With Hungary’s parliamentary elections just days away, Donald Trump and his administration are leaving no stone unturned in their attempts to prop up the flagging fortunes of their favorite two-bit autocrat, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Vice President JD Vance went all the way to Hungary this week to rally on Orbán’s behalf, while the president last night posted a long, glowing endorsement on Truth Social.

Nevertheless, the polling shows Orbán’s Fidesz party trailing its main opposition, Tisza, 49 percent to 39 percent. Apparently America isn’t the only nation where MAGA-style right-wing authoritarianism is getting a little stale. Happy Friday.

What Melania Didn’t Say

by William Kristol

In Act 1, scene 2, of The Tempest, Prospero, the once and future Duke of Milan, tells his daughter Miranda how years before traitors tried to do him in:

they hurried us aboard a bark,

Bore us some leagues to sea, where they prepared

A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged,

Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats

Instinctively have quit it.

Shaespeare knew that rats instinctively leave a sinking ship. Yesterday, Melania Trump made her move to quit the rotten carcass of her husband’s presidency.

Standing behind a podium bearing the presidential seal, speaking at the White House Cross Hall where so many presidents have addressed weighty matters of state, and where her husband last week spoke to the nation about Iran, the first lady read a six-minute statement about her and Jeffrey Epstein.

Melania’s focus was on . . . Melania. She began, “The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” Her purpose, she said, was to defend “my reputation,” to clear “my good name.” (Emphasis mine.)

And so she asserted that “I have never been friends with Epstein” and that “I . . . was never on Epstein’s plane.” She also claimed that “My email reply to [Epstein’s imprisoned accomplice Gislaine] Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence. My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a trivial note.”

Left unsaid, but not unimplied, was that none of these claims could be made about her husband. He was a pal of Epstein’s. He was on Epstein’s plane. His relationship with Epstein, as exemplified for example in his contribution to Epstein’s birthday book, was more than “casual” or “trivial.”

Melania also chose to express concern for Epstein’s victims, something her husband has conspicuously not done.

And she went on to say that

Now is the time for Congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course, this doesn’t amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to uncover the truth.

So the Epstein investigation is not, as her husband has asserted, a “hoax.” Nor is it yet time, as her husband has said, to move on. The truth hasn’t yet been uncovered, and we need to uncover it. And if doing so leads more “prominent male executives” to resign, so be it. One wonders: Could Melania have one prominent male chief executive in mind?

Melania chose not to include in her statement any assertion of her husband’s innocence of complicity in the Epstein affair.

Melania is perhaps not a deep thinker, but she’s no fool. Since immigrating to the United States three decades ago, Melania Knauss has done well for herself. She’s shown that she has a shrewd sense of how to operate in her adopted country. She’s risen to the top, while mostly avoiding being directly engulfed in all the scandals that have raged around her.

And now she seems to think that the man to whom she hitched herself may be going down. She’s trying to arrange not to go down with him.

She presumably doesn’t think her husband can be induced to become one of those “prominent male executives” who resigns from his powerful position. But she knows that he can be removed from it. Isn’t Melania signaling others in the Trump administration and her husband’s supporters in Congress that it’s time to abandon ship, that it’s time to remove him from office?

It should not have taken Melania Trump, acting in her own self-interest, to spur this action. Others should have come to this conclusion based on a judgment of what’s necessary for the well-being of the nation. But one welcomes any helping hand in our current drama. After all, if

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

and if Donald Trump leaves the public stage sooner rather than later, then I stand ready to applaud Melania Trump for her role in ushering Donald Trump to the exit.