Keen On

So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch, the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power is “half way to Hungary” - the small, landlocked Central European country run by an equally small and landlocked man called Viktor Orban. For Rauch, this suggests that America is on its way to becoming the sort of pathetically petty patrimonial state that the wannabe dictator Orban is trying to establish in Hungary. But the idea of the world’s dominant superpower being “halfway to Budapest” sounds more like the title of a characteristically absurd central European novel. It suggests that Trump’s America is, in fact, currently lost in the mid-Atlantic. It’s nowhere. And if making America great again really does require borrowing anything from a country as small and landlocked as Hungary, then I fear for the historical significance of both Trump and his MAGA movement. Surely they could come up with a more original playbook than that?1. America is Following the “Hungari