In our June/July/August 2015 issue, we published an article by Eleni Kounalakis, our United States ambassador to Hungary during much of the Obama administration. The piece explored Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the 2010 election of Viktor Orbán. It was a story about how Clinton and her diplomats rallied to keep authoritarianism at bay in eastern Europe. Their successes in Hungary were partial and quite fragile. As the Washington Post explains, they couldn’t survive the election of Donald Trump. The United States now sides with the authoritarians.
Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said…
…their disparaging depictions of Ukraine reinforced Trump’s perceptions of the country and fed a dysfunctional dynamic in which White House officials struggled to persuade Trump to support the fledgling government in Kyiv instead of exploiting it for political purposes, officials said.
The government, very much including Trump’s own national security staff, has been powerless to stop this reversal.