Progressive Politics

President Donald Trump had a very bad weekend.

In the most crushing blow, his favorite European leader, the pro-Putin, anti-Zelensky exemplar of “illiberal democracy,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—whose reelection Trump had strongly endorsed—lost his bid to stay in power by a stunning landslide margin.

Only slightly less embarrassing, the much-touted peace negotiations with Iran—the first direct talks between U.S. and Iranian leaders in almost 50 years—ended in failure, dramatizing Trump’s failure to convert a massive wave of U.S. military power (hitting more than 13,000 Iranian targets in five weeks of airstrikes) into a political victory.

Finally, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has tried more than any other Western leader to maintain good relations with the American president, said he was “fed up” with the fact that energy prices dip and soar “because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world.” In an op-ed for the Guardian last week, Starmer wrote: “Britain’s national interest is best served by de-escalation, diplomacy, and the swift reopening of the strait of Hormuz.”