Chutzpah

As the presumptive Republican nominee in the November election and leading Biden in the polls, Trump has increasingly been taking over the party machinery, but he's also beginning to send serious foreign policy signals over the direction his next administration is likely to take. In the most recent example,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will meet former President Donald Trump on Friday, March 8 in Florida, Orban's press chief told Hungarian state news agency MTI late Sunday.

Last month nationalist Orban endorsed Trump's bid to return to the presidency this year.

"We hope the current president will go, and President Trump will return and he will have free hands to make peace [in Ukraine]," Orban said Feb. 23.

Elsewhere,

At the invitation of former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will be traveling to the USA next week. However, it seems unlikely that he will meet with President Joe Biden, reports eXXpress.

Orbán will meet with Trump in Florida on Friday, March 8, as confirmed by his spokesperson Bertalan Havasi on Sunday. The announcement did not mention any plans for a meeting with President Biden. Additionally, Orbán’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó is scheduled to visit Russia again at the end of March.

Note the oh-by-the-way about the foreign minister's upcoming visit to Moscow. It's likely that this will transmit some sort of message from Trump to Putin, and this will inevitably involve some sort of argument from circumstance over Ukraine -- the West generally has invested well over $100 billion in the proxy war, only to have become bogged down with no hope of even returning to pre-2022 boundaries.

From the AP:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán confirmed Friday that he will visit Donald Trump in Florida next week, and described a possible comeback by the former U.S. president as the “only serious chance” for an end to the war in Ukraine.

Addressing a diplomacy forum in Turkey, Orbán also suggested that Trump’s possible return to the White House could help end the conflict in Gaza.

. . . “The only serious chance for peace is if he’s able to come back and to make peace,” Orbán told the forum. “Otherwise, the war between Ukraine and Russia will be long.”

Trump’s return “is a precondition for a strong and quick peace in the European continent,” he continued.

Orbán said he was convinced that if Trump had been in office when the war in Ukraine started “there would have been no war now.”

Let's go back to the 2017 kerfuffle over Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Logan Act:

The controversy over former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States has revived interest in an obscure 18th-century federal law known as the Logan Act.

On Monday evening, Flynn resigned after reports that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with the Russian official before Trump took office. At the end of December, the Obama administration imposed sanctions following the determination of U.S. intelligence officials that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to undermine then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning.

The Russian-interference angle, of course, was never anything but the purest moonshine, but it's an indication of the extreme Democrat sensitivity to Trump making foreign policy initiatives when he isn't formally and legally in office. If in 2016 he was telegraphing negotiations with Russia while he was merely president-elect, what are they going to do now that he's just the presumptive nominee and current front-runner, nearly a year before he could be sworn in? Here's more on the 2017 Flynn controversy:

Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to providing false statements to the FBI. Those are less serious charges than he could have faced, because he is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigators.

Flynn likely has something to trade, as NPR's Carrie Johnson noted on All Things Considered Friday. Flynn was not acting alone, according to charging documents against him. In fact, there were multiple members of the presidential transition team who spoke with Flynn about his communications with the Russian ambassador.

That included a "very senior member," who "directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia ..." Several news organizations have identified that individual as Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law.

Ah, the Mueller investigation. This lasted from May 2017 to March 2019 as an ongoing effort to undermine the Trump presidency, abetted by never Trumpers within the administration like William Barr. The results were inconclusive -- namely, they didn't lead to impeachment and removal for Trump -- and Mueller took the blame:

People across the political spectrum, even those who have worked with Mueller, were airing concerns that the 74-year-old longtime lawman, at a minimum, appeared out of practice.

“This is delicate to say, but Mueller, whom I deeply respect, has not publicly testified before Congress in at least six years. And he does not appear as sharp as he was then,” David Axelrod, the former top Obama White House strategist while Mueller was FBI director, wrote on Twitter about 45 minutes into the nationally televised hearing.

“Bob Mueller is struggling,” added Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Mueller in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. “It strikes me as a health issue. We need only look at footage of his earlier congressional appearances to see the dramatic difference in his demeanor and communicative abilities.”

But if Michael Flynn's putative violation of the Logan Act -- he was never indicted or tried for that, he was forced to plead guilty to lying to the FBI -- was enough to force a two-year fishing expedition by the deep state, what are they going to do about Trump's meeting with Orbán? It seems all but announced that this meeting will lead to some sort of back-channel message from Trump to Putin via Orbán's foreign secretary, with Trump a private citizen fully out of office and without even the justification that he's president-elect. What's Joe Biden gonna do about this, if Obama had James Comey perp walk Michael Flynn in early 2017 for far less?

I don't think Biden will do anything. Looking back, the Mueller investigation was an early draft of the lawfare strategy, which has proven feckless, and in fact, the 2024 election is turning out to be a referendum on the Democrat opposition to Trump throughout his first term. The whole Biden administration has simply been a real-world refutation of the Democrat strategies since 2016; whatever they may argue, on whatever flimsy grounds, people are looking back and deciding things were better under Trump.

Any attempt to reboot the Logan Act strategy against Trump or whichever fall guy they may try to designate a la Flynn will simply drive Trump higher in the polls. Trump knows this. Somewhere among Biden and his handlers, they know this too.