DL Open Thread: Monday, April 13, 2026

Orban Loses And–Concedes!:

The 16-year reign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is at an end after a crushing election loss on Sunday that will send political shockwaves from Washington to Moscow.

The EU’s most autocratic leader — a close ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin — lost by a decisive margin in Sunday’s vote, amid the highest turnout in Hungary’s democratic history.

With almost all of the votes counted, his opponent Péter Magyar looked set to win 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament. Orbán’s Fidesz party was on track to win only 55.

Orbán conceded, with tears in his eyes, saying: “However it turned out, we will serve our country and the Hungarian nation from the opposition.”

A jubilant Magyar, theatrically clutching a Hungarian flag, stepped onto a stage on the banks of the River Danube to the strains of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as his supporters cheered and popped Champagne corks. “Together, we have liberated Hungary,” he said.

With such an emphatic margin of victory, Magyar will secure a supermajority in parliament that will allow him to change the constitution and unravel key pillars of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” — demolishing the former prime minister’s tight control over the judiciary, state companies and the media.

The Vance Humiliation Tour.  Sent to Hungary to grovel for Orban, sent to Pakistan to watch Iran peace talks fall apart while Trump went to UFC in Miami.

At a closed-door Easter luncheon at the White House, President Trump decided to entertain the crowd by humiliating his understudy.

Mr. Trump demanded an update on Iran peace negotiations from Vice President JD Vance. “How’s that moving?” Mr. Trump asked, in a video of the event the White House seemed to have accidentally posted online.

“It’s going good, sir,” Mr. Vance replied from the audience. Mr. Trump cut off the rest of his response.

“Do you see it happening?” the president asked, about a successful end to the war.

“Uh,” the vice president replied, “we’re going to brief it to you.”

Then Mr. Trump delivered his punchline. “So, if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” he said, to laughter. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”

Does Mr. Vance still not realize that the joke is on him? The interesting thing is not that he keeps debasing himself but that he gets less and less in return each time. As his political fortunes dim, his soul has become a depreciating asset.

Over and over in recent years, Mr. Vance struck devil’s bargains, first to gain a Senate seat and then to become Mr. Trump’s No. 2. He embraced the anti-immigrant stances he once called “reprehensible” and other dark elements of the MAGA movement in hopes of positioning himself as its next leader.

What once might have been a cruise to the 2028 Republican presidential nomination now looks more like a run through the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Vance is experiencing a version of the pain experienced by other ambitious Republicans who embraced Mr. Trump only to see themselves used and (eventually) discarded by him.

While anonymous White House officials let it be known that the vice president was skeptical about the war in the lead-up to the invasion, Mr. Trump has cut off that route of escape, saying Mr. Vance was “maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic.” Mr. Vance is reduced to maintaining that war is OK now because “we have a smart president, whereas in the past we’ve had dumb presidents.”

Then there’s this:

JD Vance had a cringeworthy moment on the world stage as he tried to call Donald Trump during a rally in Hungary—only for the president to not pick up the first time around.

In Budapest to urge voters to re-elect far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the vice president appeared on stage and declared he had something of a surprise for the crowd.

“I actually had a special guest that asked that I give him a phone call,” Vance said, as he dialed a number on his mobile phone.

“Let’s see. Let’s hope he actually answers, or this is going to be very embarrassing.”

After a few awkward seconds of silence, a voice operated message came through the speakers.

“I’m sorry, the person you were trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet,” the message said.

Vance, however, was undeterred. “Okay, try one more time,” he said.

A few more seconds of awkward silence ensued before he was finally able to connect with his boss.

“Hello, Mr. President, how are you?” a relieved VP said.

“Hi JD, could you give me a second? I’m just…uh,” Trump replied, before realizing he was on speaker phone as the audience roared.

The roar blocked out the sound of the toilet flushing (I made that part up).

Trump’s Gonna Blockade The Strait Of Hormuz?  Apparently b/c no ships passing is better than ships paying Iran to safely pass through the Strait:

President Donald Trump on Sunday announced a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to destroy “the little that is left of Iran” after peace talks in Islamabad fell apart overnight.

In a pair of Truth Social posts, Trump said the U.S. military would begin blockading ships entering or leaving the strait, and would also intercept any vessel that has paid tolls to Iran to transit it safely. He also said that any Iranian who fires on the U.S. military or other, peaceful vessels will be “BLOWN TO HELL” while the Navy works to de-mine the strait.

“THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION,” Trump wrote in one of the posts, “and Leaders of Countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted.”

“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters in Islamabad before departing for Washington. “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.”

Hmmm, could be a tough day for everyone’s 401(k)’s…

How Trump Is Trying To Steal The Upcoming Elections.  Great and scary stuff from Pro Publica:

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms.

That was then.  What’s happened since Trump was elected in 2024?:

But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found.

ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.

Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr. 

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

Pretty much the only remaining protection is if the courts hold that the state-by-state elections are indeed a function of state governments, which is how the courts have always determined the Constitution to read.  We all know, though, that there’s only one court that really counts.

What do you want to talk about?