Budapest Didn't Get the Memo — and Neither Should You

Trump's endorsement graveyard, the danger of presidents who come back for revenge, and what Hungary can teach America about overwhelming the electorate.

It is a small thing, and people look at me like I have a screw loose when I say it. But I make it my business to correct anyone who refers to what we are currently living through as Donald Trump’s “second term.” It is not his second term. It is his second non-consecutive term. That distinction is not a technicality. It is not a grammatical preference. It is the entire argument. The moment we let the language get sloppy, we let the history get sloppy. And when history gets sloppy, we repeat it.

The American electorate made a decision in 2020. They fired Donald Trump. The electoral college confirmed it. The courts — including courts stacked with his own appointments — confirmed it. And then, four years later, enough voters changed their minds to send him back. That is their right. This is a democracy. But what is not acceptable is pretending the firing never happened. What is not acceptable is treating his return like a natural continuation of something rather than what it actually is — a historic anomaly with a dangerous precedent attached to it. Words matter. Especially in politics. Especially now.

And while we are on the subject of language — let’s talk about third terms. Because Trump has openly flirted with the idea of running for one. And before his supporters could even finish celebrating that trial balloon, Obama supporters jumped in with “well if we’re doing that then Barack should get one too.” I need both camps to hear me clearly. No. To Trump — your second non-consecutive term is already historically dangerous enough without adding a third chapter to the story. And to the Obama supporters — I understand the nostalgia. I genuinely do. The man was competent, dignified, and coherent in complete sentences, which after the last few years feels almost exotic. But his time is done. Two terms is the rule. The moment you argue around it for your guy, you handed the other side the same argument for theirs. You cannot close a door you just propped open. The 22nd Amendment exists for a reason. It does not have a feelings exception.

Before we talk about Budapest, let’s talk about the body count. Because Donald Trump’s endorsement — once treated as a golden ticket, a political superpower, a force of nature that could drag any candidate across any finish line — has been quietly bleeding out for months. And the people closest to him have been too busy performing loyalty to notice the patient flatlining.

Start with November 4, 2025 — a night I wrote about in this newsletter, a night I called “The Year the Bullhorn Broke.” Virginia went to Abigail Spanberger by nearly fifteen points. New Jersey went to Mikie Sherrill by fourteen. Trump had fully endorsed Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey — held a telephone rally for him the night before, called it “the biggest election in the country.” The people of New Jersey replied with a fourteen-point rejection. In New York City, Trump endorsed Andrew Cuomo against democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, called Mamdani a communist, and threatened to cut federal funding if Mamdani won. New Yorkers elected Mamdani anyway. By a lot.

Georgia quietly delivered its own message that same night. Democrats won two seats on the Public Service Commission — the body that decides who gets electricity and how much they pay for it. No culture war. No red hats. No conspiracy about solar panels hiding immigrants. Just an election about keeping the air conditioning running in August. Practical issues still outpoll persecution fantasies. Write that down.

Then came 2026, and the pattern did not just continue — it accelerated. In Georgia’s 14th Congressional District — the most Republican district in the entire state, formerly held by Marjorie Taylor Greene — Trump endorsed Clay Fuller. Seventeen Republicans refused to drop out. Seventeen. The man’s own party looked at his endorsement, nodded politely, and kept running anyway. Fuller couldn’t clear fifty percent in the most Republican district in Georgia. Then there is Arkansas — a state Trump won by thirty-one points in 2024. In March 2026, Democrat Alex Holladay flipped a Republican state legislative seat in House District 70. The Republican had beaten Holladay by only two points in 2024. The political environment had shifted so dramatically in eighteen months that Holladay came back and won. In Arkansas.

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Here is the number that should keep Republican strategists awake at night: since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Democrats have flipped nine Republican state legislative seats in special elections. Republicans have flipped zero Democratic seats. Zero. Democrats are nine for nine. The shutout is not a streak. It is a signal. And it is the beginning of what overwhelming the electorate actually looks like in practice. We’ll come back to that.

There is exactly one historical precedent for a United States president serving two non-consecutive terms. One. His name was Grover Cleveland, and his second non-consecutive term is remembered primarily for the Panic of 1893, one of the worst economic depressions in American history, and for his brutal crackdown on the Pullman Strike, which remains one of the most anti-labor actions ever taken by an American executive. Cleveland was not a corrupt man. He was not a vengeful man. He was simply a man who came back when the country arguably needed someone different — and delivered a term widely considered inferior to his first. That is the best-case historical example of this concept. A man of reasonable character, no particular grudge list, no scores to settle — and his non-consecutive second term was still a cautionary tale. We do not have to imagine what the pattern looks like when the person who has returned is motivated by revenge. He has already been at it for over a year. We are living inside the answer.

When a country re-elects a president to a second non-consecutive term, it tells you something about the political literacy of that country. It tells you that enough voters either forgot what the first term looked like, decided the firing was a mistake, or were so dissatisfied with what came after that they were willing to try the thing they already tried. Any of those explanations is a problem. The first is historical amnesia. The second is democratic revisionism. The third is desperation dressed up as a mandate.

Nobody comes back from electoral rejection humble. That is not how human psychology works, and it is certainly not how the psychology of powerful men works. What comes back is a man with a list. And we are not speculating about what that list looks like — we are watching it get checked off in real time. Inspectors general fired in the middle of the night. Federal employees purged not for incompetence but for disloyalty. The DOJ weaponized against political enemies. ICE turned into an occupying force in American cities, terrorizing communities that have never been charged with anything. A tariff war launched that rattled the global economy and raised prices on the very working-class Americans he claimed to champion. USAID dismantled. Medicaid gutted. The January 6th participants pardoned. And just this weekend — while you were watching Hungary dismantle sixteen years of authoritarianism at the ballot box — the President of the United States called the first American-born Pope “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” claimed credit for his election, and then posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ. He deleted it the next morning and told reporters it was depicting him as a doctor. Trump’s complaint, apparently, is that the Pope — the man whose job has literally been to speak on matters of human dignity, war, and justice since the Roman Empire — should mind his business when it comes to foreign policy. Which raises the question: if the Pope can’t weigh in on war and human suffering, exactly what is he supposed to talk about? But that’s a whole other article. The point is this: these are not the actions of a man who learned lessons from his first term. These are the actions of a man who got fired, spent four years deciding who was responsible, and came back to settle every single score on the list.

The difference between seeking revenge and seeking justice is simple: justice is blind. Revenge knows exactly who it’s looking for. And a man who was impeached twice, indicted four times, and still won receives a very specific message from that outcome. The message is not “the people want my policies.” The message is “there are no consequences.” And a man who believes there are no consequences is not governing. He is settling debts.

Which brings us to Hungary. I was listening to Lurie Daniel Favors break it down on SiriusXM’s Urban View when she made a point about Pete Buttigieg that stopped me cold. When a Fox News host asked Pete directly whether it was time to just admit we lost, Pete did what Pete does — he answered brilliantly, articulately, and without actually answering. And Favors was right to call it out. Pete is one of the sharpest political minds of his generation. But sometimes articulateness is just a more expensive form of avoidance. Sometimes the right answer is the plain one. We lost. Say it. Own it. Move.

I’ll be honest with you. When Trump endorsed Viktor Orbán, I felt something I wasn’t expecting to feel — a quiet satisfaction. Not because I wanted to celebrate prematurely, but because I had been paying attention to what was happening in Hungary. The protests. The energy. The way ordinary Hungarians had been showing up in the streets for months, refusing to accept that the system Orbán built to preserve himself was permanent. I knew the ground was moving. And when Trump’s endorsement landed, I thought: there it is. He just kissed this man on the forehead with the same lips that have been killing candidates from New Jersey to Arkansas.

But you have to understand — knowing something is coming and watching it actually happen are two different emotional experiences. Even when you’ve been paying attention, even when the signs were all there, there is still that moment when the numbers roll in and the reality of it hits you. That is not contradiction. That is what it feels like to be a human being who still believes in democracy even after everything democracy has put us through.

Now let’s talk about what Hungary actually represented, because the American media has been treating it as a foreign affairs story when it is really a mirror. The Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 crowd did not pull their authoritarian blueprint out of thin air. They had a model. They had an address. That address was Budapest. Orbán’s Hungary was the laboratory where the Heritage Foundation’s ideological wet dream was already running in production — captured courts, neutered press, rigged electoral maps, government-controlled universities, EU funds held hostage. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts called Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” Project 2025 was not imagining a future. It was plagiarizing a present. And Trump coveted Orbán’s governing model the way he covets things he’s had to sign NDAs about — with absolutely no discretion and a remarkable indifference to the timing.

And then there is JD Vance — a man allegedly on intimate terms with at least one piece of furniture, and somehow the second most powerful person in America. Let the record show that the Vice President of the United States got on Air Force Two, flew to Budapest, stood on a stage next to Orbán at a rally called “The Day of Hungarian-American Friendship,” told the crowd to “stand with Viktor Orbán,” and then held up his phone so Trump could call in. Like a dweeb. Trump posted on Truth Social that Orbán had his “complete and total” endorsement, called him a “truly strong and powerful Leader,” and promised to deploy the full economic might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s struggling economy if Orbán won. That is not foreign policy. That is a bribe with a bow on it.

The Hungarian people looked at all of it — the Truth Social posts, the Vance rally, the economic promises, the phone call from the President of the United States — and voted anyway. They voted against it. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 138 seats in a 199-seat parliament. A supermajority so large they can amend the constitution. Orbán’s Fidesz took 55 seats. Turnout exceeded 77 percent — a record in Hungary’s post-Communist history. Magyar received 3.3 million votes, the most any Hungarian party has ever received. He stood before tens of thousands of supporters on the banks of the Danube and said: “Tonight, truth prevailed over lies.” You cannot argue against those results even if you wanted to — and trying would only make you look senile.

Orbán spent sixteen years building an architecture specifically designed to keep himself in power. He changed election laws. He captured media. He gerrymandered districts. He reshaped the courts. He built what he himself called an “illiberal state”. The blueprint that Heritage Foundation ideologues carried into Project 2025 like it was scripture. And he still got wiped out when enough people showed up. That is the lesson. You can rig the system, consolidate the institutions, call in every favor, get the Vice President of the United States to fly across an ocean for you — and if enough people decide they are done, they will overwhelm every advantage you built.

So here is what Americans should do. Stop waiting for the perfect candidate. Stop waiting for the perfect message. Stop waiting for the Democratic Party to figure itself out on a timeline that is convenient for your comfort level. Democrats are nine for nine in special elections since January 2025. They flipped seats in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas — a state Trump won by thirty-one points. They won by fourteen in New Jersey. Fifteen in Virginia. That is not a wave building. That is a wave that has already arrived and people are still standing on the beach debating whether to get in the water.

Overwhelming the electorate is not a theory. Budapest just showed us exactly what it looks like in practice. Seventy-seven percent turnout. 3.3 million votes. A supermajority visible, in Magyar’s words, from the moon and every window in Hungary. A country that watched its institutions get dismantled piece by piece for sixteen years decided it had seen enough — and showed up in numbers that made the outcome mathematically undeniable. No amount of captured media, gerrymandered districts, or phone calls from foreign heads of state could absorb that kind of arithmetic.

That is not a message for Hungarians. That is a message for us. If a country that had its press captured, its courts packed, and its electoral maps redrawn by the man they were trying to remove could still pull it off — what exactly is our excuse? Hungary showed us the destination. The endorsement graveyard showed us the direction. The only question left is whether enough Americans are willing to do what the Hungarian people did on April 12, 2026 — show up like the outcome actually matters.

It is his second non-consecutive term. Say it correctly. Understand what it means. And then get to work.