Last month, Trump said Orbán had his “complete and total support” in a video message to the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest.
On Sunday Orbán faces Péter Magyar, a former insider in the prime minister’s Fidesz party, who broke with him two years ago to found the centre-right Tisza party.
Tisza leads Fidesz by between 10% and 20% in most polls. Only the strongly pro-government Nézőpont agency puts Fidesz narrowly ahead.
America First as defined by Trump explicitly means “We can fuck with you, you can’t fuck with us”. They are not hiding it or packaging it in moral terms of universal ethics or the golden rule.
So there is no “gocha” moment here. Trump explicitly doesn’t think EU countries are his equal, so appealing to hypocrisy is meaningless. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do.
No one is appealing to Trump. The comments are rather directed towards Europeans stupid or corrupt enough to cheer to Putin and Trump.
It’s not so much surprise at what he does, but more that he can get away with it, and even more that there is no force stopping him from within the USA. Let alone that he still has a massive backup in the population compared to his actions
Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that large parts of the US population have no moral compass. Putin is comic book evil, and yet large parts of Republican voters think Putin is a great guy. In non-Soviet Russia, of all shithole places.