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JD Vance's Ambition Is Destroying Him
Vance had followed Trump into Orbán’s abyss, and now Trump is taking him on another losing journey.
Apr 16, 2026
As Prime Minister of Hungary for 16 years, Viktor Orbán became a beacon for the right and one of President Donald Trump’s favorite authoritarian role models. A self-described populist, Orbán’s conquest of democracy’s three pillars—the media, institutions of higher education, and the justice system—became Trump’s template.
Another Orbán characteristic attracted Trump: His regime consistently ranked No. 1 as the most corrupt country in the European Union. He abused political power for self-enrichment. He installed friends and family members in positions of influence and power that made him (and them) wealthy. He used his majority in the legislature to enhance his power. A persistent critic of Ukraine, Orbán also enjoyed the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sound familiar?
Trump embraced and praised Orbán, which meant that his Vice President JD Vance embraced and praised him too.
Vance Surrendered to Ambition
In 2016, Vance had called himself a “Never Trump Guy” and wrote a New York Times op-ed titled, “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation's Highest Office." But he reversed course in 2021 when he ran for the US. Senate and sought successfully to gain Trump’s endorsement.
As a junior senator, Vance could have refrained from voicing an opinion about Orbán. But ambition required otherwise. In a February 2024 interview with European Conservative, Vance was well aware of Trump’s views as he lobbied to become the vice-presidential pick on the Republican ticket. He held out Trump’s Hungarian idol as an example to emulate:
The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.
Of course, Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—knew that Orbán did not offer a “much less biased approach to teaching.” He demanded instruction centered on his view of history and the world.
In the same 2024 interview, Vance previewed what would also become some of Trump’s tactics:
And whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.
In a July 2024 interview on Face the Nation, Vance reaffirmed his praise for Orbán’s approach:
What I do think is on the university—on the university principle, the idea that taxpayers should have some influence in how their money is spent at these universities. It’s a totally reasonable thing. And I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.
It was only the beginning of Vance’s “awakening.”
Vance Carried Trump’s Message and Now Bears His Baggage
As vice president, Vance used his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 to attack many of Europe’s democracies by name—but not Hungary. He said that actors from within posed a greater threat than China or Russia: “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
To a stone-faced audience of European leaders, Vance complained about “old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion…”
In fact, what responsible leaders don’t like is misinformation and disinformation pervading the political landscape. Orbán relied on both, as have Trump and Vance.
And Vance declared that mass immigration was Europe's most significant problem, noting record levels of foreign-born residents in Germany and increased EU immigration from non-EU countries caused by “conscious decisions” from certain European leaders.
For Trump and Vance, leaders like Orbán were the antidote to the decline of Western civilization. But heading into the April 2026 election in Hungary, Orbán was down by double digits in the polls.
On April 8, Trump dispatched Vance to Budapest where he held a rally for the embattled leader. Vance portrayed Orbán as a hero:
I’m here because of the moral cooperation between our two countries. Because what the United States and Hungary together represent under Viktor’s leadership and under President Trump’s is the defense of Western civilization… The defense of the idea that we are founded on a certain Christian civilization and Christian values that animate everything from freedom of speech to rule of law to respect for minority rights and protection of the vulnerable.
Vance continued:
Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy? Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers? Then my friends, go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán because he stands for you and he stands for all these things.
In fact, Orbán stood for none of those things.
The closest Trump got to the rally was a speakerphone call via Vance’s cellphone through which he said, “I love Hungary and I love that Viktor.”
Vance’s Reckoning Has Only Begun
On April 12, 2026, three days after Vance’s rally for Orbán, a reckoning arrived for all three men—Orbán, Trump, and Vance. In a landslide, Hungarian voters threw Orbán out of office. The populist had become unpopular, and Hungary’s citizens reclaimed their country.
Vance had followed Trump into Orbán’s abyss, and now Trump is taking him on another losing journey. Vance is the highest-ranking Catholic in the Trump administration, and he has joined Trump in attacking the Pope.
Sometimes ambition makes a person not only blind, but also deaf and dumb.
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AOC Rips Vance: 'The Only Thing Longer Than My Pause to Think Was Their Silence to His Joke'
"Alexandria lives in JD Vance’s head rent-free because she won't back down from fighting for what's right," said the progressive's reelection campaign.
Feb 19, 2026
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez swiftly fired back at Vice President JD Vance on Thursday after the Republican mocked the New York Democrat for her difficulty answering a question about Taiwan during the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Speaking during the inaugural meeting of President Donald Trump's so-called Board of Peace, Vance attempted a joke: "Thank you, Mr. President, very much for your leadership, but also for the kind words about me personally. I knew exactly what I wanted to say but then after the president said that I was so smart and that I didn't want to repeat our congresswoman who froze for 20 seconds over in Munich. Now I'm tempted, sir, just to freeze for 20 seconds and just stare at the cameras, and maybe they'll say nice things about me, like they do about Congresswoman Cortez, but I have three very brief messages."
Responding to a video clip of Vance on social media, Ocasio-Cortez said, "The only thing longer than my pause to think was their silence to his joke," with a skull emoji, generally used to convey laughing to death.
Vance previously took aim at Ocasio-Cortez during a Tuesday interview with Fox News' Martha MacCallum, who asked him to weigh in on footage from Munich last Friday, when Ocasio-Cortez was asked whether the United States should send troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
The congresswoman began, "Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, a—you know, I think that—this is a, um—this is of course, a, uh, a very long-standing, um, policy of the United States."
While Fox cut off the clip there, Ocasio-Cortez added: "And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic, research, and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise."
Describing the congresswoman as "a person who doesn't know what she actually thinks," the vice president—who may run as Trump's successor in 2028—called her answer "embarrassing" and "the most uncomfortable 20 seconds of television I've ever seen."
"Does anybody really believe that AOC has very thoughtful ideas about the global world order or about what the United States should do with our policy in Asia or our policy Europe?" Vance added. "No, this is a person who is mouthing the slogans that somebody else gave her."
Ocasio-Cortez is seeking another term in the House of Representatives this cycle, though she has fueled speculation of a possible Senate or presidential run in 2028, including with her trip to Germany, where she argued that "working-class-centered politics" is key to defeating the "scourge of authoritarianism."
Her congressional campaign noted the attack from Vance in a Thursday email to supporters: "Did you see what JD Vance said about Alexandria? He said she's 'somebody who doesn't know what she actually thinks.' JD Vance is wrong."
It goes on to detail some of "what Alexandria thinks," including:
- In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, when a person gets sick, they shouldn't go bankrupt;
- A minimum wage should cover the minimum cost to live; and
- Homes are not slot machines for investors and Wall Street to extort working families out of every last dollar that they have.
"Alexandria lives in JD Vance's head rent-free because she won't back down from fighting for what's right," the email adds. "But she can't do this work alone. She needs a movement alongside her."
The congresswoman wasn't alone is ridiculing Vance after he mocked her on Thursday. Journalist Mehdi Hasan said that "it's so funny that he tries to make a joke about AOC and gets no laughs."
It is "a reminder" that Ocasio-Cortez, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, "and the rest of the top-tier Dems could make mincemeat out of this guy in 2028," Hasan declared. "He has the charisma of a broken wooden chair and the humor of Elon Musk."
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Marco Rubio’s Munich Speech Sanewashed US-Backed Dictatorships
The implication, delivered with straight-faced solemnity in Munich, is that the US-backed campaign against leftist movements in the Cold War was a noble defense of freedom, democracy, and Christian civilization.
Feb 16, 2026
Much has already been written about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's damage-control mission to the Munich Security Conference, sent to cool transatlantic tensions mere weeks after President Donald Trump hinted multiple times at annexing Greenland by force. But beneath the conciliatory tone was Rubio's explicit defense of the fight against “godless communist revolutions” and “anti-colonial uprisings” throughout the world, a horrific sanitization of the US-backed dictatorships that terrorized Latin America and beyond in the last century.
Rubio painted a sweeping narrative of Western civilization under threat. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline,” he declared, “accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map.”
That line is a direct homage to the doctrines of Cold Warriors Henry Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both of whom infamously argued that right-wing dictators were acceptable allies in the fight against communism—regardless of their brutality—because they were “authoritarian” rather than "totalitarian.” Yes, even if those “communists” were democratically elected, popular, and nonviolent.
The implication, delivered with straight-faced solemnity in Munich, is that the US-backed campaign against leftist movements in the Cold War was a noble defense of freedom, democracy, and Christian civilization.
The United States can continue down the path outlined by Rubio’s speech, but it will only accelerate its decline, alienate its allies, and create the very chaos it claims to fight.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the US helped set up Operation Condor, a network that far-right dictatorships operated throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a coordinated system of state terror across South America. The Chilean intelligence service chillingly described it as “something similar to what Interpol has in Paris, but devoted to subversion.” It was, also important to mention, explicitly framed by the US government to defend Christian civilization (also called the Banzer Plan).
Rubio's Christian civilization trope is an ode to a very specific, pro-corporate, pro-authoritarian, and white-supremacist Christianity, the same ideology championed by Donald Trump's MAGA movement. This is the same ideology that colonized, enslaved, and subjugated Latin America and the Global South, through the European institutions he lifted up in his speech. Centuries later, the United States resurrected this crusade through the CIA, which funded and even armed the rise of far-right, pro-capitalist Evangelical movements, to actively oppose and dismantle the more redistributive, popular Catholic churches rooted in liberation theology.
Many of the right-wing paramilitaries and dictatorships backed by the US were explicitly Christian. They, however, killed priests who did not adhere to rigid far-right fundamentalism—Catholic groups were central to the resistance. That Evangelical fundamentalism now fuels the region's new wave of right-wing leaders, including Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Maria Corina Machado, and José Antonio Kast, who are also fanatical supporters of Israel.
The Condor system maintained a centralized database tracking guerrilla movements, left-wing parties, trade unionists, religious groups, liberal politicians, and anyone deemed an enemy of the authoritarian regimes. These designated “terrorists” were hunted across borders, tracked down, and eliminated throughout the Americas and even in Europe, including France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal.
The United States actively designed, funded, and supported this architecture of repression, and then helped cover it up. The infamous, still-open School of the Americas trained torturers, while CIA stations shared intelligence with Condor operatives. US Embassies smoothed relations with allies and propagandized local populations.
In Bolivia, the US backed Hugo Banzer after his predecessor convened a People's Assembly of proletarian sectors to usher in populist reforms. That president was later kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated by the Condor system.
In Brazil, Washington supported the neo-Nazi-backed military coup that deposed social democrat João Goulart after he attempted mild economic reforms, ushering in two decades of brutal military rule.
In Chile, the US organized against socialist president Salvador Allende, who was instituting democratic, redistributive reforms. The Nixon administration famously declared it would “make the economy scream” in Chile, and went on to support Augusto Pinochet's coup, which brought torture, disappearances, and a dictatorship that murdered thousands. Rubio and the US currently back its Pinochet-supporting, grandson-of-an-SS-lieutenant President, Jose Antonio Kast.
On the topic of the SS, the US used Nazis as part of their anti-leftist subversion campaign in the Cold War. After World War II, the US set up “ratlines,” or escape routes, for Nazis and Nazi sympathizers throughout Latin America and Europe, to escape prosecution. They ended up being key architects of the US-backed right-wing dictatorships throughout the world including in Latin America, while many even joined anti-communist death squads.
Final Solution architects Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, and countless others all left for South America with help from the US State Department, which Rubio now commands.
The US also deposed socialist governments and installed brutal right-wing regimes in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti (multiple times), Mexico, Nicaragua (multiple times through the Somoza family), Costa Rica, Honduras (multiple times), El Salvador, and Panama.
In Guatemala, the CIA overthrew socialist president Jacobo Arbenz after he dared to enact land reform that threatened the American United Fruit Company, whose political connections apparently mattered more than Guatemalan democracy. Guatemala was ruled by brutal military dictators for decades afterward, also regimes the US supported.
Mind you, this is only in Latin America—the US did plenty more of this in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was all less than 50 years ago, and continues to this day.
Such is the legacy that Rubio defends when he mourns the setbacks to “Western civilization” made by “anti-colonial uprisings.” We must ask, why did those uprisings occur? Is Rubio implying that opposing colonialism is bad? Most of them occurred after centuries of slavery and subjugation, some of which was inflicted by the US.
This historical whitewashing serves Rubio's contemporary objectives. The United States is currently engaged in a multi-front campaign to reshape Latin America into a bastion of pro-American right-wing populism.
The administration has waged economic war on Venezuela, and Cuba, now on the verge of total humanitarian collapse. It swayed the last election in Honduras through disinformation and threats—continuing a pattern of US intervention that began with the Obama administration's 2009 backing of a coup against socialist Manuel Zelaya. Trump's first term engineered a coup in Bolivia against socialist Evo Morales, that Rubio enthusiastically supported.
Trump’s second administration has threatened strikes on Mexico and Colombia, imposed sanctions and tariffs on Brazil, and openly and covertly supported authoritarian parties throughout the hemisphere, including the Bolsonaros in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Tuto Quiroga in Bolivia, and opposition figures across the region.
There is something profoundly ignorant in Rubio's performance. He and his boss have championed authoritarian tactics, openly supported neo-Nazi politics, praised dictators abroad, and destroyed democracy and the Constitution at home. To then stand before the world to declare that America defends freedom, democracy, and Judeo-Christian principles against godless revolutionaries is a ridiculous diminution of those very principles.
As Salvador Allende put it mere hours before his death at the hands of US forces at the Palacio de la Moneda, “While they have strength and will be able to dominate us, social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force.”
In Haiti, more than a century of US interventions, coups, and support for corrupt and violent figures has produced a humanitarian catastrophe that now generates waves of migration, while the American right has the gall to turn around and fearmonger about Haitian migrants invading the country.
As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva says, “Foreign intervention can cause more damage than it seeks to prevent.” They create the migration crises that then become fodder for right-wing demagogues. They alienate Latin American populations, who increasingly view China more favorably than the United States, because while Washington offers only militarism and domination, Beijing offers infrastructure investment and trade (however problematic its own debt traps may be).
Many Latin American states would rather navigate imbalanced partnerships with China than submit to foreign invasions and coups from Washington.
The United States can continue down the path outlined by Rubio’s speech, but it will only accelerate its decline, alienate its allies, and create the very chaos it claims to fight. Or it could finally reckon honestly with its history and chart a different, humane course.
Eduardo Galeano once said, “Latin America is part of the world, which was for many years condemned to the system of power where intimidation had more strength than the vote.” By sanitizing these atrocities, Rubio is condemning Latin America and the world to that fate once again.
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