Orban is OUT

Viktor Orban's defeat in Hungary is huge news. Orban was idolized by Trump, Vance, and quite a few Republicans. Orban is a great role model, if you are a wannabe-dictator. To see them all cozying up to that rat bastard in Hungary was repulsive, but it shows that today's GOP is leaning heavily towards autocracy and authoritarianism.

Well, Hungary said no to Orban after 16 years of repression. America can do the same to Trump come November and the midterms. Despite Eric Swalwell's stupidity knocking him out of the California race for governor and out of the US House, things are turning against Trump. 

Keep up the pressure, and enjoy this one from Scott Dworkin and The Dworkin Report

Trump’s Guy Crushed In Hungary, Jury Demolished DOJ Case, Oregon Locked Out ICE, and The Children Came Back

Plus, an entire city council got voted out by the resistance

SCOTT DWORKIN

APR 13, 2026

The Trump regime is losing—in Hungary, courtrooms, statehouses, and in the hallways of a Minnesota school. Hit the  like button and re-stack this edition right now to make sure all of these stories break through the MAGA propaganda machine.

On Friday at 1:15pm ET my new season of live interviews kicks off on Substack. My guest will be the indomitable Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

I’ve been fighting Trump since 2016. We’ve driven millions of calls and letters to Congress on hundreds of issues, and run one of the largest social media efforts against Trump ever—all while taking on corporate media and organizing the resistance.

Everything we do is funded by our readers, folks just like you who’ve decided the fight to flip Congress is worth investing in. And right now, we need all hands on deck. If you haven’t yet, please join us as a paid subscriber today.

HUNGARY FIRED TRUMP’S GUY

Marco Rubio flew to Budapest to show the regime’s support for Viktor Orbán in February, and JD Vance was there last week. During a rally, Vance called Trump from the stage and got a voicemail box that wasn’t set up yet. When Trump picked up on the second try, he told the crowd: “I love Hungary and I love that Viktor.”

Hungary’s voters chose Viktor Orbán’s opposition, Péter Magyar, in a landslide—with a record turnout of nearly 80%. Magyar’s Tisza party won a supermajority of 138 out of Hungary’s 199 parliamentary seats. Orbán called Magyar to concede, then faced his own supporters. Orbán told them it was “painful.” He then walked off the stage.

At his rally in Budapest, Magyar told a massive crowd: “Together we replaced the Orbán regime, together we liberated Hungary. We took our country back.” He said the victory was so large it was “visible from the moon and every window in Hungary,” adding: “Tonight, truth prevailed over lies.”

Hungary just proved what we’ve always known—when people show up, autocrats lose. The movement is real, it’s spreading, and November is next.

NOT GUILTY

Jonathan Caravello, 38, a lecturer at Cal State Channel Islands, was outside a Camarillo cannabis farm in July when federal agents fired tear gas into a crowd that included children and elderly community members.

When a canister rolled toward a protester in a wheelchair, he picked it up and threw it over the agents’ heads. No one was hit. The regime charged him with felony assault anyway.

Their own body camera footage showed agents laughing about gassing the crowd, celebrating canisters as “f**king awesome.” Facing twenty years, he fought the charge for nine months. A jury took two hours to say not guilty.

Outside the courthouse, Caravello spoke to a large crowd of supporters, including students who drove 70 miles to stand with him. “I’m tired of them kidnapping, abducting people—and then indiscriminately using weapons against us,” he said.

To date, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have not won a single case involving alleged assault on a federal officer stemming from anti-immigration protests.

OREGON LOCKED THE DOOR

On April 9, Oregon’s county and state governments moved in tandem against the regime. Multnomah County—which includes Portland—voted unanimously to codify sanctuary protections into law, effective immediately.

Federal agents must now get a judicial warrant in order to enter any county building, county funds can no longer be used for immigration enforcement, and county property can’t be contracted for ICE detention.

Commissioner Shannon Singleton was clear: “I stand as firm as I did then against this authoritative, racist, fascist, and xenophobic federal regime—we will stand up to bullies and stand up for all of our immigrant and refugee friends, families, and neighbors.”

The same day, Governor Tina Kotek signed eight bills that strengthened sanctuary protections at schools, hospitals, courtrooms, workplaces, and companies that sell personal information. All institutions the regime has tried to weaponize.

At a signing ceremony in Portland, Kotek was direct: “To those in Washington, DC, who think they can bully Oregon into abandoning our values and neighbors, you got it wrong. Oregon is not staying quiet, and we are not backing down.”

FESTUS VOTED, EVERY INCUMBENT IS GONE

On March 30, the Festus City Council in Missouri approved a $6 billion data center despite the objection of hundreds of residents they ignored. One council member was even caught texting another member: “Just got to make sure we keep our city council focused and not get caught in the sideshow of uneducated people.”

One week later, every single incumbent who supported the development lost their seat. The day after the election, four property owners filed a 54-page lawsuit against the city and developer. Named plaintiff Mary Fakes said: “We had no voice. We talked for two hours on the last council meeting. And immediately they just approved it.”

They called their constituents uneducated. Those same folks just voted them out and sued. That’s a clear verdict with more to come.

THE CHILDREN ARE BACK

In January, federal agents flooded Columbia Heights, Minnesota as part of Trump’s federal invasion. They grabbed parents while shoveling snow, circled schools, and staged raids from their parking lots.

Seven students were taken into federal custody, including 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, whose blue bunny hat became a heartbreaking symbol of this regime’s cruelty. Hundreds stopped coming to school. Some hid with blankets on their bedroom windows. One child’s family left the country rather than live under Trump.

Last week, the students came back to Valley View Elementary. Down a gold carpet, under a balloon arch, into their school that had been half-empty for months.

Principal Leslee Sherk said: “It’s like the first day of school all over again.” One student said: “I am very happy because me no stay in my house. I am very, very happy.” Another walked in and said: “I feel happy because I’m coming back and I see my friends.”

We are living through one of the most consequential fights in US history. The outcome isn’t written yet. But look at what happened in this edition alone—a tyrant was toppled, a jury said not guilty, voters fired every council member who betrayed them, a governor locked the door on ICE, and children came back to school.

We exist to make sure you see every one of these wins. Funded by readers alone, we answer to no one else—all while leading the resistance through our Contact Congress campaigns and one of the largest social media operations against Trump ever.

The resistance is winning.

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Lots of good writers and reporters around these days, despite the chaos and uncertainty. The writing below, by Jared Yates Sexton, can be found on Substack in a series titled, Dispatches from a Collapsing State.

In my humble opinion, the United States is due some long-overdue comeuppance. Jared uses "humiliation." We have meddled in country after country, toppling this leader and that because they would not play ball with us the way we wanted to play ball. We keep sticking our noses in and throwing our weight around all sorts of countries. Yes, these are some of the "warts" that politicians often refer to. But we're a great country, with a few "warts." And we deserve some humiliation. Will we even recognize it when it hits?

The Age of American Humiliation is Here

We're waking up today in a new and stupider world.

JARED YATES SEXTON

APR 08, 2026

I can’t tell you the number of people who reached out on Tuesday asking if the President of the United States was preparing to launch a nuclear strike on Iran. It was one of those days where the veil of civilization and decorum peels away to reveal the true madness of this fucked up world. The stakes became hauntingly clear and the specter of living another day under the rule of this madman appeared in its full audacious terror. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t cute. It was the equivalent of snapping out of a dissociative fugue and realizing you’re in the passenger seat of a car going a hundred miles an hour down the wrong way of a busy interstate.

The largeness of Trump’s threats reveal something critical here. As I’ve often talked about, abusers are never more dangerous than when they are cornered or weak. Looking back over the past month or so, it’s obvious how atrocious and historical the decision to carry out war in Iran was from the very beginning. Intoxicated by the feeling of power from kidnapping Nicolás Maduro, Trump was led into the war by Israel and Saudi Arabia, a pair of rogue client states, thinking he and his anti-brain trust were smarter than all of the intelligence and military strategists warning him it was a disaster in the making. Iran ran circles around the U.S., exposing our most critical lies, and sprung an economic trap that was so telegraphed that Iran themselves told everyone leading up to the war it would be one of their first moves.

In the past few days, the picture has only grown clearer. The “rescue” mission that took up headlines over the holiday weekend has gotten progressively foggier and less believable, now focusing on the twist of “Ghost Murmur,” a “top secret” CIA device that utilizes “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find a missing weapons officer, and Hollywood-ready stories about the officer directing strikes from his hiding spot. Meanwhile, just a cursory glance at the situation tends to speak more toward the very real possibility that Trump and company greenlit a special operation to try and steal over 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium from a base near Isfahan and were summarily ambushed, defeated, and had to escape in a hell of a hurry.

This disaster, on top of a whole heap of other disasters, has now resulted in a ceasefire that isn’t even a ceasefire. Iran is still striking Israel and just hit a pipeline in Saudi Arabia. They’ve assumed total control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is an earth-shaking development that could change almost everything. Israel is still pounding away at both Iran and Lebanon and shows no signs of stopping. Trump’s “last second” deal was brokered by Pakistan and likely only happened because we begged China to pull some weight with Iran to get them to accept an offer that was, despite what you’re being told, an American surrender gussied up with lies and laughable deniability.

Welcome to the Age of American Humiliation.

An Exposed Goliath

The basis of American hegemony since the end of World War II was a guarantee of safety. In exchange for ultimate global power, the U.S. promised its allies around the world that it would protect them from aggression and use its power to secure free and unfettered trade. To this end, the U.S. created global capitalism, a system of supply chains and relationships that set the stage for a period of historic profit. Of course, that arrangement including longstanding partnerships with dictators and warmongers who would keep their peoples in slavery and poverty, but the resulting “1st world” privileges were prioritized above human dignity.

In the last few years, this has all started to go to hell as capitalism is preparing to abandon American hegemony and head for brighter skies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and then the genocide in Gaza, accompanied by one endless war after another by Israel, exposed that the U.S. was incapable of holding the order together anymore. All it took was someone, in this case Vladimir Putin, to dare the empire to do something. When they didn’t, everything else was fair game.

With Iran, the U.S. was exposed. Simple strategy revealed that America’s military, the most expensive project in the world, was actually wildly vulnerable. For all of the jets and systems and everything our wealth has been plundered to create, all Iran had to do was launch dirt-cheap drones and missiles at critical infrastructure - exposing the vulnerabilities of a global capitalist system - and bleed shockingly expensive interceptors dry. The Iron Dome didn’t matter. U.S. swagger didn’t matter.

Then, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz took advantage of those vulnerabilities and revealed simply kinking the hose of the supply chain could bring the entire world to its knees. Though there isn’t much talk of it now, we’re likely going to suffer shockwaves, as will the rest of the world, emanating from that closure. The effects could range from pretty bad to catastrophic. Add that to an already precarious economy and you could have a total disaster on your hands that could alter history. Oh, and Iran is now going to charge millions of dollars for ships to move through the Strait, an arrangement Trump seems fine with as long as he gets a cut. If you think about the effects of free shipping now being charged at this level, you start to feel a little antsy.

But, what’s more, the failure of the U.S. to protect gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE will have incredible repercussions. The petrodollar system - an arrangement by which the U.S. bought fossil fuels from these gulf states and, in turn, those gulf states reinvested in the U.S. economy - is in absolute tatters. Surely the gulf states will still invest in American interests, but to the same extent? Why would they? The investment, in the past, was a promise to borrow the U.S. military in case of emergency and now we’ve seen that that isn’t the safest bet in the world. Not to mention, the gulf states in question have suffered immense damage to their infrastructure and will need those resources to repair themselves.

Now, consider that the tech industry and the AI project are largely kept afloat by gulf state investment. Oh, and the AI project is also an umbrella for the data center construction boom, which accounts for a massive share of all U.S. construction projects. Kind of makes you wonder if the entire AI bubble, which was on the verge of popping before the war, is quivering.

Not With a Whimper, but With a Bang

A few years back I was talking with a group after my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis came out. Back then, in January of 2023, a lot of people were still convinced that Joe Biden would right the ship and that maybe even Trump would end up in jail. So, in my talks, I received a little bit of pushback here and there. Surely the American Empire wasn’t heading toward a collapse and surely capitalism wasn’t nearly finished with American hegemony and looking elsewhere.

Sometimes that pushback would take the form of someone asking what I imagined the U.S.’s collapse into failure would look like and it was a welcome exercise. The American “character,” so to speak, is defined by arrogance, delusion, and militaristic violence. So, I figured, it would look something like one humiliation after another as the empire faltered and refused to learn its lessons. We would be reduced to a laughingstock as we alienated our allies and friends and walked stupidly into an escalating series of traps laid out by our rivals. The people would recognize it before our leaders because we were experiencing the “leadership” of increasingly senile and corrupt men. The tension between the people and that terrible leadership would lead to increased oppression and possibly even revolt.

Well, we’re here.

The staggering nature of this failure is really hard to appropriately convey. The foundation for American Hegemony is pulverized. A memory so distant those who believed in it, outside of the U.S. at least, are probably shocked they ever believed in it in the first place. Europe is busily working on a new alliance that excludes us because they can read the writing on the wall. China is quickly becoming the new fulcrum of world power and its alliance with Russia and Iran is paying wild dividends. Conversations among their strategic minds has to be akin to what Americans watching the decrepit Soviet leadership prior to collapse sounded like. Giddy disbelief.

What does this mean? Economic hardship. Increased oppression and surveillance at home, where the fascist regime can still lash out and exert control. Probably an excursion to somewhere like Cuba in order to rack up an “easy win.” More threads to Canada, Greenland, and anyone else. The U.S. will continue lording over the Western Hemisphere and playing directly in the Spheres of Influence strategy that China and Russia have envisioned. Sometimes we’ll lash out and get over our skis and then we’ll get our asses handed to us while we dole out unbelievable and unnecessary tragedies.

It reminds me, a lot, of this guy I knew in elementary school. He talked a lot of shit and started a lot of fights. He didn’t win many of them. In fact, a friend of mine were chatting not too long ago about how we both had a rite of passage where his provocations had to be met with violence. We kicked his ass and he went off to find someone else to bother until they kicked his ass.

This is far, far from the last time America will be humiliated, and it is likely, if we do not take a democratic stand and shut our economy down, that it will only get dumber and dumber. I know that sounds unbelievable now, but what lies beyond Trump, in the faraway fields of American collapse, is something uglier and meaner and stupider. And, considering the nature of these things, probably more violent. Already the Far Right is divorcing from MAGA and lining up to blame Jews for this failure and embarrassment, and you don’t need a PhD in history to see where those things go.

These mistakes will compound. The economic impact and the political impact and the military impact and every other impact will create new problems that these idiots will fail to solve and will, through their idiocy, make even worse. Their attempts to fix things will, once again, humiliate us and dig the hole deeper. 

There is a future where this humiliation compounds and, like past shiftings of cycles and power, a war will be “necessary.” Already we should see where the battle lines are drawn and what the consequences would be. This disastrous “excursion” in Iran, which might not even done yet, needs to serve as an illustration of just how nightmarish modern war can be. In case it isn’t already obvious, you cannot rely on these “leaders” to make the right choices and midterms or presidential elections, in this current stake, will not set things right. If we are to avoid the worst case scenario, it is on us to take action and step up to the moment.

Humiliation is painful, but it is also information. Do not shy away from it. The American Empire has been a horrendous and earth shattering disaster. We have terrorized the world for far too long and this defeat, like that of the bully lying bleeding in the dirt, is both deserved and telling. 

Don’t look away now. Feel it. Know it.

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It sure feels like Trump and the GOP are trying to destroy America. If we have free and fair elections for the midterms coming up in November, we should be able to oust quite a few of these Trump enablers. (Orban just lost in Hungary, so it can be done.) They are carrying "conservatism" to an absurd radical extreme. Bankrupt the government, trash our alliances, spend countless sums on the military while cutting vast amounts from social programs. I wonder if they have thought about how badly they are fucking up the country? There will be little left to "rule over" unless they suddenly realize how badly they are fucking things up. Many of these will deserve some prison time. 

The United States is destroying itself

Rebecca Solnit - The Guardian

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.

It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.

Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.

Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country ... We’re fighting wars ... It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.

The old aphorism about how long it takes an aircraft carrier to turn around might be why the nation seems relatively stable, and why reactions have been inadequate; the full impact is yet to come. At some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump. He has started a war for no particular reason – the word funwas deployed – that is further undermining the global economy he already badly damaged with his ever-fluctuating tariffs. Enterprises need to be able to plan, and tariffs that triple and melt away and pop up again like his moods undermine the ability to do so. In much the same way, threats that aren’t carried out, talks that never took place, administration actions that the courts reverse become forms of political whiplash, jerking everyone and everything around, a show of force that is also a show of incoherence and inconsistency.

We need to talk about the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality

But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness. A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the US.

It’s also evident that Trump wanted to come back into office in part to revenge himself on a country that in 2020 had rejected him, the way an ex-partner sometimes becomes a murderous stalker of the woman who dared to escape him, and specifically revenge himself on the individuals and institutions that had prosecuted him for crimes or otherwise thwarted him. Trump at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively and physically and wants to take it all down with him, the way that ancient rulers were buried with their slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency.

But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.

It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

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