A Really Bad Week for the Global Right

Today on TAP: And what is it about Christian nationalism that looks to produce kleptocratic regimes?

https://prospect.org/2026/04/14/really-bad-week-for-global-right-trump-orban/


Credit: Denes Erdos/AP Photo

By any empirically based metric, this has been a lousy week for the global right. Hungarian voters overwhelmingly repudiated their Christian nationalist kleptocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Here at home, Donald Trump took ownership of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, ensuring the continued rise of oil and gas prices at a time when the foremost concern of American voters is the unaffordability of life’s essentials.

Sensing he’d left something undone, Trump also accused the pope of being “soft on crime” (hey, it worked against Michael Dukakis; why not the pope?). And just in case he still retained the support of those right-wing Catholics who’d railed against Francis and were holding their tongues against Leo, not to mention the Protestant evangelicals who’ve never quite made their peace with Catholics, he then decided to post an image on Truth Social that depicted himself as Christ the Healer. The 1960s comic Mort Sahl would always interject a line into his act: “Is there anyone I haven’t offended?” Sahl never offered that line up, however, as a political strategy.

Trump’s supporters are disproportionately evangelical Protestants, so attacking the pope merely harked back to the classic evangelical fear of satanic popery (the main reason, along with that hardy perennial of antisemitism, that the U.S. banned immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe from 1924 through 1965). But equating himself with Jesus was a bridge too far even for many evangelicals. Trump was compelled to take down that Truth Social post, though if he now looks at it at all askance, I suspect it’s because he realizes he should have identified himself with God the Father, who was made of sterner stuff than his Son, who was way softer on crime (“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”) than Leo, or, for that matter, Dukakis.

In looking at the defeat of Orbán, there are enough parallels with the current state of American politics to make Republicans even more nervous than they already are. For one thing, discontent with the stagnating Hungarian economy was widespread, and heightened by voters’ awareness that Orbán had redistributed the nation’s wealth both upward and to his cronies, whom he’d turned into oligarchs. There are some parallels to this here at home. Trump’s cultivation of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk, and the deals he’s cut with Silicon Valley billionaires to support a rapid and unregulated expansion of their AI ventures (wildly unpopular with the public at large, fearful of jobless futures and data centers in their backyards), from which, he surely hopes, his family will get a cut—all this is in sync with the kleptocratic policies of Orbán and, for that matter, Orbán’s other great champion, Vladimir Putin.

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