The Daily Populous Tuesday April 14th, 2026 morning edition
Authored by slate.com and submitted by Dry_Nail5901

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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.”

Starmer isn’t alone. Americans’ “consumer sentiment” hit a low point, too.

As the weekend ended, seemingly angered by Iran’s defiance and flustered by his deepening isolation, Trump ordered a blockade of Iran’s ports in and out of the Strait of Hormuz—which, besides being an act of war under international law (thus effectively ending the April 8 ceasefire), will only exacerbate the global economic hardships that have resulted from the war.

Like many of his remarks and actions since the war began, this one—shutting down the strait in order to pressure Iran to open it up—makes no sense.

Orbán lost his bid for reelection after 16 years in power mainly because of a crumbling economy combined with the corruption of his cronies. But his defeat will have consequences across Europe and perhaps beyond. Orbán, an open admirer and ally of Putin and Trump, impeded and sometimes outright blocked the European Union from assisting Ukraine in staving off Russia’s invasion. Aid will now flow more easily; new sanctions against Moscow might be leveled as well.

Peter Magyar, the opposition leader whose Tisza party won more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament, is in many ways conservative. Magyar, whose name means Hungarian, campaigned on nationalist themes; his views against large-scale immigration aren’t so different from Orbán’s. But he has also promised to restore democratic institutions and good ties with the rest of the EU.

Orbán’s defeat is also seen as a slap against Trump, Vance, and other right-wing parties in Europe. In the days leading up to Hungary’s election, Trump pledged on social media to use America’s “full economic might” to help his friend’s economy. Vance traveled to Budapest to endorse Orbán as a leader who has “stood up” for “the normal, God-fearing people of Hungary” against the sneering “bureaucrats in Brussels.”

Polls just before the election suggested that the Trump’s and Vance’s campaigning diminished, rather than boosted, support for Orbán. The massive defeat may damage similarly minded political movements, in Europe if not quite yet in the United States—where the MAGA movement remains loyal to Trump.

The architects of Trump’s MAGA movement have cited Orbán’s tactics as a model to emulate. He held on to power in Hungary by taking over the free press, stacking the judiciary and independent agencies with his own lackeys, and rewarding them through his own brand of crony capitalism. (Sound familiar?)

If Trump was surprised by the downfall of his friend Orbán, he was nonchalant about the failure of peace talks with Iran, which took place in Islamabad, mediated by Pakistani leaders who were also his friends. Trump may even have welcomed the dead end.

Certainly, given the way the negotiations were set up, failure was inevitable. First, they weren’t really negotiations. The U.S. delegation issued a set of demands. Iran “chose not to accept our terms,” as J.D. Vance, the chief delegate, put it. And so he and his team flew home.

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It’s preposterous to think that, even with the best of intentions on both sides, a peace as complicated as this could have been settled in one day. These things take weeks, months, sometimes more than a year. The fact that Vance and his team weren’t ready even to stay over one night suggests either that they were very naive or that they knew the trip was a dead end.

Second, there’s the matter of the U.S. delegates. Iran sent over experienced officials, some of whom had taken part in the talks that produced the Iran nuclear accord. Besides Vance, Trump sent his usual emissaries, fellow real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. None of the three had any background in issues involving Iran or nuclear weapons and no experience at real diplomacy. The State and Defense departments once had many experts at both, but most of them have either resigned or been fired; the few still around have been ignored.

Back in February, as Trump was preparing for war, Iranian negotiators put forth a very favorable proposal. Among other sacrifices, it would have restricted their uranium enrichment to 1.5 percent purity. (Weapons-grade enrichment is 90 percent pure. They currently have about 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent.) Kushner and Witkoff didn’t understand the significance of Iran’s proposal. In any case, Trump was insisting on zero enrichment. The talks were due to continue the following week; Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a surprise attack on a Saturday.

After the talks this past weekend, Vance said Iran had refused to meet Trump’s demands, so that was that. The way Vance put it was that the Iranians refused to drop their pursuit of nuclear weapons, but that’s not what happened. Actually, they refused to drop their “inalienable right”—as guaranteed by Article 4 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran signed—to enrich uranium to some degree. Experienced negotiators might have tried to use this insistence as the basis for demanding other compromises.

But it is clear, in retrospect, that Trump didn’t really want a deal—not one that would have involved any compromises on his part. On Saturday night, while the talks were still going on, Trump was attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Florida with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. On his way to the match, Trump told reporters it didn’t matter whether the talks succeeded. “We win, regardless,” he said. “We’ve defeated them militarily.”

First, that’s not a politic remark for a president to make while his negotiators are trying (or even just pretending) to carve out a peace. Second, it shows, once again, that Trump has no understanding of war. In his April 1 TV address, which he delivered while the bombing was still going on, Trump boasted that the U.S. armed forces had “delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield, victories like few people have ever seen before.” In fact, they were just bombing lots of targets. They weren’t achieving “victories” of any sort. In other words, they weren’t—and still aren’t—accomplishing the goals for which Trump had gone to war in the first place.

Many years ago, not long after the end of the Vietnam War, Army Col. Harry Summers, who’d won Bronze and Silver stars in that war as an operations officer, flew to Hanoi as chief of the U.S. delegation to resolve the status of missing American soldiers. In between sessions, he struck up a conversation with his counterpart, Col. Nguyen Don Tu, who’d fought in the North Vietnamese army. “You know,” Summers remarked, “you never beat us on the battlefield.” Col. Tu replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

One can imagine, sometime in the future, the same conversation between an American officer and an Iranian. Right now, the American president, who talks so much about “winning,” doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

Kr1sys on April 13rd, 2026 at 21:00 UTC »

We've seen this headline for 10+ years.

Lumpy-Direction4360 on April 13rd, 2026 at 20:58 UTC »

If Hungary could stomp out the right wing fascists then so can we. The fact that republicans are still trying every day to rig elections proves that voting still really matters. They know they can loose. Vote! Vote! Vote!

Dry_Nail5901 on April 13rd, 2026 at 20:48 UTC »

Not bad enough for my liking