In an episode of MAGA gaslighting so absurd that the most avowedly neutral observers around the world found it irresistible, Vice President JD Vance visited Hungary last week to deliver a campaign speech for that nation’s doomed Trumpian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. It was “disgraceful,” Vance said — in his patented sad-but-outraged mode, suggestive of a junior college debate team’s second-best performer — that “outside forces” were trying “to put their thumb on the scale” of Hungarian politics.
“What has happened in the midst of this election campaign,” Vance later told a Budapest press conference, without the slightest glint of ironic self-awareness, “is one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.”
