There’s very little justice to be found in this world, but it is fun to see how everyone who debases themselves in service to Donald Trump eventually gets hung out to dry. So I enjoyed watching Vice President JD Vance being forced to take the blame for last week’s failed negotiations with Iran. He can whine to reporters all he wants anonymously about how he was against the war in the first place, but he backed Trump and now he gets to own this debacle. 

Not that Secretary of State Marco Rubio should feel confident just because he got to be Trump’s towel boy at the UFC fight they attended this weekend. Trump already makes Rubio clomp around in oversized shoes. He’s probably just toying with Rubio before finding some way, before the 2028 GOP primaries roll around, to destroy his presidential prospects too.

I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole of theories about why Melania Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, held a press conference denying a bunch of connections to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell that no one had been asking about. (Although it’s worth noting that a former friend of Melania’s, who was deported by ICE, is threatening to spill the tea.) But it’s pretty funny to see Melania caught in the paradox that snags all MAGA women. 

Whatever her ties to Epstein may be, it can’t be denied that Melania is proudly married to the man who was found liable in civil court for the sexually assault of E. Jean Carroll, and who has been accused of sexual abuse and harassment by more than two dozen other women. He even bragged about doing it on an open mic. So Melania’s claims to care about victims are laughable at best. Frankly, they’re insulting. 

Unfortunately, this is all too common with right-wing women. They will say they oppose sexual violence and certainly, like all women, they fear it. But they don’t really care, at least if it happens to someone else. Not if caring means having to defy the men in their lives. Or deciding not to vote for a man who brags, on tape, about sexual assault. 

The Epstein files have caused enough cognitive dissonance that a few Republican women, like former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, seem visibly rattled. But it’s been more than nine years since the “grab them by the pussy” tape. If Republican women really cared about sexual violence, they would have turned on Trump a long time ago.

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It was a blast watching Viktor Orbán lose the Hungarian election this weekend, especially after Vance spent so much time campaigning for the autocrat. But it’s still confusing why the vice president even bothered. Hungary has fewer than 10 million people and the winner of the election, Péter Magyar, as my colleague Andrew O’Hehir put it, “is a long way from anybody’s idea of a European progressive.” He didn’t run to Orbán’s left. He just opposed Orbán’s corruption.

The election wasn’t about conservative vs. liberal at all, but a referendum on whether Hungary should have a democracy. The main reason to back Orbán was to signal support for the autocrat’s decade-plus of efforts at dismantling democratic accountability. Magyar didn’t stake out different stances on LGBTQ rights, immigration or women’s equality. 

That said, I think Vance and MAGA are genuinely afraid that if democracy truly takes hold, it will eventually lead to the “woke” outcomes of diversity and feminism. They fear that ultimately, the far right cannot win by persuasion, only through lying and outright rigging the system. 

That’s frankly true enough in our system. It’s true that Trump won outright in 2024, though in no small part by lying through his teeth about everything. But overall, if our system wasn’t so gerrymandered and corrupted by dark money, we'd almost certainly have a more robust and powerful progressive movement, instead of the feckless Democratic party we’re stuck with now. 

So yeah, Vance’s support for Orbán wasn’t really about policies or ideology. It was a vote of confidence for taking away the people’s right, and ability, to govern themselves. On some level, Vance knows that people like him can’t keep on winning when the voters have real choices. 

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