Vice President JD Vance dropped a bombshell in his remarks to reporters during his swing through Hungary on Tuesday.
The Trump administration is, he revealed, “aware that there are elements within the Ukrainian intelligence services that try to put their thumb on the scale of American elections.”
Vance did not elaborate much. What he did describe sounds far less malign than his initial remarks let on. “For example,” the vice president continued, “there were people in the Ukrainian system who were campaigning with Democrats literally in the weeks before the presidential election, where Donald Trump won very comfortably in November of 2024.”
As I argued at the time, along with my colleagues, Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to appear for photo ops alongside Democrats in the fall of a presidential election year was the result, at minimum, of poor judgment — perhaps a reflection of foreign observers’ often thumbless grasp of the subtleties of American domestic politics. At worst, it sacrificed Ukraine’s national interests. The Trump administration certainly made Zelensky and his countrymen pay for the error.
But if that constitutes putting a “thumb on the scale” of U.S. politics, Vance is also guilty. After all, he delivered those remarks alongside embattled Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose fading political prospects are evidently regarded as a crisis inside the Trump administration.
Because Orbán has made Zelensky more of a foil in Hungary’s election than even the Hungarian opposition, Vance perhaps felt compelled to lend credence to that narrative. But the vice president’s denunciation of foreign elected officials who lend political aid to like minds abroad confounds those of us with eyes.