THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Viktor Orbán is the closest thing in Europe to a prime minister for life. He has served four consecutive terms since 2010, perpetuating his power with the ruthlessness of a royal. But ruthlessness may not guarantee him reelection. That became clear to me recently in Székesfehérvár, a small city in central Hungary where Orbán was born.Székesfehérvár lacks Budapest’s grand boulevards and baroque extravagance, but the city is not without luster. Hungary’s first king, Stephen I, built a basilica in Székesfehérvár that served as the coronation site for later monarchs. Rain was lashing the city when I visited one evening last month. It was dark and cold. But close to 1,000 people had gathered in the town square, all of them waiting for Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who broke with the prime minister two years ago and is now trying to unseat him in elections on Sunday. Most polls have shown Magyar’s party, Tisza, with a comfortable lead over Orbán’s Fidesz Party. But it’s not a given that popular support will translate into a victory at the polls.Such is the state of Hungary’s democracy. Gerrymandered districts give lopsided influence to the rural countryside, traditionally fertile territory for Fidesz. Deceptive campaigning is rampant, in the form of billboards that dot Hungary’s highways, deepfakes that dominate the internet, and pro-government messaging that fills newspapers and television channels owned by the prime minister’s allies. Orbán enjoys the support of foreign governments, in both the United States and Russia. Donald Trump’s endorsements have been as forceful as any he has issued in this year’s domestic midterm elections, a sign of his personal stake in a regime revered by the MAGA movement. His vice president, J. D. Vance, traveled to Budapest this week to underline the political alliance and advance conspiracy theories about “bureaucrats in Brussels” meddling in the election, words that could have come from the lips of Kremlin spin doctors.It may not be obvious why an election in Hungary, a landlocked European country with a population roughly the size of Michigan’s, has commanded so much international attention. It’s not a nuclear power, a global media hub, or a center of innovation. Its language is a beast to learn. But Sunday’s vote may well be one of the most important elections in the history of postcommunist Europe. It will test the longevity of a regime that has deviated from principles of democracy and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It sure feels like 1979 again. Iran is fighting the West. The price of gas has been rising for weeks. Moscow is aiming to take advantage of a distracted White House. The party in control of Washington is anxiously looking at the polls. Flared pants and jumpsuits are back! So are cigarettes. Steven Spielberg is riding high after doing a movie about humans encountering aliens. (Not to be outdone, actual space missions are back too.) U2 put out new music. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates are good.And if we do seem to have returned to that moment in time, then, well, Donald Trump would seem to be ready for whatever comes next, because the guy has lived his whole life like it’s the 1980s.He embraces the big-bigger-biggest ethos of the decade, with its gold-plated style and “greed is good” mantra. His views have been shaped by the brash era in which excess was the norm and ostentatious displays of wealth and power were celebrated in pop culture and in Trump’s Manhattan. (The pink-marbled lobby of his Trump Tower skyscraper looks just as it did when it opened in 1983.) It was also a moment when New York City was defined by extreme wealth stratification and racial unrest, a time of high crime and corruption. To this day, Trump’s touchstones almost seem preserved in amber from that decade: Sylvester Stallone, George Steinbrenner, Hulk Hogan, the musical Cats. This was an era of over-the-top displays of patriotism and even jingoism; the phrase Let’s make America great again was in. (It’s true—Ronald Reagan got there first.) This was when Trump became a celebrity, when he still had youth on his side. In his mind, at least, he hasn’t left.Smith Collection / Gado / GettyTrump’s favorite era may also be shaping his approach to the war with Iran. Back then was when Trump revealed himself to be an Iran hawk, one who believed that President Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to rescue hostages at the U.S. embassy broadcast a sign of American weakness to the globe. In a series of remarks over the decade when he became a public figure, Trump said he’d punish Iran, and he began to float his now-familiar refrain of take the oil. Indeed, those 1980s discussions of foreign policy and Iran were when the media began speculating that Trump might someday run for president. The lessons he learned decades ago have… [TheTopNews] Read More.

U.S. presidential campaigns usually get started at the Iowa State Fair or some other exalted arena of Americana. J. D. Vance chose Budapest. The vice president visited Hungary’s capital today to align himself in the most visible way possible with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is fighting to hold on to power in parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday.The U.S. government’s support for Orbán had already been clear. Donald Trump had issued a “Complete and Total Endorsement” on social media. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the most credible threat to Vance’s claim on the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, had traveled to Budapest in February and declared, “Your success is our success.” Vance, not to be outdone, didn’t cloak his endorsement in diplomatic rituals. “I’m here to help him in this campaign cycle,” the vice president said at Orbán’s side. For the prime minister, it was almost too good to be true. He raised his hand to his face as if to stop himself from blushing.Hungary is of relatively little material value to the United States. It’s a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people that accounts for about a quarter of 1 percent of U.S. trade. It contributes negligibly to NATO, ostensibly the measure that the Trump administration uses to determine the worth of its European partners. But Hungary matters to Vance because it matters to the MAGA intelligentsia—the think-tank bosses, Substack scribblers, and X influencers who help mold the agenda of the modern Republican Party. Many of the gatekeepers of GOP values view Hungary as a model. In their mind, Orbán shows how to cast aside conservative niceties and seize the institutions of the state to advance a particular vision of the good life, one that claims Christianity as its basis while punishing adversaries including leftists, immigrants, and sexual minorities. And so the Hungarian election has become the first stop of the 2028 presidential contest.[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]The trip, which took place five days before voting begins in Hungary, couldn’t have come at a better time for Vance, whose self-image as an anti-interventionist is at odds with Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran. In Budapest, he allowed himself some distance from the president’s threats to bomb Iranian civilization out of existence. He was squarely in his comfort zone, conjuring fears of “woke” indoctrination and leading Hungarians in a call-and-response chant opposing… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The empty warehouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City had a lot of potential but no buyers. Built in 2022, it was one of the largest warehouses in the area, with 833,000 square feet of space—14 football fields under one roof. The surrounding industrial zone had been promoted by the state as “Utah’s Inland Port,” a logistics hub smack-dab in the middle of a desert but only a few minutes to the freeway and the international airport.Demand for big warehouses had softened, however, and the property remained vacant, a white elephant by the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Then, suddenly, on March 11, the Department of Homeland Security snapped it up for $145.4 million—paying nearly 50 percent more than the property’s 2025 assessed value to a private investment fund controlled by a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Bank.The deal went through six days after President Trump announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as DHS secretary. Noem and her team had been racing to buy up industrial properties as part of a $38 billion overhaul of the ICE detention system in an effort to supercharge Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. DHS officials described the acquisitions as a crucial step to meeting the White House’s goal of 1 million deportations a year, after ICE carried out fewer than half that many during Trump’s first year back in office. The warehouses would be reconfigured and remodeled into megajails, with capacity for up to 10,000 detainees each.Noem’s replacement, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took control of the department on March 24 and ordered a pause on conversion plans for the warehouse in Salt Lake City as well as for 10 others scattered across the country, seeking to defuse backlash from local jurisdictions. Many local leaders say that they were blindsided by DHS’s acquisitions and don’t want giant immigration jails in their communities. Some have made clear that they are willing to fight the government’s plans. Lauren Bis, a spokesperson for DHS, characterized the pause as a logical part of Mullin’s transition process, which requires “reviewing agency policies and proposals” and making sure that the department works with community leaders. “We want to be good partners,” Bis told me.There are also legal challenges. The administration is facing lawsuits across its new portfolio of industrial properties, including in Michigan and New Jersey. In Maryland, a federal judge halted renovation work at a warehouse that ICE… [TheTopNews] Read More.