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Thursday

Roger Kimball

Vance Derangement Syndrome

Bret Stephens has come a long way in his estimation of Donald Trump. Back in 2016, when Trump was first running for the presidency, Stephens wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism.” As the election season progressed, Stephens mostly dropped the sewer talk, sliding into its place evocations of Trump’s “darker antipathies” and warnings that his “candidacy is manna to every Jew-hater.” A “Trump administration,” he explained,“would give respectability and power to the gutter voices of American politics.” At one point he giddily announced that Trump’s chances of victory were “next to nil.

Vance

Thursday

Will Collins

The end of the Orbán era

Over the headline “Peace Mission,” a recent cover from the conservative Hungarian periodical Mandiner shows an awkwardly photoshopped Viktor Orbán mediating between a bemused-looking Vladimir Putin and a grim Volodymyr Zelensky. Behind Orbán, a map of the world connects Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing, Washington and Budapest. One of these capitals, as they say, is not like the others. Even before Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, the chances of Orbán’s July trips to Kyiv and Moscow producing a peace settlement were slim. The Mandiner cover, however, is a revealing window into the mindset of Orbán’s conservative fans. The idea of a Hungarian prime minister mediating between squabbling great powers is both attractive and plausible to many of Orbán’s fervent supporters.

Orbán