As usual recent days have had no shortage of appalling news: the Supreme Court’s eviscerating of the Voting Rights Act; federal indictments of former FBI director James Comey, and the Southern Poverty Law Center; Trump’s rejection of Iran’s proposal to end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; an apparent attempted attack on administration officials during the White House Correspondents Dinner, leading paradoxically to increased calls to build Trump’s ballroom at the White House.

Earlier this month brought some rare but significant and impactful news, however, as Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban was ousted after sixteen years in power. Orban was defeated by Peter Magyar, a former member of Orban’s Fidesz party who left in 2024 after exposing a pardon scandal involving Magyar’s ex-wife. In an interview with The Conversation website, Fletcher School’s John Shattuck compared the election of someone named Peter Magyar in Hungary to electing someone in the US named “Joe America,” as Peter is one of the top 12 first names in Hungary and Magyar is Hungarian for “Hungary.”

“Donald Trump is compromised,” Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens told former CNN news anchor Jim Acosta on January 19. “He’s acting as a functional asset of the Russian federation,” Stevens, who at one time served as Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist continued. “And if you are a Republican senator and you’re going along with Donald Trump, he is compromising you….

The degree to which the Republican party has been compromised by Russia, I think, is one of the great underreported, understudied stories of our time. And it's been going on for a while. I mean, you go back to early warning signs, the way that they [Russia] funneled all this money into the NRA, and they were compromised by this, and then they clearly compromised the Heritage Foundation. And now you have that consistently for decades the single greatest antagonist to the Soviet Union and then an expansive Russian Federation was the most conservative element of the Republican party. And now it's the beating heart of the pro-Putin [constituency].... You don't say that you're a Ronald Reagan Republican, the guy that stood in front of [the Berlin wall and said] "Tear down the wall Mr. Gorbachev," and you go along with Donald Trump. No.  Either you're lying then or you're lying now. I think all this stuff that we put out as principles for the party were just marketing slogans.

Up until a few days ago when the Court of International Trade ruled that Trump did not have the authority to impose broad tariffs on US trading partners¹, one of the noisiest news stories was the release of the book titled Original Sin, by CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and British journalist Alex Thomson. As its subtitle conveniently informs us, the book claims to document “President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.” The “original sin,” in the authors’ view, Axios’s Mike Allen tells us, was Biden’s decision to run again. Setting aside Democratic party insiders such as Jaime Harrison and Jake Sullivan disputing key claims made in the book, and setting aside the sloppy and unclear appropriation of a term that theologians have debated since at least the time of St. Augustine, I would assert that the bigger story is Trump’s very public cognitive deterioration and its effect on what passes for policy in the current administration.