15 April, 22:41
Many of those trying to make sense of the surrounding absurdity do so through the prism of left versus right — as if some great ideological battle were being fought and won or lost in what we habitually call political processes. But there are no genuine left or right forces here. Not even approximately. It is an illusion, a collective abstraction, and the media keeps society firmly inside it. The only thing that is real in this game is money.
Hungary Revealed: When Trump Showed His Hand
The fall of Orbán sent the European left into a peculiar state of euphoria. One of the more entertaining phrases making the rounds: "Europe is swinging left, the right is crumbling." Orbán suffered a crushing defeat and now everything will be different. Everything will be fine.
It won't.
Hungary's new government has no plans to stop buying Russian oil. Construction of the Russian-designed nuclear plant continues. Kyiv's accelerated EU accession finds no support in Budapest. So what, precisely, has changed? Putin lost his lobbyist inside the EU and his intelligence asset inside NATO? The flow of documents from Brussels to Moscow dries up? Nobody left to quietly lift sanctions from Russian oligarchs? Is that all? Where is the left-wing agenda in any of this?
Did Trump back the wrong horse? Did he back Orbán at all — in the way the word "backing" usually implies?
Here is what Trump said after Orbán's defeat: "He was my friend. These were not my elections, but he was my friend, a good man. He did a good job on immigration. He didn't let people come and destroy the country, like Italy." Was. Full stop.
Two days before the Hungarian vote, on April 10th, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was ready to throw "the full economic might of the United States" behind Hungary — on condition of "Orbán's continued leadership." In any functioning system, that is called the corrupt use of public office on an international scale. When a sitting US president promises a foreign leader "full power" in exchange for electoral survival, he is telling the rest of Europe plainly: I will sponsor those who dismantle your alliance.
Orbán did not "conserve" Hungary out of conviction. He turned it into a closed joint-stock company. Trump supported him because he hoped to acquire a stake in that company at a bargain price. The Hungarian voter did not cast a ballot for a left-wing agenda. He voted against a comprador who had become too expensive and too toxic.
This is the clearest illustration yet of how Trump attempts to monetize American influence. And Orbán is only the beginning of the conversation. Because behind every move Trump makes lies personal gain — and that is the only working key to his politics.
Which brings us to a far more interesting question.
Is Trump Right-Wing?
The media keeps society captive to the fairy tale of left and right so that people never think to ask: where do the taxes actually go? The "right" — Trump, Orbán, Putin — sells fear of migration and the defense of "Christian values," while using that noise to divide budgets among arms manufacturers, developers and energy companies. The "left" sells "social justice" and "ecology," while using the same noise to redistribute those same budgets toward a different set of corporations: green energy, consulting, NGOs.
Was Orbán's discourse genuinely right-wing? If we consider that Trump and Vance campaigned for him by emphasizing his role in defending "Christian civilization" and blocking migration — then yes, in that narrow sense. But beyond the branding?
Trump is called right-wing, yet he appeals to nationalism — which was originally a left-wing idea. His governing style gravitates toward something monarchical. He embodies what political science calls Caesarism, or Bonapartism.
Personal loyalty above institutions. For the monarchist, what matters is fealty to the sovereign, not to the constitution. Trump demands personal devotion from everyone: attorneys general, judges, officials.
Direct communion with "the people." Like Napoleon or Caesar, he bypasses traditional institutions — media, parliament, party — and communicates with the masses directly, through social media and rallies. This is the construction of a "people's tsar" who protects the common man from the "corrupt boyars" of the deep state.
The dynastic element. The role of his family — Ivanka, Jared Kushner, Donald Jr. — in political processes far exceeds anything normal in a classical democracy. Power is distributed by blood and proximity to the throne.
Here lies the central manipulation. Trump sells his electorate the idea of "national rights" (nationalism), but packages it in the form of a "strong leader" (quasi-monarchy). The nationalist says: "We are a nation, one law for all, we decide the fate of our country." The Trumpist says: "The system is broken, the laws work against you, only I can fix it."
Trump exploits right-wing aesthetics — tradition, hierarchy, strength — to deliver what political science calls "illiberal democracy": the external trappings of elections are preserved, but real power concentrates in the hands of one man and his clan, reducing citizens from political subjects back into a cheering section for the ruling monarch.
Here it is worth acknowledging something uncomfortable: in his own way, Trump is a genius. Not as a politician, not as an economist — as a lockpick. He saw what neither the left nor the right had noticed: the system runs not on ideas, but on the belief that ideas exist. All it took was showing that the emperor had no clothes — and half the country followed the first man to say it out loud.
Right or Left? The Actual Scorecard
Trump is "right-wing" for those who want hierarchy and order. He is simultaneously "left-wing" for the old aristocracy of capital, because he demolishes the established rules of markets and politics. In terms of concrete policy, Trump leans further left.
Trade protectionism. The classical right — from Reagan to Bush — worshipped free markets and globalization. Trump imposed tariffs and launched trade wars, a position historically closer to the old labor-left defending domestic industry.
Isolationism. Traditional American right-wing foreign policy meant active intervention and the role of "world policeman." Trump's "America First" effectively dismantles that doctrine, putting even NATO in question.
The national debt. The right perpetually screams about fiscal discipline and deficit reduction. Trump performs the same lines in public. The reality: during his first term (2017–2021), the US national debt grew by nearly $8.2 trillion — a 40% increase in four years. As of mid-April 2026, the cumulative debt has broken through $38.98 trillion and is racing toward $40 trillion. In the past year alone (since April 2025) it has grown by $2.77 trillion. With interest rates where they are, servicing that debt costs the Treasury $1 trillion annually. The United States now spends more on interest payments than on many social programs.
Where he is genuinely right-wing: cultural conservatism (hard rhetoric on migration, defense of traditional values, support for religious constituencies) and tax deregulation — slashing the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, which is textbook Republican orthodoxy, directed in practice against the very people who voted for him.
Trump sells the image of "defender of the working class" while deploying methods that methodically destroy that class. He transferred the tax burden from corporations onto future generations through debt accumulation. This is the high art of comprador politics inside the "first world": convincing the victim that the robber is her only savior.
Trumpism: Three Pillars of One Venture
So who is Trump? An anti-systemic pragmatist. His ideology is not a right-wing doctrine — it is Trumpism, resting on three pillars.
Nationalism as an offshore scheme. Behind the slogan "America First" lies "Trump First." By dismantling international institutions (NATO, WTO), he does not make America stronger — he eliminates the regulators. In the murky waters of bilateral "deals," personal preferences are far easier to extract. His pressure on NATO allies in 2025–2026 transformed arms procurement from a question of collective security into a question of paying tribute to his administration personally.
Populism as a swamp restock. Trump did not drain the Washington Swamp — he simply replaced its crocodiles. By purging the old bureaucracy, he installs loyal oligarchs who ask no questions. "Ordinary people" receive an emotional release at rallies ("We defeated the elites!"), while the actual elites — the defense industry, crypto-billionaires, developers — receive direct lines to the White House, free from regulatory oversight. Corruption has become not a systemic error but the official interface of power.
Industrialism as selling antiques at the price of the future. Bringing back a 1950s steel mill in the age of neural networks and robotics is like selling cassette players as innovation. Trump subsidizes obsolete industries. This does not create millions of jobs — modern factories are automated — but it generates photogenic backdrops for campaign rallies. Supporting "old industry" conveniently blocks the green transition, which suits his donors in the oil and coal lobby. The people get the promise of returning to the 1960s; the sponsors get another decade of windfall profits from dirty technology.
How Trump Trades War and Peace
Trump spent decades selling the status of "billionaire" and "dealmaker." The actual financial records frequently showed bankruptcies and staggering losses. But for the mass audience, facts are secondary — what matters is the image: gold toilets, skyscrapers bearing his name, a personal jet. He convinced millions that his personal success was their potential success.
He found an enormous constituency — the working class of the Rust Belt — that felt abandoned, and sold them a magic pill: the promise of restoring the past. Exactly as Putin did.
Trump operates on a formula of transactional politics in which war and peace are not questions of morality or strategy, but entry tickets into a deal. Each time he enters negotiations, he raises the price of resolution, masterfully using the fear of total loss as a lever.
Ukraine: buying in through sabotage. From early 2025, the Trump administration effectively zeroed out direct military deliveries to Ukraine (a reduction of 99%), declaring it not his war — someone else's business. The result: he forced European stakeholders and Ukraine itself to seek ways to "purchase" his loyalty. The outcome is the PURL program (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), under which the US no longer gives weapons but sells them to Europeans, who redirect them to Ukraine. Aid has been converted into a pure export contract for the American defense industry.
Iran: his war. What is happening with Iran is the mirror image of his approach to Ukraine. If Ukraine was "Biden's business," the conflict with Iran is Trump's business. In the first two weeks of the Iran war (March–April 2026), the US spent roughly $100 billion — more than all military aid to Ukraine across the preceding years. That money does not exist in the budget; it was simply printed and borrowed. Trump has already asked Congress to raise the defense budget to $1.5 trillion, roughly 6% of GDP. That is a guaranteed gold rush for weapons manufacturers.
By striking Iran, he created explosive demand for air defense systems and drones from the Gulf monarchies. Those who feared he would "destroy their business" — the traditional defense giants — now see record budget figures and guaranteed contracts for years to come. Trump is not against military spending — he is against spending that does not carry his name as the lead brand of victory. He simply redirected focus from a "murky" war in Europe to a "legible" and expensive war in the Middle East, where the checks for weapons are paid in petrodollars on delivery. He has turned US foreign policy into a giant auction. This, incidentally, explains Europe's reluctance to participate in his Iranian venture.
The Fuel of the System: Ressentiment
To understand why all of this works, one must name correctly what Trump feeds his Americans. It is ressentiment — the key piece in understanding why Trump and leaders like him are so consistently successful.
This is not mere "grievance." It is a deep socio-psychological condition that Nietzsche and Scheler described as impotent envy and rage. A person believes the world — the system, the elites, the globalists — has cheated him, despite the fact that he is "good and righteous." He cannot change the situation directly: cannot get rich, cannot bring the factories back to his town. The rage finds no outlet in action and becomes a poison in search of a target. To avoid feeling like a "loser," he begins to despise what he cannot attain. If the "elites" are educated and cosmopolitan, then education must be evil and isolationism must be virtue.
Trump is a brilliant moderator of ressentiment. He offers no solution to people's actual problems — the factories do not return, the debts keep growing — but he grants them the right to legitimate anger. He converts the interior sense of humiliation felt by millions into his own political power. Rather than treating the cause (the economic chasm), he offers a painkiller in the form of an enemy.
When he speaks of Orbán — "he didn't let people destroy the country" — he speaks directly to the ressentiment of those who fear change. A person can vote for the "right-wing" Trump, who behaves like a "left-wing" populist, simply because Trump articulates his ressentiment better than anyone else.
He understood that in a world where the left-right dichotomy no longer provides answers, people are instinctively looking not for an ideologue but for a trickster. Trump, for his supporters, is "our guy who will cheat the system for us." It is the psychology of a casino gambler: everyone knows the house always wins, but each player believes that this particular bold dealer will spin the wheel in his favor.
Putin: The Terminal Stage of Trumpism
Both Trump and Putin — along with Orbán, Erdoğan and similar figures — run the same operating system of governance, which political science calls personalist authoritarianism, or neopatrimonialism.
Both came to power on a wave of national humiliation — real or constructed. Putin had the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century" (the Soviet collapse) and the bitterness toward a West that "didn't cut them in." Trump had "Make America Great Again" — the idea that America is being "violated" by China, Mexico and NATO allies while Washington elites look the other way. Both sell not a future but revenge for the past. More precisely: a step backward, a return to a past that never quite existed.
For both, the state is not a set of institutions — courts, parliament, constitution — but a personal asset. Putin built a "vertical" in which loyalty trumps competence. Trump (especially in his second term, 2025–2026) has been aggressively implementing Schedule F and similar mechanisms to replace professional officials with personally devoted ones. Both loathe international law and multilateral agreements, because rules constrain personal will. Both raise the price of resolution by manufacturing crises from thin air — threats to seize Greenland, troop buildups along borders — before "graciously" agreeing to negotiations where they dictate terms. Both deploy the firehose of falsehood: the goal is not to make you believe a specific lie, but to make you stop believing that truth exists at all.
The difference lies in context and depth of penetration. Putin operates in a system where institutions have already been demolished and can afford open aggression. Trump operates in a system with high resistance — American courts, Congress, a free press — and is therefore forced to act through political raiding: capturing the party from within, corrupting meaning, driving the system to paralysis.
Putin made the same move, twenty years earlier and without Twitter. His genius is of a different order: he understood that fear is an inexhaustible commodity, provided you refresh the enemy on schedule. The West, NATO, Ukrainians, "Satanists" — this is not politics. It is a product line.
The question "is Putin right-wing?" in 2026 sounds like asking whether a shark is vegetarian. He deploys the full inventory of ultra-right clichés — traditional values, anti-LGBT legislation, the crusade against the "decadent West," clericalism, the alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, imperial nationalism, the "gathering of lands." It is the same "Christian civilization" that Orbán claimed to defend. But to maintain power, he employs methods that look decidedly "left-wing": state capitalism, in which an enormous sector of the economy is controlled by the state (read: Putin and his associates), and military Keynesianism — massive transfers to the families of the killed and the fighting, as a method of purchasing the loyalty of the poorest. This is not care for people. It is the procurement of living inventory for the front.
Trump, Orbán and Putin are one and the same model at different stages of completion: Trump is still dreaming of turning the United States into his personal feeding trough, fighting courts and constitution. Orbán succeeded halfway, making Hungary a "personal LLC" inside the EU. Putin finished the job: for him, Russia is not a country but a resource base managed like a CEO manages a corporation.
If Trump is the adventurer selling hope, Putin is the debt collector extracting payment from history. He uses ressentiment — the bitterness over the Soviet collapse — to turn an entire country into serfs working for the military-industrial complex and the hydrocarbon sector.
The most striking detail is that Putin simultaneously sponsors both sides: he funds the "right" (Orbán, Trump), providing media and financial support to dismantle Western institutions from within; and he provokes the "left" into radical actions, using the resulting chaos to undermine Europe's energy independence. Because Putin is the monopolist of noise. He does not merely divide budgets under cover of values — he has turned values themselves into a currency.
If Trump is the adventurer who wants to seize control of the corporation, Putin is the raider who has already expelled all shareholders, burned the charter and transferred all assets to his bodyguards — while continuing to broadcast a television commercial about "defending family traditions."
But here a necessary acknowledgment is due. Both men, each in his own way, are genuinely brilliant — not as statesmen, but as system-breakers. They saw the crack no one else was willing to name and drove a truck through it. The problem is they got carried away. Like the character from Krylov's fable, they have been digging up the roots of the oak tree, not understanding that the acorns they feed on grow precisely on it.
The Fatal Mistake: The Demystification of the State
They became overconfident. When leaders of Trump's and Putin's caliber began playing "geopolitical chess" too openly and too cynically, they tore from the state that very "sacred mantle" which once caused people to believe in the social contract. The modern state rests on three myths — and all three are now cracking.
The myth of the national interest. It was once assumed that some common good existed for all citizens. It is now becoming obvious that "national interest" is frequently nothing more than the business plan of a narrow group of individuals, wrapped in patriotic packaging.
The myth of democracy as an instrument of popular power. Watching electoral processes converted into marketing campaigns for the sale of ressentiment, people are beginning to understand: a vote is not power — it is a license for the continuation of the extraction.
The myth of the state as protector. If the state can at any moment crash the market, launch a war for the sake of one more billion for the leader, or simply "raise the price of the question" at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, it ceases to be a refuge and becomes what the economist Mancur Olson called a stationary bandit.
When Trump says "America First" and Putin "defends the values of Great Russia," they are doing the same thing: mobilizing archaic human emotions — fear, pride — to legitimize the redistribution of resources toward their own clans. The consequences are predictable: the desacralization of power (the leader is no longer a "chosen one" or a "sage" but a fortunate raider who seized control of the tax system and the army); the erosion of loyalty (why die or pay taxes for an "abstraction"?); and the retreat into grey zones — from cryptocurrencies and parallel economies to closed communities trying to minimize contact with a state that has become a confidence operation.
The irony is that Trump and Putin, in attempting to "make greatness," are accelerating the disintegration of the very concept of the nation-state. They are proving that contemporary borders, rules, traditions and laws are nothing but stage sets.
The danger is that what follows the demystification of the state is not freedom but chaos. If people broadly conclude that the state is a fiction for extraction, they will stop observing its rules. And that is precisely where Trump and Putin are leading: in the turbid waters of collapsed institutions, their methods of "power deals" function best of all.
They are, in effect, steering the world toward a condition of "global Somalia" — a place where rights do not exist, only the price of resolution. While the world debates the "collapse of the right" or the "twilight of liberalism," the actual beneficiaries are simply moving money from one pocket to another. The political process is nothing more than the public relations division of asset redistribution.