A pair of vice-presidential visits to Hungary and Pakistan underscore the enigma that is JD Vance
JD Vance – who once called Trump “noxious” and a “bad person” leading his voters to “a very dark place” – is on a global mission as the uunshaven semi-reasonable face of Trumpism. It is every bit as ridiculous as you might think.
In Budapest in recent days, Vance endorsed Europe’s icon of illiberalism, Viktor Orban, while at the same time, and with a straight baby-face, denouncing the European Union for supposed “interference” in Hungary’s politics. Orban, the international oracle of the idea that a majority rule is the only democratic principle that matters, faces his most serious electoral challenge Sunday in over a decade, with multiple recent polls showing Peter Magyar’s Tisza party ahead.
In Islamabad, a vice president with no meaningful diplomatic track record has been inserted into the highest-stakes negotiations in decades, facing the surviving Iranian bigs as they demand – in utter indifference to the thrashing their regime has taken – control guarantees over the Strait of Hormuz.
Taken together, the two episodes amount to a masterclass in the incoherence of the current American posture abroad — and in the peculiar way Vance has become its most polished vessel: a full-throated Trump loyalist who nevertheless speaks in complete sentences and projects a modern managerial competence, complete with the de rigueur stubble now weirdly standard among men under 45.
Let’s take a look at JD’s excellent adventure.
Hungary: interfere, and accuse others of interfereing
In Budapest, the US vice president endorsed Orban at a moment when he faces real electoral vulnerability. Recent polling shows his Fidesz party trailing, with some polls placing Tisza in the high 40s and Fidesz in the high 30s. Even allowing for volatility and a large undecided bloc, Hungary has become competitive again. The secret is that Magyar is not actually a leftist, and that Orban has become hubristically indifferent to his failure to engineer prosperity for Hungary.
This is huge, because Orban is not merely a national conservative figure. He has become the central global reference point for “illiberal democracy” — a model that asserts that elections are the sole meaningful expression of democratic legitimacy, while systematically weakening the institutional constraints that give democracy its substance. In this narrative, courts are unelected obstacles, journalism is the enemy of the people, and civil servant gatekeepers become “deep state” saboteurs.
It is a model that has found admirers far beyond Hungary, and its most devoted adherent may be Trump himself. Another one is Vladimir Putin, who deployed a similar playbook enroute to making Russia a full dictatorship. Both Putin and Trump back Orban, therefore, and all three of them hate the European Union.
So Vance dutifully praised Orban for standing up for “sovereignty” in the face of “nameless” bureaucrats who supposedly would take it away. Putin hates the EU because he wants a weaker and divided neighbor to his east. Orban is a nationalist. Trump is Trump. But Vance knows better. And it doesn’t matter.
The European Union is not an external actor imposing alien will; it is the institutional framework Hungary voluntarily joined, complete with agreed-upon standards for rule-of-law governance. If it were applying to be admitted to the EU today, Hungary would be rejected because of Orban’s installing of an authoritarian system.
Considering that the (ultimately failed) 1956 Hungarian revolution was a landmark moement of the Cold War, it is grim to observe how Orban’s Hungary has maintained a warm relationship with Moscow, including continued energy engagement even as Europe has tried to reduce dependence on Russian supplies.
And when a top American political figure adopts Orban’s language of resistance to “EU interference,” he is stepping into a global argument about whether liberal institutional constraints are essential to democracy — or optional appendages that can be stripped away once elections are secured. They are, to be clear, the essence of the US Constitution. Trump doesn’t know it; Vance certainly does, and is pretending.
