Evelyn Reynolds

Special counsel Robert Hur said his report on declassified documents held by President Biden didn’t exonerate him, insisting ‘that is not a part of my task as a prosecutor’. Hur also didn’t rule out a possible future role in the Trump administration when pressed for an answer by Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell. ‘I’m not here to speak about what may or may not happen in the future,’ Hur told lawmakers More

In his opening statement, former special counsel Robert Hur defended his descriptions of Joe Biden’s memory and its relevance in his report as “necessary, accurate and fair”.Hur said:
There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the president’s memory, so let me say a few words about that. My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information “willfully” – meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids. I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind.
Hur said that for that reason, he had to “consider the president’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial”. He added:
My assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.
Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
Robert Hur, the justice department special counsel assigned to report on Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, told Congress he was just doing his job when he shook up the US election campaign by criticizing the president’s apparent inability to recall certain events. In his opening statement, Hur defended his descriptions of Biden’s memory issues and the relevance of them to his investigation and in his report as “necessary, accurate and fair”.
Appearing before the House judiciary committee, Hur said his investigation into Biden “did not exonerate” the president despite declining to charge him.
Hur declined to rule out accepting a role in a potential second Trump administration. Hur was appointed as a US attorney by Donald Trump in 2017.
A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden shows the president repeatedly said he never meant to retain classified information after he left the vice-presidency, but he was at times fuzzy about dates and said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.
Ken Buck, the hard-right Republican congressman of Colorado, announced he will leave Congress at the end of next week, putting the GOP’s wafer-thin majority in the House in further jeopardy.
The Pentagon will send a new military aid package for Ukraine worth $300m, the White House announced, the first such move in months as fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition.
The White House’s announcement that the US will send a new military aid package for Ukraine worth $300m marks the first such move in months as fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition.It comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions, and after months of statements from US officials that the it wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided the additional replenishment funds.The aid announcement comes as Polish leaders are in Washington to press the US to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, met on Tuesday with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate and was to meet with Joe Biden later in the day.Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him from praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president that Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marine general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.
I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.’
Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss.Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war. But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before.The Biden campaign is feeling good about Robert Hur’s testimony before the House judiciary committee today, a campaign official has told CNN.After nearly five hours, the House judiciary committee has adjourned its meeting and former special counsel Robert Hur has been released.Reaction is coming in to the announcement that Colorado Republican representative Ken Buck is leaving Congress before the end of the month.One GOP-er called it “alarming”.Buck announced last November that he wouldn’t stand for re-election but gave no indication then that he would leave before the end of his term. He cited the dysfunction of Congress in general but also slammed the Republican party as it “continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen” by Joe Biden from Donald Trump.Buck is currently questioning Robert Hur in the judiciary committee hearing.The House judiciary committee hearing has resumed in the questioning of now-former special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Joe Biden’s having kept hold of classified documents after he left office as the US vice-president.Hur concluded that the US president should not be punished, which enraged Republicans, but justified that decision by saying, essentially, that a jury would find Biden too forgetful, because of his age, to be able to conclude that he committed a crime.“I stand by every word in the document,” Hur said in testimony at the hearing.National security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the fresh consignment of $300m of weapons that the US is dispatching to Ukraine won’t last long.The weaponry including artillery ammunition will “maybe only last for a couple of weeks”, Sullivan said during a media briefing at the White House.Meanwhile, the outgoing Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, has just urged the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, to hold a vote in the lower chamber on the stalled bill that supplies new aid to US allies Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Reuters reports.The US Senate gave final approval to a $95bn wartime aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other American allies, including Taiwan, last month and sent the bill to the Republican-controlled House, where it screeched to a halt amid rightwing opposition.Sullivan has left the west wing briefing room now and White House the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is answering questions that focus more on US domestic topics.The Pentagon will rush about $300m in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost savings in its contracts, the Associated Press reports.The relatively small input will happen even though the US military remains deeply overdrawn and needs at least $10bn to replenish all the weapons it has pulled from its stocks to help Kyiv in its desperate fight against Russia, the White House announced a little earlier.It’s the Pentagon’s first announced security package for Ukraine since December, when it acknowledged it was out of replenishment funds. It wasn’t until recent days that officials publicly acknowledged they weren’t just out of replenishment funds, but overdrawn.The announcement comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions and efforts to get fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition. US officials have insisted for months that the United States wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided additional replenishment funds, which are part of a large supplemental package stalled in Congress.National security adviser Jake Sullivan, in announcing the $300m in additional aid:
When Russian troops advance and its guns fire, Ukraine does not have enough ammunition to fire back.
The aid announcement comes as Polish leaders are in Washington to press the US to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, met on Tuesday with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate and was to meet with Joe Biden later in the day.The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has so far refused to bring the $95bn package, which includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, to the floor.Republican congressman Ken Buck of Colorado is leaving Congress short of his elected term, he announced within the last half hour.Buck is a hard-right representative. He had already announced that he would not seek re-election but now he’s leaving much sooner, putting the GOP’s wafer-thin majority in the House in further jeopardy.Here’s the congressman’s post on X/Twitter:The congressional hearing for former special counsel Robert Hur to be questioned about his report into Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency has taken a recess for lunch. There are some unrelated votes to be taken in the House and the hearing will resume after those this afternoon but without an exact time given.Here’s where things stand:
National security adviser Jake Sullivan is now briefing the media in the west wing, and will be followed by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. We’ll bring you highlights.
Robert Hur declined to engage in Republicans’ questions at the hearing in front of the House judiciary committee about whether Joe Biden is “senile”. Asked whether he found that Biden was senile, after interviewing the US president at length about how he hung on to classified documents after his vice-presidency, Hur said: “I did not. That conclusion does not appear in my report.”
Hur said he “did not exonerate” Biden in his report. Hur interrupted Pramila Jayapal, the Democrat congresswoman from Washington, when she said Hur’s report amounted to a “complete exoneration” of the president. Hur shot back: “I did not exonerate him. That word does not appear in my report.”
Hur declined to rule out accepting a role in a potential second Trump administration. Hur was appointed as a US attorney by Donald Trump in 2017. Trump is running for re-election to a second term as a Republican president.
In his opening statement, Hur defended his descriptions of Joe Biden’s memory issues and the relevance of them to his investigation and in his report as “necessary, accurate and fair”.
Hur is testifying before the House judiciary committee as a private citizen after leaving the justice department. According to a report by the Independent, Hur arranged his departure from the justice department to be official as of Monday, 11 March.
Jerry Nadler, the Democrat House judiciary committee ranking member, began his opening statement at the hearing by saying that House Republicans are “desperate to convince America that white conservative men are on the losing end of a two-tiered justice system, a theory … that has no basis in reality”. Nadler opined that Biden “probably committed a verbal slip or two” in his interviews with Hur. More

The United States Marshals Service is asking Congress for $38m to fund two new programs aimed at bolstering judicial security in response to a rise in threats against federal judges and justices on the supreme court.Both programs were tucked into the US justice department’s budget proposal unveiled on Monday and were part of the US Marshals Service’s overall request for $4bn for the 2025 fiscal year that begins 1 October.The budget request proposes using $28.1m to create a new office of protective services within the marshals agency’s judicial security division, which is tasked with protecting more than 2,700 sitting judges and managing courthouse security.The marshals are seeking 53 new positions for the office, which “will develop a strong framework for fulfilling protective responsibilities for the federal judiciary”, including the US supreme court, the justice department said.A Reuters investigation last month documented a sharp rise in threats and intimidation directed at judges who have been criticized by Donald Trump after ruling against the Republican former president’s interests in cases they were hearing.Serious threats overall against federal judges rose to 457 in fiscal year 2023, from 224 in fiscal year 2021, according to the marshals service.The marshals service is also seeking $10m for a new grant program that provides funding to state and local governments to prevent the personal information of federal judges and their family members from being disclosed in government databases or registries.That program was authorized by the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, legislation that was passed in 2022 that sought to allow judges to shield their personal information from being viewed online.The bill was named for US district judge Esther Salas’s son, who was shot and killed at her home in New Jersey by a disgruntled lawyer in July 2020.The marshals service’s request for $38m in new judicial security funding is on top of $805.9m the judiciary itself is seeking for court security and $19.4m sought by the US supreme court.The supreme court’s request included funding to expand the security activities of the supreme court police and to let the court’s police take over the duties currently served by the marshals service of protecting the justices’ homes.The marshals service, when requested, also protects supreme court justices when they travel outside Washington.The high court in 2022 overturned its landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide, prompting protests outside the homes of members of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.An armed California man was charged in 2022 with attempting to assassinate conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh after being arrested near his home. That man, Nicholas John Roske, has pleaded not guilty in the case. More

The Pentagon will rush about $300m in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost savings in its contracts, even though the military remains deeply overdrawn and needs at least $10bn to replenish all the weapons it has pulled from its stocks to help Kyiv in its desperate fight against Russia, the White House announced on Tuesday. It’s the Pentagon’s first announced security package for Ukraine since December, when it acknowledged it was out of replenishment funds. It wasn’t until recent days that officials publicly acknowledged they weren’t just out of replenishment funds, but $10bn overdrawn. The announcement comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions and efforts to get fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition. US officials have insisted for months that the United States wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided the additional replenishment funds, which are part of the stalled supplemental spending bill.The replenishment funds have allowed the Pentagon to pull existing munitions, air defense systems and other weapons from its reserve inventories under presidential drawdown authority, or PDA, to send to Ukraine and then put contracts on order to replace those weapons, which are needed to maintain US military readiness.“When Russian troops advance and its guns fire, Ukraine does not have enough ammunition to fire back,” said the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in announcing the $300m in additional aid.The Pentagon also has had a separate Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, or USAI, which has allowed it to fund longer-term contracts with industry to produce new weapons for Ukraine.Senior defense officials who briefed reporters said the Pentagon was able to get cost savings in some of those longer-term contracts of roughly $300m and, given the battlefield situation, decided to use those savings to go ahead and send more weapons. The officials said the cost savings basically offset the new package and keep the replenishment spending underwater at $10bn.One of the officials said the package represented a “one-time shot” – unless Congress passes the supplemental spending bill, which includes roughly $60bn in military aid for Ukraine, or more cost savings are found. It is expected to include anti-aircraft missiles, artillery rounds and armor systems, the official said.The aid announcement comes as Polish leaders are in Washington to press the US to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, met on Tuesday with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate and was to meet with President Joe Biden later in the day.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has so far refused to bring the $95bn package, which includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, to the floor. Seeking to put pressure on the Republican speaker, House Democrats have launched a long-shot effort to force a vote through a discharge petition. The seldom-successful procedure would require support from a majority of lawmakers, or 218 members, to move the aid package to a vote.Ukraine’s situation has become more dire, with units on the front line rationing munitions as they face a vastly better supplied Russian force. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has repeatedly implored Congress for help, but House Republican leadership has not been willing to bring the Ukraine aid package to the floor for a vote, saying any aid must first address border security needs.Pentagon officials said on Monday during budget briefing talks they were counting on the supplemental to cover the $10bn replenishment hole. This is the second time in less than nine months that the Pentagon has “found” money to use for additional weapons shipments to Ukraine. Last June, defense officials said they had overestimated the value of the weapons the US had sent to Ukraine by $6.2bn over the past two years.The United States has committed more than $44.9bn in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, including more than $44.2bn since the beginning of Russia’s invasion on 24 February 2022. More

Robert Hur, the justice department special counsel assigned to report on Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, told Congress he was just doing his job when he shook up the US election campaign by criticizing the president’s apparent inability to recall certain events.In his report released in February, Hur, a Republican former US attorney under Donald Trump, recommended Biden not be charged for possessing classified documents. But he infuriated the president’s Democratic allies by making repeated references to Biden’s age and memory as one reason for not indicting him, saying jurors would see him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information willfully,” Hur said in his opening remarks to the House judiciary committee. “I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the president’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial.”He defended his comments about Biden’s recollections, saying: “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.”Republicans are also unhappy with Hur’s finding that Biden should not be charged, arguing it was evidence of double standards at the justice department. A different special counsel, Jack Smith, has indicted Donald Trump for allegedly taking government secrets with him after leaving the White House and, unlike Biden, conspiring to keep them out of the hands of investigators. The justice department also decided last year not to bring charges against Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, after classified documents were found at his home.Both men were appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, but operate independently, while justice department policy also prohibits the indictment of sitting presidents.The judiciary committee’s chair, Trump ally Jim Jordan, sought to focus public attention on Hur’s conclusion that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency”.“Mr Hur produced a 345-page report, but in the end, it boils down to a few key facts. Joe Biden kept classified information. Joe Biden failed to properly secure classified information. And Joe Biden shared classified information with people he wasn’t supposed to,” Jordan said as the hearing began.Jerrold Nadler, the committee’s top Democrat, focused on how the special counsel cleared the president, and noted his cooperation with the investigation.“The Hur report represents the complete and total exoneration of President Biden,” Nadler said.“And how does that record contrast with President Trump, the documents he retained and the criminal charges pending against him in Florida?” Nadler continued, recounting the details of the former president’s alleged hoarding of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort.Trump is facing charges “not because of some vast conspiracy, not because the so-called deep state was out to get him, but because former president Trump was fundamentally incapable of taking advantage of even one of the many, many chances he was given to avoid those charges”, Nadler said.Hur made clear later on that he does not consider his report to be an “exoneration” of the president, saying “that is not a word that I used”.A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, which lasted for hours over several days, was released shortly before the hearing began, and shows the president fumbled occasionally with the sequence of events and certain dates, but otherwise was sharp throughout, and also corrected Hur and others when they made errors.The Democratic congressman Adam Schiff seized on Hur’s insistence that he did not “disparage” Biden, saying he did just that by including details of the president’s ability to recalls details in his report.“You chose a general pejorative reference to the president. You understood when you made that decision, didn’t you Mr Hur, that you would ignite a political firestorm with that language, didn’t you?” Schiff asked.“Congressman, politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps,” Hur replied, saying he followed justice department policy in writing his report. More

The former special counsel has defended comments he made on Joe Biden’s memory in his report on the US president’s handling of classified documents. Robert Hur appeared before a house judiciary committee on Tuesday, where he said: ‘I did not sanitise my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do’ More

Had he heard it, Joe Biden would surely have been delighted by Bianca Siegl’s comment – and the fact she barely paused before making it.“Of course I will be voting on Tuesday,” says the 47-year-old, speaking at a farmers’ market in Seattle’s University district. “If Trump were to get elected, it would be incredibly dangerous for the world and for my family.”After Nikki Haley suspended her campaign following disappointing results on Super Tuesday and the US president made an unusually partisan and pugnacious State of the Union address, America is in general election campaign mode. While polls show up to 70% of people do not want to see a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump it appears that is set to happen. As the campaigns step up their efforts, Washington state holds its presidential primary on Tuesday. Selections for local legislators and federal lawmakers get made in the summer, so Tuesday is solely a choice for voters to show their preference between the 77-year-old former president and the 81-year-old incumbent.Tina Sutter is also backing Biden. The 46-year-old registered nurse says she tends not to get involved in politics as it does not make a “lot of difference”. Things are complicated by the fact her parents support Trump, and she “cannot speak to them about politics”. She is not voting on Tuesday, but will definitely do so in November.“Trump is terrifying and everybody needs to make sure we don’t go through that again,” she says. Her policy priorities are reproductive rights, social justice and the environment, all areas in which she believes Trump would move the nation backwards.Washington state’s heartland is famous for its fruit farms and being the nation’s largest producer of apples, so cities such as Seattle and Tacoma are known for markets where city residents are hours away selecting from apples such as Cosmic Crisp, Fuji and other less common varieties. Eastern and central Washington are more conservative than the west – the state’s two GOP-held congressional districts, the fifth and the fourth are in the east – and the markets can be a rare coming together of people who live on either side of the Cascade Mountains. At the same time, politics per se tends to be avoided.In 2020, exit polls showed more than 90% of Black women voted for Biden. But a 63-year-old stall holder who asks to be identified as Marylynn P says she is not prepared to say who she is voting for.“Everything seems a mess right now,” she says. “But there seemed to be [less undocumented immigration and] people pouring into our cities under Trump.”Trump certainly has his supporters, and they tend to be very committed indeed.Loren Culp, a former police chief, was backed by him in 2022 to oust the Republican congressman Dan Newhouse, one of 10 GOP “traitors” in the House who voted to impeach Trump over January 6. (While Newhouse held his seat, another Washington member of Congress who voted against Trump, Jaime Herrera Beutler, lost hers albeit to a Democrat, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who saw off a Trump-backed military veteran, Joe Kent.)Speaking from Goldendale in the south of the state, Culp says he is convinced Trump will win a second term.Biden rarely campaigns in Washington; the last Republican president to win the state was Ronald Reagan, but he comes for private fundraising events and to tap into the wealth of liberal-leaning tech-rich millionaires.In 2020, Biden beat Trump here 58 to 39, and a poll posted recently by the website FiveThirtyEight puts Biden leading Trump 54 to 38.Yet Biden may not have things entirely without a bump. As in Michigan and Minnesota, where 100,000 and 45,000 people respectively voted as “uncommitted”, activists in Washington are looking to send a similar protest message over the administration’s support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians.Most Washington voters cast ballots by mail once they are sent out in late February. The first release of results in the state typically skews more conservative than the electorate as a whole, then moves farther to the left over time as more results from later mail returns and same-day voting comes in.Rami Al-Kabra, the deputy mayor of the city of Bothell and an organizer for the uncommitted group, says “enough is enough”.“We need to do more than just calling and protesting in the streets. As Americans, the most precious tool we have is our right to vote.”Al-Kabra, who believes he is the only elected Palestinian American official in the state, added: “And in Washington, we have this uncommitted delegates option to leverage this.”Professor James Long, a political scientist at the University of Washington, says he will be watching how many vote “uncommitted”. Though he suspects some of those “uncommitted voters” will “return home” in November, there could be a number on Tuesday who want to express dissatisfaction.“We don’t have as large a pro-Gaza, or pro-Palestinian, cause as in Michigan, but we have a lot of people on the left,” he adds.While the Guardian spoke to several Democrats who said they would prefer a younger candidate than Biden, nobody said they had thought about picking “uncommitted”.Many said they felt the election of 2024 was too important to do anything that might weaken Biden’s chances.Roger Tucker, 68, a retired architect who was browsing the stands with his wife, Becky, 65, a former university administrator, said: “If Trump is in office for another four years, he’s going to be more powerful than before and less worried that people are going to push back on him.” More

Donald Trump has not only run the Republican primaries like an incumbent, but on occasion, he gets to play-act the role of president right at home. On Friday, he hosted Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister,, for a quasi-state visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate, described by discerning critics as “the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by third-world kleptocrats”.Orbán has spent the past 14 years making his country into a kleptocratic autocracy right in the middle of the European Union. Obviously, Trump does not need general guidance from Orbán; he is already endowed with authoritarian instincts. But, for all the obvious differences between Orbán’s small European nation and the US, Orbán’s rule holds concrete lessons which the American right is ready to adopt. Given the excitement with which Trump acolytes have been promoting Orbán – and their frequent pilgrimages to Budapest as the capital of “national conservatism” – Hungary offers a preview of a second Trump term.Lesson number one: if you want to control the country, you must completely control your own party. After losing two successive national elections at the beginning of this century, it looked like Orbán’s career might be finished. Instead, he managed to govern his Fidesz party with an iron grip. It is not an accident that far-right populist leaders everywhere treat their parties as personal vehicles, with no real internal debates, let alone dissent, tolerated.That has consequences for a political system as a whole: the leader faces no restraints from political heavyweights who are fellow partisans – and who would have credibility with followers – when acting on the national stage. By 2020, Trump had already been transforming the Republican party into a kind of personality cult; that’s one reason nobody stopped him on the road to January 6. Friday marked another step in the total subjugation of the party, as Trump installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair (creating a political family business on the side).Of course, only Trump says the quiet part out loud and declares his desires for dictatorship; he has been raving about Orbán’s credentials as a “strong man” and a real “boss”. Trump’s acolytes are more guarded. One area where they don’t hold back, however, is education – they keep gushing about “Orbán’s model”. JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, has declared universities “the enemy” and advised that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary”. Supposedly the lesson is not to “eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching”.What’s being previewed here? Hungary happens to be the only country in the European Union with a systematic and structural violation of academic freedom. There it’s the government which decides what counts as an academic subject and what doesn’t (gender studies does not, of course). Orbán has also forced one university to close its doors for evidently political reasons.The ideal is not only to assert control over education and culture but to make the state as such into a partisan instrument. Like other far-right populists, Orbán has replaced career civil servants with loyalists – a lesson US right-wingers are picking up eagerly. Before paying homage to the autocrat-in-exile in Palm Beach, Orbán spoke to the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank that has laid out with chilling precision a Trumpist plan for hijacking what should be a neutral bureaucracy in the name of destroying “the deep state”.Orbán has been Putin’s ally inside the EU, trying to block sanctions and withhold support for Ukraine whenever possible. On the surface, the affinity is ideological: both supposedly believe in “strong families” (never mind how Putin treats his own family, or possibly multiple families) and the assertion of “national sovereignty” in defending borders (never mind whether that involves invading other countries).Yet the relationship is ultimately transactional. Orbán will reach out to whichever power he can – including China and Iran – to bolster his regime at home. The “national conservatism” show, including its American Putin fanboys, is patently useful because it gets critics fixated on issues like same-sex marriage instead of corruption and the destruction of democracy. Trump’s transactional approach was evident during his time in office and, if re-elected, he’ll probably double down on it in a second term.Whether Trump has learned from his experience of the presidency is a hard question. What’s not hard is the question of whether Trump is eager for retribution. Orbán felt it a grave injustice that he lost the 2002 elections; when he returned to office in 2010, he did so with plenty of resentment and a strategy for never letting go of power again. It would be wrong to extrapolate too much from a country with a smaller population than Pennsylvania. But here the parallel between two politicians who Trump himself declared “twins” couldn’t be clearer.
Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More