NEWS reports say it took European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen just 17 minutes after Viktor Orban conceded defeat in Hungary’s parliamentary elections on April 12 to proclaim on social media that “Hungary has chosen Europe,” and that the landslide win of Peter Magyar, who will assume leadership of the country’s government in mid-May after his party secured a parliamentary majority, will fully bring Hungary into the mainstream of the European Union.
“Hungary reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger,” von der Leyen said.
Billions of dollars in loans and assistance to Ukraine, which the EU deferred to give because Orban had blocked it, will be unlocked. The bloc is expected to provide Hungary’s economic programs with loans and aid, as well. Magyar has promised to rejoin EU institutions tasked with reining in official corruption and enforcing accountability. The animus between Hungary and EU officials like von der Leyen, a favorite bogeyman of Orban, is expected to end.
The rejoicing over Orban’s defeat in the upper echelons of power in the EU — von der Leyen later compared Hungarian voters’ rejection of Orban as comparable to the 1956 uprising of the Hungarian people against their Soviet Union overlords — carried one unspoken message, and its intended recipient is United States President Donald Trump.
That message is this: Hungary under Orban, considered “the model” on how far-right America under Trump should be governed, is now over.
Rejected after 16 years in power and after the lavish attention paid by Trump-aligned American conservatives to the “Orban model.” Days before the elections, Trump lavished praise on Orban and promised to support Hungary economically in case his ally wins. US Vice President JD Vance was later dispatched to Hungary to campaign alongside Orban and tell Hungarian voters that America supports Orban and his Fidesz party unequivocally.
Trump’s questionable and boundary-breaking interference in a foreign election, of course, did not sway Hungarians one bit, leading political commentators to claim that “everything Trump touches dies.” All that waving of the supposed Trump magic wand carried no weight. It was, in fact, an albatross around the neck of the Trump flunky.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic, the foreign leader often demonized by Trump — Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney — has been snatching victories from the jaws of defeat repeatedly. Remember that Carney became premier in March 2025 after his once-popular predecessor Justin Trudeau resigned from the leadership of the Liberal Party and its subsequent decision to tap Carney — who never held an elected position before — as its new leader. The Carney-led Liberals were expected to be voted out of power in the then-upcoming general elections, making Carney a short-lived prime minister and a failed politician. Surveys conducted before those polls showed that the Liberals cannot reverse their unpopularity and were destined for electoral doom.
Little did the Liberals and Carney realize that they had a savior: Trump.
After Trump returned to power in January 2025, he made two things clear: his disdain toward the Liberals and his preference for Pierre Poilievre, the “Trump lite” leader of Canada’s Conservative Party. While Trump did not actively campaign for Poilievre and the Conservatives in the April 2025 parliamentary elections, he used every opportunity to denigrate Carney and the Liberals. The punitive tariffs he imposed on Canada before the polls and his threat to annex the country and make it the 51st US state loomed large, and negatively so, on Canadian voters. Carney and his Liberals defied the doomsday projections and won, though three seats short of a governing majority.
But in recent by-elections, Carney finally secured a governing majority despite the initial economic struggle caused by Trump’s tariffs. The governing majority vests upon his government the power to enact legislation aimed at strengthening Canada’s domestic resilience and further weaning it away from what Carney called “the US hegemon.”
Trump’s decisions and pronouncements have turned off even his supposed allies from right-wing movements. Recently, his most prominent ally in the EU, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, did the unexpected: she criticized Trump for his criticism of Pope Leo XIV, the first US-born pontiff. Trump, reacting to Leo’s criticism of the war on Iran and his call for global peace, said the pope was “weak on crime, weak on nuclear weapons and catering to the Radical Left.”
Meloni said Trump’s criticism of Leo was “unacceptable,” adding that “the Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and normal for him to call for peace and condemn every form of war.”
Conservative Catholics in the US, believed to be part of the religious coalition that supported Trump in the November 2024 elections to succeed the Catholic Joe Biden, lashed out at the president’s attack on the pontiff. US bishops expressed their disappointment, though, in a moderate tone. Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said: “I am disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father.” That disenchantment with Trump is expected to impact negatively on Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
Just a year ago, Trump steamrolled over the guardrails that were supposed to neutralize the pursuit of his extremist far-right agenda, with Orban as the model. But this April, Orban is defeated, the war in the Middle East has worsened and everything that Trump touches dies.
Question: Why are Trump’s epic failures a source of schadenfreude to many of us ordinary folks from distant lands? His unhinged decision to join Israel in bombing Iran on Feb. 28 is the root cause of our current misery.
