should always be on the table, as an historical matter. I think it should be sparingly used. … I think we need to just keep working forward to try to get somewhere.”
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, an ardent Donald Trump ally who wore a T-shirt with the former president’s mug shot to the State of the Union address, was more blunt about why Johnson’s job isn’t in danger: Nobody wants it.
“Let’s just go down to Disney and see if Daffy Duck or maybe Goofy would want the job,” Nehls said. “Maybe Mickey! Maybe Mickey would want the job.”
Gee, I wonder why no one would want the job? Does anyone really want to be Marjorie Taylor Greene’s whipping boy?
The good news is that they got their scalp so they can be proud that they destroyed Kevin McCarthy, the most prodigious fundraiser in the caucus. Good work folks. Excellent.
It was the day we all were told to stay home or die
There has been a lot of talk in the last week or so about “the week before” meaning the last normal week before the country (sort of)locked down for COVID and changed everything. The trauma of that experience is still with us as it should be. We lost well over a million people from that plague and the government did not handle it well. But as Melissa Ryan explains in her great newsletter, it was way more than COVID:
… The week before is a unifying event that all Americans experienced. I’ve also learned that most folks who share their story experienced one or more seismic life changes during the pandemic. Losing loved ones, moving to a new location, and everything in between. We all seem to have a version of that story, and I always find them fascinating.
At the same time, I bristle at the idea that this was the week that changed everything. At least in America. In early 2020 we were in the 4th year of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. Things hadn’t been normal for quite some time, and a seismic cultural and political shift had already taken place. One of my memories from that week is how quickly the American news cycle went from being dominated by all things Trump — with multiple breaking news stories a day — to being dominated by the pandemic. For me, at least, the news became easier to follow because it focused on just one thing for a couple of months.
Trump’s presidency and the MAGA movement that supports him undoubtedly made the pandemic worse for Americans. He was unable and unwilling to unify us in the way we expect the American President to do when faced with a global pandemic. He was also unable and unwilling to use the pandemic preparation plan created by the previous administration. Rather than tap into the Federal Government’s knowledge and institutional memory on public health, Trump’s son-in-law sourced research from a Facebook group of ER physicians. Trump encouraged the anti-mask protest movement, and refused to wear a mask himself most of the time. He refused to advocate all that hard for the vaccine, even though its development was one of his Administration’s few wins. Trump wouldn’t even follow the CDC’s recommendations in the White House or when he caught the virus. We’ll never know how many lives were lost as a result of the Trump Administration’s negligence and opportunism.
The pandemic didn’t create new cultural or political divides but was a handy wedge for making them worse. Exposure to and belief in conspiracy theories increased substantially, from anti-vaxxers to QAnon. Wearing masks and getting vaccinated became cultural cues, with MAGA supporters refusing to take the vaccine and those of us on the left (myself included) saw masking and getting the jab as virtues. Existing health disparities and inequities remained unaddressed, and marginalized communities were disproportionately affected. Additionally, Black Americans were “immersed in three structural and avoidable major crises: the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, a debilitating economic recession, and a fiery racial justice uprising.” And, of course, Trump and MAGA used the uprising around George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to further stoke division and incite violence.
The sudden onset of pre-pandemic nostalgia also struck me because I’ve long thought that Americans have spent the last year and some change in a weird state of denial. Instead of learning from the past and trying to build a stronger future, we’re determined to get “back to normal” by any means necessary. It’s as if we’re trying to forget the global pandemic happened at all, along with all the events that contributed to making it such a catastrophe. We don’t want to talk about how to ensure this doesn’t happen again because we’re not able to examine the collective trauma or the toll it took on all of us.
On a personal level, I get it. The early days of the pandemic were some of the most painful in my life, and that entire period isn’t something I enjoy revisiting. But as a society, we can’t continue to avoid it or pretend it never happened. We will certainly experience tragedies as a nation again. And there’s no doubt that the same movement that did everything in their power to exploit the pandemic for their own gain will attempt to exploit the next collective trauma to further their authoritarian aims as well.
I suspect part of the current ambivalence about a Trump and Biden rematch comes from this. A rematch means we’ll be forced to talk about the past as we examine both men’s records. Revisiting the pandemic, and all of the ways elected officials made a tragedy worse is inevitable. We keep trying to push the memories away only to have the same candidates from four years ago bring it all back up again.
It’s interesting that as the last normal week of our lives meme is popping online, the media post-Super Tuesday finally seems to have resigned itself to the fact that yes, this election will be Trump vs. Biden again, yes, we’re going to have to remember just how catastrophic Trump and his administration was for the world, and yes, Trump is still vulnerable in the same ways he was in 2020. The timing is coincidental but perhaps if people are ready to engage on how Covid impacted their lives, they’re also ready to acknowledge what a danger letting Donald Trump back in the White House again is for humanity. And engage in the election accordingly.
I’ll end with the last few words of the meme: of our lives. Which acknowledges that we’re forever changed and that we can’t go back to normal even if we wanted to. The pandemic took a lot from us, but I would argue that Trump and the MAGA movement’s exploitation of it took a whole lot more.
Absolutely! It’s what made it so much more painful that it already would have been. Imagine if we’d had a competent government ins charge, a leader who would be straight with the American people and engage with the world like a normal human being. Imagine if we hadn’t already been dealing with three years of non-stop chaos and utter terror that he was going to make this country spin completely out of control? Imagine if we had gone into the crisis untied as a country instead of torn apart by the ugly, divisive MAGA mentality that Trump inspired?
It would have been bad, but it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was. And now we are dealing with a mass case of PTSD that we are going to have to summon the collective courage to overcome and defeat this toxic political movement all over again. It’s exhausting, but we have no choice.
I’ve been following Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s increasing influence on the American far right for some time as he hosted the likes of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson and held CPAC meeting in Budapest. (They’re doing it again in April with Orban once again doing the hosting duties.)He was the darling of a certain faction of the conservative coalition even before Trump won and whose election in 2016 super-charged the “illiberal democracy” ideology here in the US which we now know as MAGA. He likewise hopes to consolidate the European far-right into a MAGA-style movement throughout the continent.
Orban CPAC appearance got a thunderous ovation last year and just last week he came to meet with members of the Heritage Foundation which is busily putting together “Project 2025” for the second Trump term. One imagines he had quite a few tips for them. He wrote the book on how to turn a modern country into a repressive autocracy without becoming a full-fledged police state.
Trump himself doesn’t seem completely sold on that idea since he’s pushing for mass round-ups and deportations of non-citizens by national guard troops and a total lock down of the country to keep foreigners who “don’t like our religion” (or Israel) out of the country. And he’s promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections” which leans more in the direction of Putin’s Russia or Pinochet’s Chile. But Orban’s ideas about how to make the government bureaucracy into a patronage operation, gerrymander the legislature in ways that pretty much stranglse real democracy while turning the independent media and academia into impotent irrelevancies are being observed very carefully by the Trump 2.0 planners and they will be implemented if they gain power. (It’s also the case that Orban demonized migrants as a political strategy and even built a fence to keep them out, so they do have that in common as well.)
After the Heritage meeting Orban made the pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. (Notably, he wasn’t invited, nor did he ask, to meet with the actual president of the United States.) Trump was very impressed with his guest. He apparently feted him at the usual party that takes place every night at this social club and introduced him to the crowd of paying guests saying, “He’s a non-controversial figure because he says this is the way it’s going to be, and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”
Trump honors Viktor Orban for being an autocrat: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He says, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.” pic.twitter.com/Fz91sbsHi1
I’m not sure why anyone questions Donald Trump’s intentions when he says things like that. It’s always been clear that he is an instinctive autocrat. He couldn’t understand why the Department of Justice didn’t act as his personal lawyer, for instance or why he was constrained by the constitution from exercising power over the entire government. He said repeatedly that he had “an Article II” which allowed him to “do whatever I want” and that the president has “total authority.” Even today he argues that the president has “total immunity” which is now pending before the Supreme Court. Of course he admires dictators and autocrats and believes that’s what the presidency should be.
It’s pretty clear that Orban sees Trump as an important ally. He’s even cutting campaign ads for him on that theme, calling Trump a “man of peace” which is so ludicrous it makes you dizzy:
President @realDonaldTrump was a president of peace. He commanded respect in the world, and created the conditions for peace. During his presidency there was peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine. We need him back more than ever! Thank you for the invitation, Mr.… pic.twitter.com/4nSqwoYxMV
The truth is that Orban may need Trump more than Trump needs Orban. He’s isolated in Europe and in order to fulfill his larger agenda he needs a friend in the White House and Joe Biden will not be that. Over the past month his party has been in turmoil with the resignation of the president and former justice minister over a pardon scandal involving a notorious child sex abuser. This has placed Orban in a difficult position since he has waged a Ron DeSantis style crusade again LGBTQ rights and pedophilia (which he conflates for political purposes.)
He has been the last holdout in the EU for Ukraine aid and allowing Sweden to Join NATO and both issues were finally resolved in the wake of the scandal just in the past couple of weeks. There’s no rsense that Orban is in serious trouble but cracks are beginning to show. It turns out that his Potemkin democracy still has some tiny life left in it, with some independent journalists able to use the internet to get the news out even though all the mainstream news sources have been coerced or co-opted into doing Orban’s bidding. It’s just possible that his hold is shakier than it has been in years.
If Trump wins all that changes. Orban sees his friendship with Trump and Putin that puts him right at the center of a major new alliance and it’s not at all an unreasonable assumption. He and Trump and his lackeys in the US Congress have, so far, successfully given Russia a major gift by refusing to authorize funding for the Ukraine war effort. Trump even went so far as to say that he would tell Putin to “do whatever he hell he wants” to any NATO country he deemed to be sufficiently “paid up.” We have every reason to believe that if Trump wins, Ukraine is gone and Putin will have prevailed. What happens to the Ukrainians if that happens is going to be a nightmare.
All of this is very peculiar in light of Orban’s central thesis about “national sovereignty” which he spelled out in this video (featuring such luminaries as Steve Bannon and Vivek Ramaswamy) which he made after his meeting with the Heritage Foundation. Apparently, Ukraine is not entitled to that particular privilege nor is any NATO country such as Hungary if Putin or Trump decide otherwise.
The greatest fight in international politics is between the globalists and those who believe in national sovereignty. I was happy to see at the @Heritage Foundation that we sovereignists have many friends in the US as well. pic.twitter.com/Y32CQbyl6a
This alliance between Orban, Trump and the American right is very disturbing. It’s easy to dismiss a Hungarian Prime Minister as just some guy from a small European country who is punching way above his weight and isn’t really relevant. But this is one of those moments when you really have to wonder if you aren’t watching the beginning of a tectonic shift in the world order. The movement to appease Putin and force Ukraine to surrender has taken hold on the right and the threat to Western Europe that flows from that is very real. If Trump wins the chances of a major escalation are very high. Trump and Orban like to call that “peace” but it’s actually just a demand for capitulation. That’s what dictators do and that’s what they are.
“When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right,” President Bill Clinton advised Democratic leaders in 2002.
Enter Donald John Trump, the seven deadly sins on two legs. No way would Americans vote for that walking atrocity, I thought in 2016. Hoo-boy, did I call that wrong. So did Bill’s wife Hillary. Americans chose strong and wrong.
The pivot point in the Hero’s Journey comes when, after refusing the call to adventure, she/he crosses a threshold out of the ordinary world into one of challenge and quest. Young Luke Skywalker crosses that threshold early in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Did President Joe Biden reach one of those pivot points last week? Some think maybe.
Reflecting on the 2008 HBO film, Recount, about the 2000 presidential election, Joe Klein writes in The New York Times:
Democrats litigate; Republicans fight. Democrats float toward an almost helium-infused state of high-mindedness; Republicans see politics as a no-holds-barred cage match.
President Biden’s pugilistic State of the Union address last week may represent a new direction. But given the party’s recent history, the Democrats will probably need some CRISPR editing to their DNA.
Both Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were distressingly saintly in their presidential campaigns, failing to respond to Republican attack ads. Hillary Clinton endured a classic “Recount” moment in her second debate against Donald Trump. Mr. Trump stalked her around the stage. “He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled,” Mrs. Clinton later wrote. “Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on,” she wondered. “Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me.” Throwing the haymaker might not have won the election, but Mrs. Clinton would have instantly changed the impression that she was a hapless, patronizing, liberal elitist.
… and the audience CHEERS.
Throwing political left hooks is not Democrats’ nature, nor in Biden’s. But it’s time they find it in themselves. Perhaps Biden has crossed a threshold, and others will follow. (Okay, maybe not these people.) Americans cheer when the underdog fights back.
Klein continues:
Street fighting can be overdone, but it is where Mr. Trump lives. He is perhaps the most impolitic politician in American history. Joe Biden can, at times, wield a wicked sense of humor, and last week he demonstrated that he can be a merry Celtic warrior. But he’ll have to sustain his energy throughout the campaign, and he will need help.
Strong women fluster Trump. If Kamala Harris were Nixon’s VP, Klein suggests, “she’d be tasked with one job: Stomp Trump.” Maybe she will in 2024. That doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook.
Biden himself has been reluctant a reluctant warrior, writes E.J. Dionne. Working across the aisle is in his blood. But so is his “Irish.” Time for Joe to ball his fists, “because you can’t reconcile with those who have no interest in civility or dialogue,” Dionne advises:
So Biden the peacemaker gave way to Biden the scrapper on behalf of a threatened democracy. He reached for the most dramatic metaphor available to him in expressing just how irreconcilable our differences have become. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War,” he declared, “have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.”
[…]
A strategy of warfare requires tactical decisions. Rallying Democrats was the first priority of his speech, but Biden made two of his other top objectives obvious. He intends to fight hard for the kinds of Republicans and independents who rallied to Nikki Haley’s candidacy by making clear that he will stand up for Ukraine’s survival and stand strong against Vladimir Putin’s threats. His pointed contrast of Trump with Ronald Reagan reminded many Republicans of a heritage their soon-to-be nominee would squander by “bowing down to a Russian leader.”
“The assertion that hyper-partisanship, chaos and nihilism (e.g., threatening to shut down the government, egging on a default and refusing to even vote on Ukraine aide) is equally divided amounts to an outright fabrication — or utter cluelessness,” insists Jennifer Rubin while praising Democrats who won primaries on March 5 as comparative moderates.
“Responsible reporting should not cover for Republicans. The MAGA Republican Party has become shockingly irrational and radicalized, fully embracing totalitarianism, white nationalism and radical isolationism.”
Mainstream false-equivalence reporting about political polarization is nonsense. The radicalized Republican Party, like the Confederacy, has become an authoritarian movement bent on overturning our constitutional order. There’s no way back to normal without first stomping it soundly.
But not just for stomping’s sake. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) observed famously, “I think we’ve just shown that we have an ability to not only walk and chew gum at the same time, but to run, chew gum, do cartwheels at the same time on behalf of the American people.”
Democrats must not only find their Irish but do their fighting while making sure Americans know what they are fighting for, not just against. Lincoln may not have intended to free the slaves at the beginning of the war the South started, but he made sure to finish it, and to make the sacrifices mean more than just preserving the union. He made it more perfect.
Attorneys for Rudy Giuliani’s creditors negotiating his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed a request on Thursday, demanding that Giuliani reveal his financial secrets, including details on his cable TV earnings, the origin of his legal defense fund (led by his son), and even the nature of his work for Trump.
The far-reaching order is only possible thanks to allegations that Giuliani participated in “discovery misconduct”—that is to say, he failed to spill all the beans the first time around when he was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
“Indeed, it was Giuliani’s discovery misconduct in the Freeman Litigation—concerning Giuliani’s defamatory statements about two Georgia 2020 election workers—that led U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell to enter a $148 million default judgment against Giuliani,” reads the motion, obtained by Law & Crime,
“Judge Howell found Giuliani’s misconduct in the Freeman Litigation so egregious that she further ordered immediate dissolution of the automatic thirty-day stay of enforcement of the judgment, allowing the plaintiffs in the Freeman Litigation to take immediate steps to enforce the judgment,” the motion continued, noting that Giuliani’s “willful shirking of his discovery obligations” effectively lost him the case by default.
The creditors think he’s hiding his assets and for good reason. He’s got a world of legal trouble: his multimillion-dollar judgment for defaming Freeman and Moss but also the Dominion and Smartmatic defamation suits and the Fulton County Georgia election case. And there’s that truly atrocious case from Noelle Dunphy, a former assistant, who has accused him of sexual harassment and assault.
Trump held one fundraiser for him at Mar-a-lago but I don’t think it could have possibly covered all the legal costs much less the judgments. He appears to have dropped Rudy completely now. He’s got his own legal and financial problems to worry about.
The big question is whether Rudy is under so much duress that he will plead guilty — and spill the beans. There’s no evidence that he will but you never know. He might just wake up one day and wonder if it was all worth it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tells progressives why they need to vote for Biden. "If you believe climate change is real, you have to vote for President Biden. If you believe women have a right to control their own bodies, you have to vote for President Biden." pic.twitter.com/ytddI1iLVo
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on CBS urged his supporters to vote for President Biden despite the widespread opposition among them to Biden’s continued backing of Israel. “The fight continues to change Biden’s policy in Gaza, but the contrast between Biden and Trump is day and night,” he said. “The election of Trump would be a disaster for this country and, in my view, the world.”
Bernie Sanders: "Hamas cannot be continuing to run Gaza and the Netanyahu government cannot continue to run Israel." pic.twitter.com/8YmY8H4wzi
Of course Hamas is not a progressive organization. It’s a political organization and you may agree with some of its aims. But it’s also an authoritarian, fundamentalist Islamic group dedicated to violence. Fundamentalist religious organizationsare by definition not progressive. I can’t believe that anyone would think they are.
Biden is moving on Gaza. Probably not enough but he is moving. Sanders is right. It’s fine to protest (although I think “genocide Joe” is pretty crude and not exactly accurate, “genocide Bibi maybe.) But if you care about Gaza you have to do everything you can to make sure Biden is re-elected. Otherwise, you are consigning them to total hopelessness.
