Viktor Orbán’s loss in yesterday’s election is just as much a defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, as it is for the now-toppled Hungarian strongman. Seldom have American leaders intervened so overtly in a foreign election, and seldom has their preferred candidate fared so badly. Trump has a way of distancing himself from people who disappoint him. Last night, when reporters asked him about the outcome in Hungary, he turned and walked away. But having tied himself so tightly to Orbán, he may find it unusually difficult to dissociate himself from the prime minister’s downfall.Red Make America Great Again caps and other pro-Trump symbols saturated Orbán’s campaign rallies. But the opposition party—led by Péter Magyar, a conservative who had deserted Orbán’s inner circle—opted for different imagery: The euphoric crowds that occupied the streets of Budapest to welcome the end of the prime minister’s 16-year reign featured fireworks, flags, face paint, and plum brandy. And along the banks of the Danube, the Hungarian tricolor mingled with the emblem of the European Union. Trump has generally forfeited the United States’ global leadership, except for the variety that operates at the barrel of a gun. But he still fancies himself the boss of an international far-right bloc, and he enjoyed the magnified view of his own power in the mirror that Orbán held up to him. Strategically and stylistically, the two leaders are similar. The prime minister was the first EU head of government to endorse Trump in 2016, and the Republican nominee’s upset victory went on to galvanize populist parties across the world.Over the next decade, no foreign leader worked harder than Orbán to translate reactionary politics into a cross-border governing program. He turned Hungary into a testing ground for practices that Trump is now implementing in America, including the expansion of executive power and the assault on universities and other elements of civil society. Orbán has nurtured a network of think tanks and other government-backed institutions that both court existing MAGA luminaries and cultivate new ones. He put an ally of Vance, and a votary of so-called post-liberalism, on his payroll in Budapest. In Washington, meanwhile, the second Trump administration brought in young aides with experience at pro-government institutes in Budapest.In the weeks before the election, I asked representatives of the opposition party, Tisza, how they would approach this ecosystem of government-backed institutions. Party representatives told me that new funding would cease immediately, and that the government would explore ways of recovering money that’s been promised through long-term grants. Magyar, who is likely to be Hungary’s next prime minister, confirmed as much in a news conference today, arguing that the funding structure amounted to a criminal offense and vowing to launch an investigation. Many think-tank leaders, one aide told me, “will be out of a job very soon.” That could be a prelude to a broader unraveling of the Washington-Budapest nexus that has so animated far-right circles in the past decade.Competing accusations of foreign influence defined Hungary’s election. Orbán tried to portray Magyar as a covert agent of Brussels; Magyar accused Orbán of secretly colluding with Russian security services to stay in power. There was nothing surreptitious, meanwhile, about the American government’s efforts to shore up support for the prime minister.Consider the time and effort that Trump and Vance invested in the election. Trump broadcast multiple endorsements on social media and recorded a video that was played at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. Before traveling to Islamabad for Saturday’s failed peace talks with Iranian leaders, Vance spent two days in the Hungarian capital campaigning alongside the prime minister, at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. One wondered, as Trump warned of the end of Iranian civilization, whether his vice president might not have better things to do.[Read: J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]Trump treated Orbán’s reelection bid like a domestic political contest, with all the attendant implications for his political capital. “We love Viktor,” the president said last fall, standing before his European counterparts. “You are fantastic, all right? I know a lot of people don’t agree with me, but I’m the only one that matters.” As the election neared, his endorsements of Orbán were indistinguishable from his interventions in competitive U.S. congressional races, complete with his erratic capitalization. Orbán, he wrote, would protect “LAW AND ORDER!” Trump’s eldest son removed any remaining doubt about the stakes, when he weighed in over the weekend, addressing Hungarian voters on X. “We hope you will vote for my father’s friend and ally,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote. “One leader in Europe has a direct line to the White House, I hope you will support Viktor Orban!”Vance made the contest even more personal by flying to Budapest to stump for the prime minister. Standing at his side, Vance called the Hungarian leader by his first name and voiced confidence in his victory. At a joint press conference, the vice president predicted, “Viktor Orbán’s gonna win,” and then turned to him and asked, “Viktor, is that right?” Western diplomats in Budapest suggested to me that Vance’s visit may have backfired. They observed that Trump’s war in Iran is unpopular in Europe and that the welcoming of any foreign leader was at odds with Orbán’s argument that he stood for Hungarian sovereignty. (A spokesperson for the vice president didn’t respond to a request for comment.)Trump didn’t just send individual emissaries to Budapest; he also involved the apparatus of the U.S. State Department in the election. Before Vance’s appearance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to the Hungarian capital in February. The visit had an ostensible diplomatic purpose—signing a civil nuclear-cooperation agreement between the two counties—but the political overtones were obvious. “Your success is our success,” Rubio told Orbán.Trump dangled further U.S. assistance at the eleventh hour. Two days before the election, he took to Truth Social to suggest that Orbán’s reelection would enable the furthering of economic ties between the two countries. “My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” he wrote. There is a backstory here: People familiar with the situation told me that the Hungarian government had been seeking broad economic support of the kind that the Trump administration had provided to Argentina just before elections in that country last fall. He never extended similar generosity to Hungary, and the vague, last-minute promise didn’t go over as planned. According to an analysis shared with me by Redpoint Advisors, an intelligence- and geopolitical-risk-advisory firm, Hungarian-language reaction on social media to Trump’s promise revealed deep distrust of the president’s motives. Negative mentions of Trump, which had been declining, spiked following the announcement, growing 47 percent in the hour after his pledge.I figured that Orbán was going to lose—or at least that he figured he would lose—when I attended his final rally, on the eve of the election, in the heart of the capital’s Castle District. Not enough of his supporters showed up to fill the public square, and some of those who did attend were disappointed because the campaign hadn’t put up screens so that people at the back of the crowd could see the speech. There was, however, a nice view of the Matthias Church, with its exquisite tracery and stone gargoyles.[Read: Viktor Orbán could actually lose]The prime minister seemed dejected, even defensive. He didn’t have much good news to share with his supporters; the economy was in shambles, and people knew it. One bright spot, which he highlighted, was that, “the U.S. made clear they are supporting us.” How special to have the backing of “the strongest country on Earth.”I don’t know if it was the stage lights or the wisps of smoke from cigarettes, but the scene took on an artificial quality, like when additional frames are added to a movie to smooth out the picture, in what’s sometimes called the “soap-opera effect.” Bad filmmaking was also on the mind of Ferenc Németh, a specialist in international relations, when I reached him by phone over the weekend. Németh once worked at a foreign-policy institute in Budapest but left after it came under the control of the prime minister’s office. Now he’s a visiting researcher at Georgetown, watching life in America come to resemble Hungary’s.“What is happening here is the same that was happening in Hungary 15 years ago,” Németh told me. “I saw this movie once, and I gave it zero stars on Letterboxd,” he added, referring to the social-networking service that allows users to rank films. “But now I’m being forced to watch it again.”Hungary is a small country that ejected its prime minister in large part because of domestic economic conditions. The country’s broader significance lies in the illiberal model it has exported abroad. That model has champions at the height of the U.S. government who appear inclined to intervene, audaciously, in foreign campaigns. Next year, elections will take place in numerous European countries whose populations are each larger than Hungary’s, including France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. One measure of their meaning will be whether MAGA caps appear at the victory parties.