Trump’s foreign election ad-Vance man

There is something jarring about seeing the vice president of the United States speaking at a campaign rally for the election of a foreign leader. That’s exactly what happened last week when Vice President JD Vance, on an official, two-day state visit to Hungary, gave a full-throated endorsement of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for re-election in last Sunday’s parliamentary elections.

Although Vance repeatedly asserted in response to media inquiries that he was not in Hungary to tell the people whom to vote for, he belied that assertion when he asked a rally of 5,000 Orban supporters at Budapest’s MTK Sportpark: “Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our Forefathers?”

In answer to his rhetorical question, he said: “Then, my friends, go to the polls this weekend and stand with Viktor Orban, because he stands for you, and he stands for all these things.”

There was never a question that Vance’s visit and endorsement had the full support of the Trump administration from the top down. In March, President Trump released a social media video titled, “A Complete and Total Endorsement,” embracing Orban’s reelection. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Hungary with much the same message. Even last Sunday morning, on election day, Donald Trump, Jr. posted on X a message that called on “friends in Hungary” to vote for “my father’s good friend and ally” Orban, “someone who stands for Hungary first.”

Despite all the administration’s tub thumping for Orban and his “illiberal Christian democracy” party, Fidesz, the prime minister lost by such a large margin on Sunday that he quickly conceded defeat to opposition Tisza party leader Peter Magyar, saying the results were “clear.”

Ironically, in his joint press conference with Orban last week, Vance accused the European Union of interfering in Hungary’s election, calling it “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference I have ever seen or even read about.”

Vance was referring to financial penalties imposed on Hungary by the EU for its backsliding on democratic values and practices. Vance charged that, “the bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” even though the EU has underwritten Hungary’s economy for the past two decades.

Vance’s seemingly hypocritical attack on the EU for its election interference at least helped to elevate the issue. EU spokesman Thomas Regnier reacted to Vance’s visit by observing that, “in Europe, elections are the sole choice of the citizens.” And Magyar, Orban’s opponent, issued a brief statement on social media on the Vance visit, saying “No foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections. This is our country.”

Former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson reportedly told an aide in 1946 that, “Gentlemen don’t read each others’ mail.” That gentlemanly advice could also apply to a courtly corollary: “Countries do not meddle in each others’ elections.” Such genteel behavior in the late 1940s went out the window with the advent of the Cold War and rise of ideological East-West conflict, spying and covert activities.

There’s even a term for such electioneering intrusions: Foreign Electoral Interventions, defined as attempts by governments to influence the elections of another country. International relations professor Dov H. Levin, in his book, “Meddling in the Ballot Box” (2020), finds the U.S. has intervened in the largest number of foreign elections between 1946 and 2000. Of the 938 competitive national-level executive elections, the U.S. intervened in 81, while the Soviet Union or Russia intervened in 36. The two countries combined meddled in 117 of the 938 elections (about one in nine), with the majority, 68 percent, being through covert rather than overt actions.

Levin found that such interventions determined the identity of the winner in “many cases.” On average, electoral interventions in favor of one side will increase the vote share by about 3 percent — an effect large enough to have potentially changed the results in about half of the 14 U.S. presidential elections occurring since 1960. Experts are still debating the extent to which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

I am skeptical of any attempt to extrapolate from raw polling data just how much foreign efforts to influence voters actually change their choices of candidates at the polls. One thing the Trump team’s efforts to secure Orban’s reelection did demonstrate is that no amount of foreign pump-priming can replenish an empty well.

Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran, culminating as chief of staff of the House Rules Committee in 1995. He s author of, “Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial” (2000), and, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays” (2018).

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