Friday, April 17, 2026

Something to Know - 17 April

While the Middle East is in its perpetual spirit of neighbors hating it neighbors, something that has gone on for endless centuries there is the Trump/MAGA mess here at home.   It now seems the GOP is in dire straits of losing biggly in the upcoming mid-term elections, and that both the Senate and the House will swing to the Democrats; at least the House for sure.   The MAGGOTS are desperately trying to push and grab policies and programs before they are thrown out.   Of course they are doing so clumsily, but it is entertaining.    The major problem is that the leader at the top seems clueless about how badly things are going, and the big mobster is not bothered by his sycophants who dare not tell him the truth.   The only evidence he cannot hide is his increasing hair loss.  Screen writers, book writers, and documentarians are confidently producing material that will serve as relevant historical commentary.


Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 
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Apr 16, 2026, 9:57 PM (11 hours ago)
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Congress is back in session, and there is a frantic feel in the air. Republicans appear to be assessing the fall of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior along with his abysmal job approval numbers, rising prices, and an unpopular war in Iran that currently does not appear to have a solution that will not result in the U.S. losing face.

In Hungary, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar is setting a bar as he appears to want no part of playing business as usual with Orbán’s cronies. A center-right politician, Magyar appeared as a guest on state television after his party’s dramatic win—Orbán’s state media had not let him appear on it before the election—and said he intended to suspend the station’s news service because state media does not provide the journalism that the country deserves. He said that he would end the state subsidies for Orbán’s right-wing-allied university and that Hungarian president Tamas Sulyok, a close ally of Orbán, was “unfit to serve as the guardian of legality” and “must leave office immediately.”

Republicans appear to be trying to grab all the turf they can before the midterm elections.

Today the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 140, a bill that overturns a 20-year mining ban upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) in Minnesota. Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) introduced the measure, which passed the House in January. It clears the way for a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta to engage in copper-sulfide mining, which produces sulfuric acid, above the pristine BWCA. Those waters include 1,175 lakes and over 1,200 miles of rivers and streams. According to outdoor writer Wes Siler, about 165,000 people visit the BWCA annually, generating $1.1 billion in economic activity and supporting 17,000 jobs.

The Republicans’ attack on the BWCA for the benefit of a foreign billionaire feeds President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing crusade against Minnesota. Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, is targeting New York today as well, saying that the federal government will withhold $73.5 million from the state because it has refused to review the commercial driver’s licenses of almost 33,000 immigrants. New York officials say they are complying with federal law.

Trump is also continuing to try to exert his personal power over the government, threatening again to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whose term as chair ends in May but who has said he will continue on the board until the administration drops its trumped-up criminal investigation of him over alleged cost overruns on the renovations of Treasury buildings.

As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

Today Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on social media that an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves surveillance warrants against foreign actors and agents in the U.S., “raises serious concerns about FBI implementation of FISA 702,” the law that allows warrantless surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) reposted Massie’s comment and added that he, Wyden, has sent “a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about.”

This exchange seems to suggest that FBI director Kash Patel has authorized FBI agents to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant, illegally.

Churchill Ndonwie of the Miami Herald and Garrett Shanley of the Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau reported yesterday that attorneys for the immigrants being held at the Florida detention center called “Alligator Alcatraz” said in court that after a judge protected the detainees’ right to use their phone and access their lawyers, the guards cut off their access to phones and beat and pepper-sprayed detainees, openly defying court orders to respect their civil rights. The facility is operated by the Florida Division of Emergency Management but must operate according to Department of Homeland Security standards.

Prosecutors in Minnesota today charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with two counts of second-degree assault after he pulled alongside a car on a highway in Minnesota and pulled a gun on the occupants. There is a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters: “There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law in the state of Minnesota.”

Today the new Department of Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, announced that acting director of ICE Todd Lyons will be leaving his position at the end of May. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Todd Lyons led a secret police force for Trump where masked agents attacked our own American streets, violated Constitutional rights, and shot our own citizens. We’ll hold you accountable too.”

Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo noted that in their panic over polls and the popularity of Democratic candidates, Republicans are trying to reclaim their base by turning back to Islamophobia and hoping a culture war will drown out concerns about gas prices, corruption, the Iran war, and Trump’s erratic behavior. Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted that Muslims—who first came to the American colonies in the early 1600s, by the way—“don’t belong in American society,” and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called “the demand to impose Sharia Law in America…a serious problem.”

But there are signs that Trump is weakened enough that even past supporters are sliding away. At the beginning of his administration, Trump favored Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, who flattered Trump and poured as much as $90 million into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, becoming one of the largest investors in World Liberty Financial, founded by Trump’s sons. The Securities and Exchange Commission had sued Sun for securities and market manipulation in 2023, but in March 2026 it quietly settled the lawsuit for a payment of a $10 million fine.

On Tuesday, Sun accused Trump’s World Liberty Financial of setting up a trapdoor that allows company officers to freeze accounts. Sun says he has been unable to sell since September 2025, a freeze that a blockchain tracking group says has cost Sun about $80 million. On social media, Sun called out “the bad actors at [World Liberty Financial].”

According to Rob Wile of NBC News, World Liberty Financial responded by suggesting Sun himself had engaged in misconduct. “See you in court pal,” it posted.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund, was reviewing its investments even before the Iran war hit its finances, and yesterday Andrew Beaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that it is “on the verge of pulling” its funding from LIV Golf, the rival to the PGA Tour it launched with Trump’s blessing—and mostly on his golf courses—in 2022.

Meanwhile, Trump posted four screeds about the proposed White House ballroom today after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by Republican president George W. Bush, stopped its above-ground construction but permitted construction of the below-ground bunker to continue. In one of his missives, Trump complained:

“The White House doesn’t have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom, one with Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass—which all means that no future President, living in the White House without this Ballroom, can ever be Safe and Secure at Events, Future Inaugurations, or Global Summits. This Magnificent Space will allow them to carry out their vital duties as the Leader of our Nation. Furthermore, the Ballroom, which is being constructed on budget and ahead of schedule, is needed now. Almost all material necessary for its construction is being built and/or on its way to the site, ready for installation and erection. Much of it has already been paid for, costing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. If somebody, especially one with no standing, had a complaint—Why wasn’t it filed many months earlier, long before Construction was started? The Public Record was open for all to see. Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

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Juan Matute
R.B.R.
C.C.R.C.


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Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Something to Know - 14 April

Do you remember the focus given to the election for NY City mayor.   You may recall all the anti-Mamdani negative comments; Muslim, Socialist, and all the established and anti-progressive hysteria.   This newsletter on Mamdani's first 100 days in office shows what can be achieved when the government focuses on the people.   We see a government full of old politics and cronyism in many cities, states, and our country.   This is not thinking outside the box.   We have this ability.   We only need to insist on electing honest and focused leaders to obtain what democracy allows.   It is so refreshing to write about something that is not Trump.

Christopher Armitage from The Existentialist Republic cmarmitage@substack.com 
10:50 AM (27 minutes ago)
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Within eight days, he and Governor Kathy Hochul announced $1.2 billion for universal childcare, funded entirely from existing state revenue.¹ The investment includes a 1,000-seat expansion of the 3-K program and 2,000 full-day, full-year seats for two-year-olds, the first time New York City has offered care at that age. Families in lower-income neighborhoods will receive spots first. The seats run from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., 260 days a year, making the program functionally full-time childcare rather than a school-day schedule.² By fall 2026, a parent in the Bronx who currently spends $26,000 a year on daycare will spend zero.³ Hochul deserves equal credit here. The money came through a city-state partnership, both levels of government investing at the same time.⁴

At his hundred-day rally, Mamdani announced five city-run grocery stores, one per borough, starting at La Marqueta in East Harlem.⁵ La Marqueta sits on city-owned land under the Metro-North viaduct, the same spot where Fiorello LaGuardia opened a public market in 1936 so working families could buy cheaper produce.⁶ The stores will contract with third-party operators, pay union wages, and sell staple goods at subsidized prices. In the half-mile radius around La Marqueta, nearly 40 percent of households receive public assistance or SNAP benefits.⁷ Grocery prices across the city have risen 66 percent since COVID.⁸ The first store could open by the end of 2027, with all five operating before the end of Mamdani’s term.

Government-run retail is one of the oldest and most ordinary functions of public administration in this country. Seventeen states operate government-owned liquor stores, many of them profitably, generating revenue that funds schools, roads, and public health programs. North Dakota has run a state-owned bank since 1919, turned a profit every year for over a century, and returned $335 million to the state in 2024 alone.⁹ Hundreds of American municipalities own their electric utilities and broadband networks. When these operations generate revenue, that money funds other public services. When they don’t, they still deliver something essential to the community, the same way schools, buses, fire departments, and police do. Safe food at affordable prices, like freedom of movement and public safety, is exactly the kind of thing government exists to provide.

His administration recovered $9 million in restitution for workers and small businesses cheated by employers, including a $5 million settlement for cheated delivery workers.¹⁰ He expanded protected time off for 4.3 million workers and delivered $34 million in repairs, settlements, and judgments for tenants fighting negligent landlords.¹¹ His Department of Consumer and Worker Protection proposed the first municipal click-to-cancel rule in the country, allowing the city to fine businesses that trap consumers in hard-to-cancel subscriptions and recurring charges.¹² Each of these creates an enforcement mechanism at the city level that functions regardless of what the federal Department of Labor or HUD does or fails to do.

On housing, Mamdani revived the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, which the Adams administration had defunded and sidelined, and appointed longtime tenant organizer Cea Weaver to run it.¹³ On his first day in office, his administration intervened in a private landlord bankruptcy case covering 93 buildings to protect the tenants inside them.¹⁴ He launched the LIFT task force to inventory city-owned land suitable for housing development, with a report due by July, and the SPEED task force to cut permitting barriers that slow construction.¹⁵ He ordered “Rental Ripoff” public hearings across the city to collect testimony from tenants about illegal fees, retaliation, neglected repairs, and economic discrimination, with agencies required to produce a public report and action plan.¹⁶ He appointed six of the nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets allowable rent increases for roughly two million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments, and has signaled his intent to pursue a rent freeze when the board votes in June.¹⁷

Mamdani inherited a $12 billion budget deficit from the Adams administration, which the City Comptroller described as the largest gap since the Great Recession.¹⁸ The previous administration had systematically underbudgeted essential services. Adams budgeted $860 million for cash assistance in fiscal year 2026 when projections put the actual cost at nearly $1.7 billion.¹⁹ Mamdani’s response combined transparency with aggressive cost reduction. His administration appointed Chief Savings Officers at every city agency, required each to identify savings of 1.5 percent for fiscal year 2026 and 2.5 percent for fiscal year 2027, and agencies identified more than $1.7 billion in savings.²⁰ The switch to the NYCE PPO healthcare plan for city employees saves $411 million this year and $791 million next year.²¹ He secured $1.5 billion from the state through the Hochul partnership to cover expenses Albany had shifted onto the city.²² His administration terminated the McKinsey contract that had cost $9 million, began insourcing IT and consultant contracts across agencies, and audited dependent eligibility on employee health plans to remove ineligible dependents, projected to save an additional $100 million.²³ Combined, these actions cut the deficit nearly in half. The Comptroller called the resulting budget significantly more transparent and accurate than anything the previous administration produced.²⁴

The first-quarter crime numbers are where a skeptical reader should pay close attention. The city recorded 54 murders, the lowest first-quarter total since CompStat tracking began in 1994, down 28 percent from the prior year.²⁵ Brooklyn murders fell 57 percent. Manhattan fell 44 percent. Staten Island recorded zero murders across 178 consecutive days, the second-longest streak in recorded history.²⁶ Shooting incidents matched the prior year’s record low. Major crime dropped more than 5 percent across every borough. Burglaries fell 21 percent. Robberies fell nearly 8 percent.²⁷ Crime in public housing fell 7.2 percent, with record lows for murders, shootings, and robberies within NYCHA developments.²⁸ The NYPD seized more than 1,000 guns in the first quarter alone.²⁹

These numbers reflect trends built across multiple administrations and no honest person credits them to any single mayor. They do, however, demolish the argument that investing in people instead of policing makes a city dangerous. A democratic socialist funded universal childcare, opened grocery stores, expanded tenant protections, and limited ICE enforcement, and the city got safer.

On immigration, Mamdani barred ICE from entering city property, including schools, shelters, hospitals, and parking garages, without a judicial warrant.³⁰ He reversed the Adams-era order that had allowed federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex.³¹ His administration launched a Know Your Rights campaign in 10 languages and distributed 30,000 flyers through houses of worship.³² When a Columbia University student was detained by ICE, Mamdani made a direct appeal to Trump and secured the student’s release.³³

On corrections, Mamdani committed to closing Rikers Island and ordered full compliance with the city’s ban on solitary confinement.³⁴ He appointed Stanley Richards as Department of Correction commissioner, the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the department in its history.³⁵ His administration opened a long-delayed therapeutic center at Bellevue Hospital to treat incarcerated people.³⁶

Mamdani filled 100,000 potholes at the fastest repair pace in eleven years.³⁷ He restored four bike and bus infrastructure projects the previous administration shelved and announced fast bus lane expansion across 45 priority corridors.³⁸ He committed to containerizing all residential trash citywide with a funded timeline, after the previous administration’s effort stalled without a deadline or a budget.³⁹ He launched an initiative to install public restrooms across all five boroughs.⁴⁰

His administration established the Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.⁴¹ He invested $20 million in early childhood mental health and moved homelessness outreach away from the NYPD.⁴²

Whether the first hundred days become a foundation or a high-water mark depends partly on Albany. The budget gap Mamdani inherited from previous city and state administrations constrains new investment, and his largest revenue proposal, the wealth tax, requires the governor and state legislature to act. But the trajectory is already set. By fall, 2,000 two-year-olds will have full-day, full-year childcare seats that did not exist in January. By 2027, a city-run grocery store will open in East Harlem selling subsidized food on the same spot where LaGuardia built one ninety years ago. Those cost money the way fire departments and public schools cost money: because delivering the service is the point.

Your city and state can do everything mentioned here and even more.

You can go find your city councilmember and state house representative. Tell them what you want, in person, persistently, and specifically.

A quick note: we need 10 subscribers every article to keep all this going. We reached that number yesterday, 18/30 days now. If you can be a member then you are personally keeping the activism machine running for MILLIONS of monthly readers!

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Juan Matute
R.B.R.
C.C.R.C.


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Something to Know - 14 April

The news reflects the overall situation the nation and the global community find themselves in today.   The overthrow via the ballot box in Hungary suggests that change is on the way.   The question is whether it can happen in the USA; sure anything is possible.   How long can MAGA endure the storm? Chances are MAGA is too divided and shows signs of breaking down.    The usual right-wing force might be considering its chances of survival.    The GOP's division has started to take its toll on the party.   The Democrats need to get smarter and stay focused.   Trump seems to be oblivious to it all.  Just keep him away from the codes until this mess sorts itself out.

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American heathercoxrichardson@substack.com 
Apr 13, 2026, 11:16 PM (10 hours ago)
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On April 12, the day of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.

The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.

Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.

Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.

Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.

It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.

But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.

Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”

Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.

Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.

But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.

Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

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Juan Matute
R.B.R.
C.C.R.C.


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