The Fall of Orbán in a Time of War
It makes one want to celebrate, but it’s not time nor the reason
It is hard not to become part of the fray. Hard not to cheer every event that marks a point for your side. This weekend was a banner one for people who dislike JD Vance. His record of international failures is, at this point, almost architectural in its construction. He visited the Pope. The Pope died the next day. He toured Greenland. He stumped pathetically for Orban. Then he walked into a peace negotiation for a war his boss started, at the behest of one of the most compromised Prime Ministers in Israeli history, carrying nothing but a suitcase of losses. His boss, meanwhile, positioned himself to claim whatever slim victory might emerge while saddling Vance with the loss most of us knew was coming.
It is stunning. It is also a window into both men. The view is not reassuring.
Trump’s priorities are, in order: self, then wealth. This is not analysis. This is biography. He has mortgaged everything and everyone to feed what can only be called his id. Not ego. Id. The contractors he stiffed. The wives he betrayed. The consistent, decades-long pattern of needing to feel satiated at this exact moment, consequences deferred indefinitely. This is what should keep a person up at night.
Wealth is the ego’s scoreboard. If he can point to a financial number going up, things are good. Health is irrelevant. Governance is irrelevant. This ethos runs clean through his parenting philosophy, if you can call it that. His children’s wealth, however grifted, functions as another data point feeding an ever-hungry need for affirmation. It is a mechanism. The same one that made him buy the Plaza and Mar-a-Lago. The same one that tore down the East Wing and gilded the White House. He mistakes the mechanism for instinct. That is exactly where the rubber is meeting the road.
Never mind that the combination of out-of-control egotism, insatiable need, and absent self-esteem is a genuinely horrifying set of ingredients. For evidence of the self-esteem part, observe what happens when he loses. He does not have the psychological infrastructure to cope. This is not psychobabble. It is a pattern.
His cabinet reflects the same logic. Few deserve their seats. They fall into predictable categories: grift, a need to please, and a remarkable absence of self-awareness. These are the characteristics of everyone who rises high in Trump’s orbit. Icarus had nothing on the ambitious Trumper. And of all the figures who flew too close, none may be more tragic than JD Vance.
It could end there. A cautionary tale about a kid from Appalachia, maybe conservative, maybe not, maybe Christian, maybe not, a man of substance the way mercury is a substance. Toxic and fluid and taking the shape of whatever container holds it.
If Vance had stayed within the traditional limits of the vice presidency, he might have ended up a footnote. Somewhere near Dan Quayle, whose mark on history lives in a TV Guide archive in service to Murphy Brown. Nothing more.
But we do not have a stable president. We have an aging, erratic one who has plunged the world into financial and geopolitical chaos. Which raises the possibility, not theoretical anymore, that JD Vance is the Manchurian candidate of Silicon Valley. The product of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. A strange Pinocchio to the GOP’s Frankenstein.
Many thought the worst-case scenarios were abstract. We survived January 6th, they said. And for those who needed convincing that they hadn’t seen what they saw, Fox and Newsmax (at a collective cost of over a billion dollars) slowly retrained them. A mind can be washed. Patty Hearst knew it. Murdoch confirmed it. The Maytag cycle of American consciousness runs on a continuous loop.
In they came. Zeldin, assigned to protect the physical environment, destroying it. McMahon, a billionaire blonde tasked with education, plunging children into intellectual darkness. A vicious legal advocate. A dog-killing domestic security czar. A replacement plumber. The list of incompetents is long. None is more consequential than Vance. None arrives at a more critical moment.
The fall of Viktor Orban is worth a moment of acknowledgment. He was one of the most malignant leaders in modern history, overshadowed only by larger thugs. His lies about Ukraine, his affection for Putin, his mutual embrace with Trump, his willingness to drag an entire country and the EU into poverty and subjugation. Good riddance is the reflexive response of any person who values democracy. But his removal is not without risk.
Orban was a weight on the world’s scales. Putin and Trump will not read his exit as a harbinger. They will read it as a threat. These are men who see the world not as right and wrong but as mine and yours. A grabbing hand near their things. Their response to that has never been measured.
There is also the more subtle destabilization. The lesser actors, the ones with outsized voices and insufficient power to back them, the self-dealing, violence-adjacent leaders of which the world is full. None is more dangerous right now than Netanyahu. No Prime Minister has been more calculating, more self-serving, more violent. A perceived shift in power will push him to behaviors the world has not seen since the late 1930s. We are, in fact, already there.
This is where Vance becomes the most chilling figure in the frame. Rather than absorbing the lessons of his own failures. Rather than looking in the experiential mirror and recognizing he has no standing on the world stage. Rather than listening to a boss who plunged us into this illegitimacy in the first place. He strutted into the negotiation room with his slimy companion Kushner to broker peace in a war entered without legal justification, domestic or international, while the president posted genocide fantasies on his own social media platform between whiplashing policy reversals.
All of it facing an adversary that has proven itself the true master of ideology and long-term pressure. All of it built on the illegal aggressive killing spree of last June.
This is American life under an unhinged administration. And given Trump’s age, his vascular disease, his increasingly erratic behavior, we may very well end up with Vance. A man with no real ideology. No real record. No real history of succeeding at anything that mattered.
The noise is not victory, it is the groan of stress.
Listen carefully.
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