Victor Orban

Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model, attacking Europe and aligning with Putin

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 13, 2026

On April 12, the day of Hungary’s parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orbán’s Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orbán called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.”

Today Péter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orbán was using government money to finance CPAC. Orbán has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October, Orbán told Putin, “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents.

The influence of Orbán on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics.

Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.

Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.

Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.

The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.

When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order.

It’s impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 Great Crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market but by cronyism. And it’s impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules.

But when Orbán took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right-wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote Hungary’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns.

Increasingly, Orbán used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

That model proved irresistible for right-wing leaders in the U.S. who courted radical white evangelicals and who recognized that their ideology was unpopular enough that the only way to make it the law of the land was to impose it through the power of the state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, followed Orbán’s model right down to the laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues and DeSantis’s attempt to strip Disney of its governance structure when it refused to adhere to the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Orbán’s idea that the power of the state must be used to overturn democracy in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation inspired the far-right figures that took charge of the Republican Party under Trump. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Calling for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” Roberts pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right-wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”

Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orbán’s model both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia.

Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: “Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.” By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction rather than that of the MAGA Republicans by pointing out that Magyar’s government seems more likely to resist America’s adversaries and work with America’s allies than Orbán was.

But the model that Hungarian voters’ dramatic rejection of Orbán offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar’s party won because voters recognized that Orbán’s vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people.

Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people.

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Musk calls Social Security, the basis of the U.S. social safety net, a “Ponzi scheme.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 3, 2025

As seemed evident even at the time, the ambush of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday was a setup to provide justification for cutting off congressionally approved aid to Ukraine as it tries to fight off Russia’s invasion. That “impoundment” of funds Congress has determined should go to Ukraine is illegal under the terms of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, and it is unconstitutional because the Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to set government spending and to make laws. The president’s job is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

It was for a similar impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds for Ukraine, holding them back until Zelensky agreed to tilt the 2020 election by smearing Joe Biden, that the House of Representatives impeached Trump in 2019. It is not hard to imagine that Trump chose to repeat that performance, in public this time, as a demonstration of his determination to act as he wishes regardless of laws and Constitution.

On Sunday, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a series of memos he and other senior career officials had written, recording in detail how the cuts to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” at the agency will lead to “preventable death” and make the U.S. less safe. The cuts will “no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” one memo read.

Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States.

Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to create a system for waivers to protect that lifesaving aid, the cuts appear random and the system for reversing them remains unworkable. The programs remain shuttered. Enrich blamed “political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation.”

On Sunday, Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”

Dangerous cuts are taking place in the United States, as well. On Friday, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Musk called Social Security, the basis of the U.S. social safety net, a “Ponzi scheme.” Also on Friday, the Social Security Administration announced that it will consolidate the current ten regional offices it maintains into four and cut at least 7,000 jobs from an agency that is already at a 50-year staffing low. Erich Wagner of Government Executive reported that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) team had canceled the leases for 45 of the agency’s field offices and is urging employees to quit.

The acting commissioner of the agency, Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer who got his post after sharing sensitive information with DOGE, blamed former president Joe Biden for the cuts. In contrast, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that the system currently delivers 99.7% of retirement benefits accurately and on time. He warned that the administration is hollowing it out, and when it can no longer function, Republicans will say it needs the private sector to take it over. He called the cuts “a prelude to privatization.”

“The public is going to suffer terribly as a result of this,” a senior official told NPR. “Local field offices will close, hold times will increase, and people will be sicker, hungry, or die when checks don’t arrive or a disability hearing is delayed just one month too late.”

In South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia, more than 200 wildfires began to burn over the weekend as dry conditions and high winds drove the flames. Firefighters from the Forest Service helped to contain the fires, but they were understaffed even before Trump took office. Now, with the new cuts to the service, prevention measures are impossible and there aren’t enough people to fight fires effectively and safely. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster (R) declared a state of emergency on Sunday.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo picked up something many of us missed, posting today that Trump’s February 11 “workforce optimization” executive order is a clear blueprint for the end goal of all the cuts to the federal government. The order says that departments and agencies must plan to cut all functions and employees who are not designated as essential during a government shutdown. As Marshall notes, this is basically a blueprint for a skeleton crew version of government.

But for all that the administration, led by DOGE, insists that the U.S. has no money for the government services that help ordinary people, it appears to think there is plenty of money to help wealthy supporters. In February, the cryptocurrency bitcoin experienced its biggest monthly drop since June 2022, falling by 17.5%. On Sunday, in a post on his social media site, Trump announced that the government will create a strategic stockpile of five cryptocurrencies, spending tax dollars to buy them.

Supporters say that such an investment could pay off in decades, when that currency has appreciated to become worth trillions of dollars. But, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN notes, “for every bitcoin evangelist, there is an academic or banker from across the political spectrum who will point out that cryptocurrency investments might just as easily go up in smoke, which would be an unfortunate thing to happen to taxpayer dollars.”

The first three currencies Trump announced were not well known, and the announcement sent their prices soaring. Hours later, he added the names of the two biggest cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. After the initial surges, by Monday prices for the currencies had fallen roughly back to where they had been before the announcement, making the announcement look like a pump-and-dump scheme. Economist Peter Schiff, a Trump supporter, called for a full congressional investigation, suggesting that someone other than Trump might have written the social media posts that set off the frenzy and wondering who was buying and selling in that short window of time.

Also on Sunday, the administration announced it would stop enforcing anti-money-laundering laws that were put in place over Trump’s veto in 2021 at the end of his first term and required shell companies to identify the people who own or control them. Referring to the law as a “Biden rule,” Trump called the announcement that he would not enforce it “Exciting News!” The Trump Organization frequently uses shell companies.

A world in which the government does not regulate business or address social welfare or infrastructure, claiming instead to promote economic development by funneling resources to wealthy business leaders, looks much like the late-nineteenth-century world that Trump praises. Trump insists that President William McKinley, who was president from 1897 to 1901, created the nation’s most prosperous era by imposing high tariffs on products from foreign countries.

Trump confirmed today that he will go forward with his own 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on goods from China, adding to the 10% tariffs Trump added to Chinese products in February. While President Joe Biden maintained tariffs on only certain products from China to protect specific industries, it appears Trump’s tariffs will cover all products.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called the tariffs “unjustified” and announced that Canada will put retaliatory tariffs on $20.8 billion worth of U.S. products made primarily in Republican-dominated states, including spirits, beer, wine, cosmetics, appliances, orange juice, peanut butter, clothing, footwear, and paper. A second set of tariffs in a few weeks will target about $90 billion worth of products, including cars and trucks, EVs, products made of steel and aluminum, fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, and dairy products.

Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum did not provide details of what her country would do but told reporters today: “We have a plan B, C, D.” Chinese officials say that China, too, will impose retaliatory tariffs, singling out agricultural products and placing tariffs of 15% on corn and 10% on soybeans. It also says it will restrict exports to 15 U.S. companies.

The tariffs in place in the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century were less important for the explosive growth of the economy in that era than the flood of foreign capital into private businesses: railroad, mining, cattle, department stores, and finance. By the end of the century, investing in America was such a busy trade that the London Stock Exchange had a separate section for American railroad transactions alone.

And the economic growth of the country did not help everyone equally. While industrialists like Cornelius Vanderbilt II could build 70-room summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island, the workers whose labor kept the mines and factories producing toiled fourteen to sixteen hours a day in dangerous conditions for little money, with no workmen’s compensation or disability insurance if they were injured. The era has become known as the Gilded Age, dominated by so-called robber barons.

Today, the stock market dropped dramatically upon news that Trump intended to go through with his tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 650 points, down 1.48%. The S&P fell 1.76%, and the Nasdaq Composite, which focuses on technology stocks, fell 2.64%. Meanwhile, shares of European defense companies jumped to record highs as Europe moves to replace the U.S. support for Ukraine.

Also today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecast a dramatic contraction in the economy in the first quarter of 2025. Evaluating current data according to a mathematical model, it moved from an expected 2.9% growth in gross domestic product at the end of January to –2.8% today. That is just a prediction and there is still room for those numbers to turn around, but they might help to explain why Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is talking about changing the way the U.S. calculates economic growth.

Trump: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 2, 2025

On February 28, the same day that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Martin Matishak of The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, broke the story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.

Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.

On Face the Nation this morning, Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, contradicted that information. “Considering what I know, what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would I’m certain not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States operations,” he said. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, Turner was in line to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in this Congress until House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) removed him from that slot and from the intelligence committee altogether.

And yet, as Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.

Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.

“Russia and China are ourbiggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”

Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”

Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”

Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.

Trump has made dismissing as a hoax what he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia” central to his political narrative. But Russian operatives did, in fact, work to elect him in 2016. A 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Putin ordered hacks of Democratic computer networks, and at two crucial moments WikiLeaks, which the Senate committee concluded was allied with the Russians, dumped illegally obtained emails that were intended to hurt the candidacy of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.

Russian operatives also flooded social media with disinformation, not necessarily explicitly endorsing Trump, but spreading lies about Clinton to depress Democratic turnout, or to rile up those on the right by falsely claiming that Democrats intended to ban the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. The goal of the propaganda was not simply to elect Trump. It was to pit the far ends of the political spectrum against the middle, tearing the nation apart.

Fake accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook drove wedges between Americans over issues of race, immigration, and gun rights. Craig Timberg and Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Facebook officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.

That effort was not a one-shot deal: Russians worked to influence the 2020 presidential election, too. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US.” But “[u]nlike in 2016,” the report said, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”

Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded.

In October 2024, Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned in an interview with CBS News that Russia was bombarding voters with propaganda to divide Americans before that year’s election, as well. Operatives were not just posting fake stories and replying to posts, but were also using AI to manufacture fake videos and laundering Russian talking points through social media influencers. Just a month before, news had broken that Russia was funding Tenet Media, a company that hired right-wing personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen, who repeated Russian talking points.

Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech. Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.

On February 20, Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes, and Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is firing or reassigning officials at the FBI and CISA who had worked on protecting elections. That includes those trying to stop foreign propaganda and disinformation and those combating cyberattacks and attempts to disrupt voting systems.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story that two members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” are now installed at CISA: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” and Kyle Schutt, a 38-year-old software engineer. Kim Zetter of Wired reported that since 2018, CISA has “helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

“America has turned.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 24, 2025

Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”

For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.

At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.

“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.

In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”

As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.

Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.

On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”

The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “[i]n the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”

Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”

“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”

It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.

On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.

The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.

“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.

Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.

John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”