The Dictatorship
Viktor Orbán concedes defeat after ‘painful’ election result
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungarian voters on Sunday ousted long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power, rejecting the authoritarian policies and global far-right movement that he embodied in favor of a pro-European challenger in a bombshell election result with global repercussions.
It was a stunning blow for Orbán — a close ally of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who quickly conceded defeat after what he called a ″painful″ election result. U.S. Vice President JD Vance had made a visit to Hungary just days earlier, meant to help push Orbán over the finish line.
Election victor Péter Magyar, a former Orbán loyalist who campaigned against corruption and on everyday issues like health care and public transport, has pledged to rebuild Hungary’s relationships with the European Union and NATO — ties that frayed under Orbán. European leaders quickly congratulated Magyar.
His victory was expected to transform political dynamics within the EU, where Orbán had upended the bloc by frequently vetoing key decisions, prompting concerns he sought to break it up from the inside.
It will also reverberate among far-right movements around the world, which have viewed Orbán as a beacon for how nationalist populism can be used to wage culture wars and leverage state power to undermine opponents.
It’s not yet clear whether Magyar’s Tisza party will have the two-thirds majority in parliament, which would give it the numbers needed for major changes in legislation. With 93% of the vote counted, it had more than 53% support to 37% for Orbán’s governing Fidesz party and looked set to win 94 of Hungary’s 106 voting districts.
“I congratulated the victorious party,″ Orban told followers. “We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition.″
Jubilation erupted along the Danube
In a speech to tens of thousands of jubilant supporters at a victory party along the Danube River, Magyar said his voters had rewritten Hungarian history.
“Tonight, truth prevailed over lies. Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them — they asked what they could do for their homeland. You found the answer. And you followed through,” he said.
On the streets of Budapest, drivers blared car horns and cranked up anti-government songs while people marching in the streets chanted and screamed.
Many revelers chanted “Ruszkik haza!” or “Russians go home!” — a phrase used widely during Hungary’s 1956 anti-Soviet revolution, and which had gained increasing currency amid Orbán’s drift toward Moscow.
Turnout in the election was nearly 80%, according to the National Election Office, a record number in any vote in Hungary’s post-Communist history.
‘Choice between East or West’
Orbán, the EU’s longest-serving leader and one of its biggest antagonists, traveled a long road from his early days as a liberal, anti-Soviet firebrand to the Russia-friendly nationalist admired today by the global far-right.
The EU will be waiting to see how Magyar changes Hungary’s approach to Ukraine. Orbán repeatedly frustrated EU efforts to support the neighboring country in its war against Russia’s full-scale invasion, while cultivating close ties to Putin and refusing to end Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy imports.
Recent revelations have shown a top member of Orbán’s government frequently shared the contents of EU discussions with Moscow, raising accusations that Hungary was acting on Russia’s behalf within the bloc.
Members of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement are among those who see Orbán’s government and his Fidesz political party as shining examples of conservative, anti-globalist politics in action, while he is reviled by advocates of liberal democracy and the rule of law.
In Budapest, Marcell Mehringer, 21, said he was voting “primarily so that Hungary will finally be a so-called European country, and so that young people, and really everyone, will do their fundamental civic duty to unite this nation a bit and to breakdown these boundaries borne of hatred.”
Strained relationship with the EU
During his 16 years as prime minister, Orbán launched harsh crackdowns on minority rights and media freedomssubverted many of Hungary’s institutions and been accused of siphoning large sums of money into the coffers of his allied business elite, an allegation he denies.
He also heavily strained Hungary’s relationship with the EU. Although Hungary is one of the smaller EU countries, with a population of 9.5 million, Orbán has repeatedly used his veto to block decisions that require unanimity.
Most recently, he blocked a 90-billion euro ($104 billion) EU loan to Ukraine, prompting his partners to accuse him of hijacking the critical aid.
His challenger came from the inside
Magyar, 45, rapidly rose to become Orbán’s most serious challenger.
A former insider within Orbán’s Fidesz, Magyar broke with the party in 2024 and quickly formed Tisza. Since then, he has toured Hungary relentlessly, holding rallies in settlements big and small in a campaign blitz that recently had him visiting up to six towns daily.
In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, Magyar said the election will be a “referendum” on whether Hungary continues on its drift toward Russia under Orbán, or can retake its place among the democratic societies of Europe.
Tisza is a member of the European People’s Party, the mainstream, center-right political family with leaders governing 12 of the EU’s 27 nations.
Uphill election battle
Magyar faced a tough fight. Orbán’s control of Hungary’s public media, which he has transformed into a mouthpiece for his party, and vast swaths of the private media market give him an advantage in spreading his message.
The unilateral transformation of Hungary’s electoral system and gerrymandering of its 106 voting districts by Fidesz also required Tisza to gain an estimated 5% more votes than Orbán’s party to achieve a simple majority.
Additionally, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries had the right to vote in Hungarian elections and traditionally have voted overwhelmingly for Orbán’s party.
Russian secret services have plotted to interfere and tip the election in Orbán’s favor, according to numerous media reports including by The Washington Post. The prime minister, however, accused neighboring Ukraineas well as Hungary’s allies in the EU, of seeking to interfere in the vote to install a “pro-Ukraine” government.
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Associated Press journalists Béla Szandelszky, Marko Drobnjakovic, Ivan L. Nagy, Florent Bajrami in Budapest, Hungary, and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
ByDavid J. Bier
Following two killings of motorists in two weeks in Maine and Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement briefly suspended most vehicle stops to retrain its agents. The suspension implicitly conceded the obvious — ICE could have prevented these deaths — but President Donald Trump quickly overruled the agency, ordering it to resume the stops.
The president posted on social media Wednesday that “we cannot give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” But he’s wrong. His own adviser, White House border czar Tom Homan, has admitted that vehicle stops are not an important enforcement tool, and that permanently ending them would better protect ICE agents, their targets and the public.
ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away.
It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeksand working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.
To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.
Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two weeks were not the individuals ICE agents were originally looking to arrest, according to lawmakers who spoke to officials. A similar situation played out in Minnesota earlier this year, when ICE agents mistook a DoorDash driver for their target before shooting him after he ran into his home. (That officer was charged after video evidence from a city traffic camera contradicted his account.)
Even when pre-arrest surveillance of a specific suspect is conducted, ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away. One Department of Homeland Security supervisor described the attitude to The New York Times as “we’re adrenaline junkies who want action, foot chases, car pursuits.”
In October 2025, for instance, agents waited outside the home of Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikTok influencer, whom ICE was particularly interested in arresting. But rather than leap immediately into action, they let him get into his car. This led to a vehicle stop at which an ICE agent shot Parias, and the bullet ricocheted into a U.S. marshal.
On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said.
Another shooting in California in April 2026 followed the same pattern. ICE did the surveillance but let the suspect get into their car. This appears to have been intentional. In June, surveillance video captured what appears to be a targeted ICE arrest in Milwaukee, in which officers allowed the suspect several minutes to get a snack and re-enter his vehicle before the team moved in for the arrest.
When stops do happen, as a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this yearICE agents commonly use tactics that place themselves in unnecessary risk: failing to tell drivers to turn off their engines, grabbing cars when they start to move, placing their bodies — rather than vehicles — in the way, and then shooting at uncooperative drivers.
DHS’ use-of-force policy already gets most of these issues right. It prohibits officers from “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.” It bars shooting drivers unless there is an imminent risk of serious bodily harm.
Outside of a terrorist attack where the car is the weapon, shooting the driver does not lessen the threat; it enhances it. After an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot Renee Good, the car didn’t stop. It accelerated until it crashed. In Maine, ICE officers had to try to grab the car on foot to stop it after the injured driver lost control, and the car circled blindly. Eventually, an ICE agent used his vehicle to stop it.
ICE’s suspension of most vehicle stops would force agents to spend time learning new tactics, but doing so would have gone a long way to protect agents, targets and bystanders. Rather than a temporary reprieve, in fact, ICE should have made it permanent.
On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said. “Before he gets into the car, you can arrest him then. You can wait until the vehicle gets to its destination,” he said — unless the target is a violent criminal. He added, “If we can take that 2-ton ‘weapon’ away from them, that’s good.”
Homan is admitting what the record shows: ICE has been endangering its officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.
David J. Bier
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been shy about the point of the prime-time speech he intends to deliver Thursday night. During an appearance on Newsmax this week, for example, the president peddled familiar, tiresome nonsense: “Our elections are crooked, and we’ve got to straighten them out.”
A day later at an unrelated White House event, he said he didn’t want to go into a lot of detail about what would be included in his address, though he did tell reporters“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday is, it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
The president neglected to mention that Americans already have a country, as well as free and fair elections.
But while the public waits to hear Trump’s latest conspiratorial pitch, it’s worth appreciating the fact that the format he has chosen has not exactly served him well.
In recent decades, prime-time presidential addresses are generally reserved for major announcements about pressing matters of great significance. Trump’s prime-time presidential addresses, however, tend to be duds.
Consider some of the more notable examples.
April 1, 2026: The president delivered remarks on the war in Iran, though once it was over, no one seemed to have any idea what the point of the speech was. He presented no plan. He offered no coherent vision. Trump meandered from dubious point to dubious point and peddled a contradictory message about a possible endpoint, leaving many viewers even more concerned about the war. The New York Times’ Helene Cooper summarized“Trump has concluded speaking after 19 minutes. … This was a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.”
The speech had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Dec. 17, 2025: Trump delivered a prime-time address, ostensibly to talk about how great the first year of his second term was. What he presented, however, was 18 minutes of combative presidential blame-shifting and excuse-makingpackaged in the unsubtle desperation of a man who didn’t seem to understand why so much of the public failed to appreciate his systemic failures and embarrassments.
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
March 11, 2020: As the Covid-19 pandemic started to wreak havoc in the United States, Trump delivered a weird Oval Office address in which he flubbed his own policyprompting White House officials to spend the rest of the evening clarifying that the president didn’t exactly mean what he said.
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Jan. 8, 2019: In the middle of a government shutdown he was responsible for, Trump delivered an Oval Office address for no apparent reason. Over the course of nine minutes, he presented no plan, offered no material, endorsed no solution and had no factsas evidenced by the avalanche of falsehoods he peddled to the nation. Rachel Maddow asked as part of MS NOW’s live coverage, “Why did he just do this? … Why did this just happen?”
The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.
Taken together, it’s hard not to wonder if this just isn’t Trump’s best format.
A member of the president’s team told Axios this week that he wants to do prime-time speeches because they “give a sense of importance to what he’s saying.”
I don’t doubt that this is the idea behind the addresses, but as Hearst columnist Philip Bump explainedTrump and his team apparently haven’t figured out “that he’s dragging the gravitas down rather than it lifting him up.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
This is the July 15, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
In his final speech as president, Ronald Reagan talked about the importance of immigrants to America’s heritage.
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Johan Sebastian Guerrero came to America from Colombia. The 25-year-old husband and father worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
On Monday in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot him dead through his car window. His wife knelt weeping over him in the street as their daughter watched.
Johan wasn’t even the person they were looking for.
The young father’s killers were whisked away, like King George III would have protected British troops who gunned down colonists 250 years ago.
Now as then, no body cameras, no investigations, no justice.
Source: Gallup poll of 1,001 U.S. adults, conducted June 1-15, 2026, margin of error: ±4 percentage points
INFLATION DOWN, BUT NOT OUT
Wednesday’s June inflation report can be read two ways: Since May, prices fell — driven by the drop in oil and gas. But compared to a year ago, prices are still 3.5% higher, which is exactly how much wages have risen over the same period.
In other words, consumers have not achieved any “real” growth in purchasing power over the past year.
Watch Steve Rattner break down the numbers below.
WHAT THEY SAID
John Heilemann on GOP politics
“The last things Ken Paxton and Susan Collins want to talk about are mass deportation and ICE on one hand and election fraud on the other. Yet those are the two issues in the headlines in Texas, in Maine, and all across the country. Donald Trump is bringing Republicans a political nightmare heading into November.”
Sen. Chris Coons on Maine ICE shooting
“Hearing the account of Sebastián’s widow and 3-year-old wailing by the side of the car after he had been shot point-blank is just heartbreaking. All of us need to step up and do a better job of holding accountable those to whom we give the power of life and death. This is a fundamental challenge to civil liberties and to justice in our nation.”
Lisa Rubin on Todd Blanche
“I knew Todd Blanche briefly when I was in private practice, and I witnessed the adoration firsthand. He was liked for many reasons. He was a regular guy, the paradigmatic lawyer that jurors would want to have a beer with. The guy that I see on our screens growling from the podium at the Department of Justice is entirely inconsistent with the person that I briefly knew.”
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