Trump’s America and the Axis of Autocracy

The ties that bind Hungary, Russia, European neo-Nazis – and MAGA

Do you remember the “Axis of Evil”? In 2002 George W. Bush introduced this phrase as the opening salvo in his campaign to build support for military action against Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea — regimes that, in fact, had nothing to do with 9/11. Those were the days when the US was still a nation in which presidents believed that they needed to make a case for war, even if that case was fraudulent.

I say fraudulent both because the supposed case for invading Iraq, WMDs, was fake and because Bush’s claim that those countries were members of a united front was a bizarre misrepresentation: all three regimes were indeed evil, but Iraq and Iran were enemies rather than allies, while both had little interaction with North Korea.

Today, however, there really is a coalition of regimes and political movements that one can justifiably call an axis of evil — a coalition that is bound together by a shared hatred for democracy and freedom. Call it the Axis of Autocracy. The most important players in that axis are Vladimir Putin; Viktor Orbán in Hungary; right-wing European political movements like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD; and, of course, the Trump administration. And unlike Bush’s imaginary grouping, the Axis of Autocracy is a true alliance.

Allies, after all, help each other in times of need. And that’s what Trump is doing for Viktor Orbán. Despite Orbánist control of the Hungarian media and extensive electoral rigging, Fidesz, Orbán’s party, is at serious risk of losing power in the next election. So Trump is rushing to its aid with extravagant statements of support, as you can see in the Truth Social post above. Beyond that, JD Vance will be visiting Hungary, in effect to campaign for Fidesz, just a few days before the election.

As Politico writes,

The overt politicking on behalf of any foreign leader runs counter to a long tradition of American administrations generally staying out of other countries’ domestic politics.

Indeed. There would be deafening howls of outrage if a foreign government were similarly to insert itself into a U.S. election. But then Vance has also positioned himself as a strong defender of Germany’s AfD, which, as NBC says,

has included leaders who have embraced old Nazi slogans and minimized the atrocities of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

On Sunday, by the way, the leadership of the AfD demanded that U.S. troops leave Germany.

Trump’s brazen allegiance to the Axis of Autocracy is now playing out – to America’s detriment – in his disastrous war against Iran. Russia, by all accounts, is supplying extensive aid to Iran, providing real-time targeting information about the locations of U.S. warships and aircraft. According to Ukraine, Russia took satellite photos of a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia just days before Iran struck the base, wounding multiple U.S. service members and destroying a crucial surveillance aircraft. Western intelligence sources indicate that Russia is supplying the Iranian regime with sophisticated drones.

Yet Trump continues to staunchly defend Putin and is becoming ever more explicit in his support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Have we ever before in this country seen a president side with a foreign regime that is actively putting the lives of American service people in danger? Has this happened in any country with a democratically elected head of state? It would be akin to LBJ and Nixon siding with the Chinese during the Vietnam War.

The betrayal is almost too deep to fathom.

So what motivates the slavish devotion of Trump and MAGA to Orbán, Putin and the AfD? I can make sense of Trump’s affinity with petrostate autocrats and tech broligarchs because they, after all, can shower him with private planes, millions for his vainglorious ballroom, and hundreds of millions of dollars of purchases of his crypto con.

But neither Orbán nor Putin have the unfettered deep pockets to bankroll Trump in the style to which he is accustomed. Nor can they give him any political capital with the average American voter. So it’s clear that the major source of affinity between MAGA, Fidesz and Putinism is something more raw and atavistic: a shared commitment to racism, ethnonationalism, and social illiberalism. Unlike the Europeans who chastise Trump for breaking norms and threatening allies with invasion, Trump is in his element in the company of swaggering, deceitful and power-hungry strongmen.

Indeed, autocracy itself is a shared value. Trump and those around him clearly admire systems in which the Leader — Trump’s capitalization in his Orbán post, not mine — faces no restraints and is protected from criticism, perhaps one in which critics have a tendency to die after falling out of windows.

And autocracy as a value in itself explains the flip side of the current U.S. government’s affinity for authoritarian regimes: Its loathing for democratic governments in Europe and, especially, its ever-more-open hostility to Ukraine.

All that being said, I personally remain amazed by Trump’s willingness to betray Americans on the battlefield by allying himself with Putin despite Russia’s aid to Iran. This is, after all, Trump’s war, and his personal political fate may depend on whether he can somehow extricate himself from the quagmire he got us into.

It’s just another proof of the Trumpian dictum: every time you think he can’t go any lower, he does.

MUSICAL CODA