Trump and Vance happily smearing Ukraine to save Orbán

For the Trump administration, Ukraine is now reduced to a cheap punchline - lies and stereotypes they throw about - to help their political ally Viktor Orbán win the Hungarian elections Sunday.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

Last week, I argued that Ukraine had lost its last friend in the Trump administration.

That “last friend” was supposed to be Marco Rubio - the man many in Europe had convinced themselves might remain tethered to reality on Russia, Putin and Ukraine.

That illusion did not survive long.

At the end of March, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized the Trump administration for putting undue pressure on Kyiv to cede Donbas to Russia, Rubio responded bluntly by calling this “a lie.”

He went on to threaten Ukraine that U.S. weapons already promised Ukraine may instead be diverted to the war in the Middle East.

Rubio’s public broadside against Ukraine was bad enough. But what we have seen this week is worse: Donald Trump and JD Vance reducing Ukraine to a cheap punchline — something to be crudely mocked, lied about and politically abused in order to help their only real political ally in Europe: Viktor Orbán - a man in political trouble ahead of this Sunday’s elections after 16 years in power.

The conclusion is as obvious as it is ugly: Trump and Vance are happy to throw Ukraine under the bus if it can help the MAGA-Orbán-Putin axis hold ground.

Ukraine as collateral damage

There is a particular ugliness to the way this administration now treats Ukraine: not as a country fighting for survival, but as a stockpile to be raided whenever Trump needs to flatter a dictator, fight another war, or rescue a political buddy.

The Trump administration has already told Congress that key military equipment — including Patriot-related air defense support — will be diverted away from Ukraine. In other words: this is now moving into policy.

And let us be clear what that means:

It means that while Ukrainian cities continue to face Russian missile and drone attacks, Washington is signaling that air defense for Ukrainian civilians is negotiable.

Negotiable even when European allies have already paid for said equipment, and coordinated and organized around the assumption that Ukraine would get what it needs.

That is not merely strategically reckless. It is morally filthy.

And it also sends exactly the message the Kremlin wants to hear: that Ukraine is no longer treated as a frontline ally, but as an optional inconvenience.

Every delay, every diversion, every such signal helps Russia.

And so does every extra dollar from oil exports that ends up flowing into Putin’s war machine. The U.S. waiver of sanctions on Russian oil exports, in combination with almost a doubling of oil prices left – within one month – leaves the Kremlin around $10 billion better of. Other estimates are even higher.

“The war in Iran is pretty good business for President Putin,” Alexander Kolyandr from the Centre for European Policy Analysis.

“The main windfall for Russia comes from the Defense Ministry of the United States. It comes from the higher price of oil,” Mr Kolayndr said.

More money to Russia means more money for Putin’s war in Ukraine. This is Ukraine being made to pay for Trump’s political priorities elsewhere: Ukraine has become collateral damage.

The Vance show comes to town

Nobody will forget J.D. Vance’s performance when he helped his boss ambush Zelensky in the Oval Office last year.

But that was not a one-off. That is his job description. Vance’s role in Trumpworld is clear: attack dog in a suit, with a degree.

And so this week, with Viktor Orbán fighting for his political survival before Sunday’s election, Vance flew to Hungary to help him. Not discreetly. Not diplomatically. But openly - in what amounts to one of the most shameless examples of direct U.S. intervention in a European election in recent memory.

Vance even admitted it. “I want to help as much as I possibly can, the prime minister as he faces this election season.” Not even a shade of a diplomatic fig leaf.

And let us be clear about who Viktor Orbán is.

He is not merely a difficult conservative or a nuisance in Brussels. He is an illiberal nationalist who has spent years hollowing out democratic institutions, sabotaging EU unity, obstructing support for Ukraine and acting as Vladimir Putin’s most useful ally inside Europe.

For months, he has been blocking the EU from using $90 billion of frozen Russian assets as a loan to sustain Ukraine. And last week, news broke that the Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó had systematically been passing confidential EU information to Russia - in order to undermine sanctions against Russian individuals and companies and block any Ukrainian progress towards EU membership.

In a leaked phone conversation, Szijjártó tells Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov: “I am always at your disposal.”

The French government described the Hungarian foreign minister as “a traitor.”

Right now, Orbán is in real political trouble. After 16 years in power, he is facing the most serious electoral challenge of his rule, with multiple reports and polls showing him vulnerable ahead of Sunday’s vote. So in jets Vance - grievance merchant, MAGA emissary, Orbán hype man - to tell Hungarian voters that Washington wants their strongman to stay.

That would already be ugly enough. But it got worse. Because Vance did not just campaign for Orbán. He weaponized Ukraine for him.

Vance’s lies about Ukraine

To understand just how cynical this is, you have to look at how Orbán has used Ukraine in this election: Ukraine is not a side issue in Hungary right now. It is central.

Orbán has spent months turning Ukraine into a political scarecrow - trying to convince Hungarian voters that Ukraine is not a neighbor under attack, but a threat - a source of war, instability and economic pain.

Orbán’s campaign has deliberately run on fear and anti-Ukrainian messaging, with pro-government propaganda portraying Ukraine as something Hungary must defend itself from.

The French paper Le Monde ran a reportage called “Hungarian PM Orban campaigns on fears of war and hatred of Ukraine.”

Budapest is plastered with posters of Zelensky. One of the most widely circulated campaign slogans reads:

“Let’s not let Zelensky have the last laugh.”

Cue J.D. Vance.

Standing beside Orbán, he did exactly what the long-time Hungarian leader needed him to do: repeat and legitimize this narrative. (It only made things slightly more weird that Vance – it seems for my untrained eye – had chosen a darker eye makeup than usual and a lighting that made him look even more ominous than usually. Whether he deliberately played on it, I have no idea, but there definitely was more than a bit of ‘Count Dracula’ over Vance’s days in Budapest. Or maybe I am just projecting.)

Vance – seemingly without getting the irony of his own presence in Budapest - accused the EU of interfering in Hungary’s elections and claimed that Ukraine was trying to influence the vote.

He claimed that “Viktor [Orbán] told me himself that Zelensky had threatened to send his military to Orbán’s private house.

“It’s completely scandalous,” Vance said. “You should never have a foreign head of government … threatening the head of government of an allied nation.”

Do I need to add that as he was talking, his boss was publishing his infamous social media post about annihilating Iran? No joke.

Vance also condemned that “the Ukrainians shut down pipelines, causing suffering among the Hungarian people in an effort to influence an election.”

He even claimed that “We are certainly aware that there are elements within the Ukrainian intelligence services that try to put their thumb on the scale of American elections, of Hungarian elections. This is just what they do….”

There is, utterly unsurprisingly, no evidence for any of this. But that is not the point. The point is to create an external enemy. And Ukraine - already under attack, already vulnerable - is the perfect target.

As is his style, Vance ignored (= implicitly lied about) the war an its beginning, portrayed it as a school yard squabble between unruly kids and made sure to aportion blame equally - “it takes two to tango.”

The indiction somehow being that if the Ukrainians would jus stop fighting, everything would be fine.

“We’re talking about haggling at this point over a few square kilometers of territory in one direction or another, is that worth losing hundreds of thousands of additional Russian and Ukrainian men?” he asked. “Is that worth an additional months or even years of higher energy prices and economic devastation?”

Trump’s lies about Ukraine

Donald Trump has been lying about Ukraine for years. Already before he was reelected, I wrote several long, detailed pieces about this.

His favorite ruse is that the Ukrainians are a bunch of corrupt types, scheming nice, God-fearing American taxpayers out of their hard-earned dollars. They are lead by this dodgy dude, Volodymyr Zelensky, who “every time he comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion. I think he’s the greatest salesman on Earth.”

That one has been Trump’s favorite Ukraine sleight for 2-3 years, and he repeated it as late as just days before his lieutenant set off for Viktor land.

The figure of $350 billion is false. Flatly false.

Multiple fact-checks and aid trackers have shown that Trump’s number wildly inflates actual U.S. support. Most serious sources/accounts put the figure at - at the very most - half that amount. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy and other fact-checking organizations have repeatedly shown that the real number depends on what exactly is counted - military, financial, humanitarian, committed versus delivered - but it is nowhere near the number Trump keeps throwing around.

And then we come to the scene.

The scene that tells you everything. How Trump and Vance see Ukraine as a cheap political football to be kicked about as they need.

At a campaign event in Budapest on the 7th of April, Vance phoned up Donald Trump on his mobile and put him on loudspeaker in front of 5,000 Orbán supporters.

A campaign stunt. And Trump delivered exactly what Orbán needed:

First he praised the Hungarian prime minister – the usul about how much he loves his buddy Viktor - and then – lying through his teeth about the Ukrainian leader and the Russian invasion, Trump directly reminded the Hungarians to vote for Orbán, and why:

“Remember this, he didn’t allow people to storm your country and invade your country, like other people have, and ruin their countries,” Trump told the Hungarian crowd via speakerphone, with his deputy eagerly nodding.

Read that again. Watch that again.

The U.S. president, live on speakerphone into an Orbán rally, suggesting that some countries - unlike Hungary - “allowed” themselves to be invaded.

No prizes for guessing who he meant.

This is not just ignorance, not just campaigning. This is active moral inversion. Blaming the victim.

When Trump talks about Ukraine “allowing” itself to be invaded, or frames Kyiv as somehow responsible for Russia’s war, he is not merely being stupid or crude. He is actively rewriting reality in a way that benefits Putin, Orbán and every other authoritarian. The U.S. president is excusing the aggressor.

It is, of course, very very difficult not to see the parallel between Donald Trump so easily excusing Putin’s rape of Ukraine with the many many accusations leveled against the U.S. president for rape, assault and pedophilia.

(But that is a job for the U.S. courts, not this article.)

And once you understand that, the whole performance makes sense.

We all know that Donald Trump is a bully. But Trump is not accidentally mocking Ukraine. Trump is mocking Ukraine for political use.

Cheap, ugly and dangerous

Last week, Rubio’s shift should already have ended any illusion that there were still limits inside the Trump administration when it came to Ukraine – still decency. This week, Trump and Vance have removed any doubt.

Trump and Vance reducing Ukraine to a cheap punchline - live, in the middle of Viktor Orbán’s election campaign - is something else entirely.

Because it shows their intent: Ukraine is no longer just negotiable, it is disposable.

Disposable in the service of a political alliance that, not coincidentally, overlaps neatly with Vladimir Putin’s interests. Trump and Vance are happy to throw Ukraine under the bus if it can help the MAGA-Orbán-Putin axis.

This is ugly. In every sense of the word.