The astonishing hypocrisy of JD Vance

While Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth celebrate their Pyrrhic victory in the Middle East back home, vice president JD Vance – no fan of the war – has been busying himself trying to prevent regime change in Hungary.

Vance has been in Budapest giving his administration’s endorsement to Viktor Orbán, the illiberal autocrat and Trump’s favourite man in Europe, who faces a potentially tricky general election this weekend. And in doing so he’s been employing hypocrisy breathtaking even by the beardy weirdy’s own low standards.

Reacting to comments made by Volodymyr Zelensky last month that Ukrainian soldiers could talk to Orbán “in their own language” amid his threats to veto an EU loan package to the country, Vance described them as “completely scandalous”.

“You should never have a foreign head of government or a foreign head of state threatening the head of government of an allied nation,” he fumed. “It’s preposterous, it’s unacceptable.”

Indeed it is – as the governments of Denmark (“We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not”), Canada (“the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished 51st state”), Spain (“I could tomorrow – or today, even better – stop everything having to do with Spain”), Norway, Ukraine itself or any of the many other allies which Trump has threatened in the past year can testify to.

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Vance has also been railing against the EU, accusing it of “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference” he had ever seen. “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” he said. “They have tried to make Hungary less energy-independent. They have tried to drive up costs for Hungarian consumers. And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.”

No such interference from the US government though, except to send the vice-president the 4,500 miles to Budapest days before the election to join Orbán on stage and tell Hungarians to vote for him. But that’s different, apparently.

“This is not American influence,” said Vance. “I would never do this, but do you know how easy it would be for the US to threaten Hungary economically in the same way the EU has? We would never do that because we respect their friends enough to respect their democratic will.” In other words: nice country you’ve got here, Hungary: shame if anything happened to it!

And amid all that shameless hypocrisy, Vance even had time to attack the UK’s energy secretary Ed Miliband, claiming it was a “scandal” that Brits “can’t afford to heat their homes, can’t afford to transport themselves to work” because the government “has made energy so expensive”.

There was no time, alas, to mention what had actually caused the soaring prices in energy: the Iran war launched unilaterally by Vance’s boss, and which the Veep had travelled halfway around the world to get away from any of the responsibility for.