Politico's senior executive editor, Alexander Burns, has a long history of attempting to foist far left politics upon the public. In his latest incarnation on Monday, Burns uses the defeat of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the polls to argue the Democrats need to embrace socialism if they want to defeat the nasty MAGA Republicans at the polls, "Orbán’s Defeat Shows What Trump’s Opponents Keep Doing Wrong."
The defeat of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, should deliver a sharp jolt to one of America’s two major political parties.
Oddly, it’s not the Republicans, deeply invested though they were in Orbán as a fellow traveler.
...the sharpest message from Budapest should be for the Democrats, strange as that may sound.
That is because Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete. Hungary’s Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold. There is no equivalent figure among Trump’s American opponents.
A note here that in Politico speak, "reformist candidates" always means far left candidates. Conservative candidates will always be labeled as "rightwing" or worse at the website whose major accomplishment for the past decade has been to protect the election of Joe Biden in 2020 by publishing the fake news written by serial fabulist Natasha Bertrand that "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo."
The American party system is heavily armored against disruption. It would be all but impossible to replicate here what Magyar has done in Hungary — or what France’s Emmanuel Macron and Argentina’s Javier Milei did before him — and turn a fledgling political organization into a personal vehicle and bring it to national power in a flash. We do not have secondary political parties that can surge to prominence in a single campaign, like Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or Rob Jetten’s D66 in the Netherlands.
Yet as Trump himself has shown, it is possible to devour a major party from the inside — commandeering an old institution with grassroots support, casting aside its entrenched leaders, remaking it in a new image and earning a fresh look from voters who didn’t like the old version.
Right, so by that standard Donald Trump has been a "reformist candidate," a label that neither Burns nor Politico ever actually assign to him. He just cannibalized the GOP.
If Democrats want to take the hint, they’ll give a closer look to the leaders frustrating their peers in Washington and defying their home-state political bosses, and less time measuring the applause meter at various special-interest conventions and donor retreats.
Meaning go far left, Democrats! Even if it means choosing a deranged leftist wearing a Nazi Totenkopf ("Are We the Baddies?") tattoo such as Graham Platner running for the U.S. Senate from Maine.
And with his history of promoting far left ideology, Alexander Burns is the last person the GOP should take campaign advice from yet here he is letting the public know who he (and the Democrats) really fear in 2028, namely JD Vance who has displayed an excellent ability at handling the liberal press.
And Republicans would be wise to do the same thing, instead of waiting for an unpopular president in his 80s to name his own heir sometime next year, as the Democrats did under Biden.
The strongest successor to Trump — from either party — would not be a ladder climber awaiting his or her turn, but rather someone ready to claim the role through disruption and combat.
And for anyone who doubts the utter devotion of Alexander Burns to promoting the Democrats, just check his extensive record on this topic including this 2021 gem, "How Could Anyone Still Vote GOP After Biden’s Amazing Successes?"
