Professor Tamás Magyarics, editor-in-chief of Hungarian Conservative magazine and Senior Research Fellow at the John Lukacs Institute at the Eötvös József Research Centre of the Ludovika University of Public Service, is probably Hungary’s most prominent expert in US politics and history. He was Ambassador to Ireland from 2011 to 2015 and served as Head of the North American Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade between 2015 and 2016. Professor Magyarics has been on the faculty of the School of English and American Studies of ELTE University since 1987. He also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the International European Studies (IES) in Vienna and Corvinus University of Budapest. He has been very busy these days, with many people asking for his opinion on the recent assassination attempt on former US President and the current leading presidential candidate Donald Trump, and the nearing US presidential election. He sat down with the US affairs staff writer of Hungarian Conservative online to discuss these very events so pertinent to world history.
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The last US President to be hit by a bullet from an assassin was Ronald Reagan in 1981, and he went on to win re-election in a landslide in 1984. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson also won in a landslide in the next election in 1964. Given that pattern, can we assume, can we make some inferences that this attempted assassination is going to help Donald Trump win also, even with a large majority in the electoral college and the popular vote?
It’s very difficult to predict what impact the assassination attempt on Trump will have on the American electorate. Of course, the case of John F. Kennedy which you mentioned was a bit different. After all, the sitting President was killed, and the transition at the time was relatively smooth. Lyndon Johnson stepped in, despite the fact that Lyndon Johnson represented a different line of policies than John F. Kennedy. In fact, Lyndon Johnson was more quote-on-quote ‘progressive’. He was the one who pushed the civil rights legislation in the administration. But more or less, he was working with the Kennedy people. In one of the most important issues at the time, the Vietnam War, he inherited all the advisors, from Dean Rusk to Robert McNamara, to the national security advisors who all suggested that he should continue the military build-up in Vietnam. And Johnson was also sort of fixed on the issue: he didn’t want to be the first President of the United States to lose a war.
So, the situation was a little bit different then. Right now, you have a presidential candidate and an attempted assassination. The real issue is what impact it will have, primarily on the so-called independents. The Republican voters are 100 per cent, or 90 per cent behind Trump, the Democratic voters are 90 per cent behind Biden. I basically don’t believe that the assassination attempt will change the dynamic between the Republicans and the Democrats as for their party supporters. The interesting thing is what will happen to the independents.
And it’s not just about the independents, but, as I have already talked about several times, that 40-plus states are already fixed in one or the other camp. So we have about seven–eight circled battleground states, or swing states. And the real question is whether independents in these swing states will be swinging towards Trump or towards Biden. The first couple of opinion polls, but this is too fresh, indicate that there might be a swing towards Trump. And the fact is that Trump was already very leading in these states except for Virginia, where Biden was up by 2.2 percentage points. He may be sort of solidifying this lead. But this is, first of all, a post-assassination situation. Second, this week is the Republican National Convention. National conventions usually give a boost to the party’s candidate. So you might expect some boost to Trump from next week on or this week. But the dust will be settled, so to say, after the Democratic National Convention is over in August in Chicago. So that’s going to be a little bit more accurate picture of how the different segments or different parts of the electorate will be taking sides, either on the side of the Republicans or the Democrats.
Right at this moment, the Republicans have been gaining ground in three very important demographic voting blocs:
one, among the young, interestingly. For instance, in the so-called Generation Z, Biden was winning by 20 points in 2020. And right now, according to opinion polls, they are tied 50–50 or so. Second, the blacks. The difference was like 70 percentage points in favour of Biden in 2020. Right now, it has been reduced to 50–60 points, a net 50-per-cent gain among the blacks by the Republicans, which is quite significant. And the third is the Latino voter. Once again, the 2020 elections brought a huge lead for the Democrats among the Latino voters. And right now, some polls even put Trump ahead of Biden among these traditional Democratic voters because Latinos are closer culturally to the Republicans than to the Democrats. When we get to values like family values, religion, and traditional values, they are closer to the Republicans. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is moving or has been moving to the left in the past couple of years or so. So we’ll see how all of these trends will be playing themselves out in the next couple of months or so.
Do you think that now the Biden campaign cannot really push the campaign point of Donald Trump being an existential threat, a supposed threat to democracy? After the assassination attempt, should that part of their campaign messaging be suspended or scrapped completely, not even brought back before November?
Definitely the Biden campaign and Democrats in general, they have withdrawn a couple of political advertisements. They might have been about democracy, about Trump as a dictator or second Hitler and so on. After the assassination attempt,
this very extreme rhetoric is not going to work for the Democrats.
So, they should recalibrate their message and I think they should to some extent temper down this very extreme rhetoric.
If they concentrate on issues like the so-called achievements of the administration in terms of reducing inflation, adding 15 million new jobs, or having this student debt issue, which is controversial, by the way, because not all the people like the idea that the quote-on-quote privileged enjoy the right of student loan relief.
And the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional.
Well, yeah, that’s a different question. Also, if the Democrats concentrate on such cultural issues like abortion which was a winning issue for them in 2022 during the congressional election, there’s a different question if it is going to be such an important issue in a presidential election as it was in 2022. So they should be sort of concentrating on these achievements. Of course, numbers can be expanded. Winston Churchill has said that he believed only those statistics which he had doctored before.
You can say that adding 15 million jobs was a great achievement. But at the same time, you should also add that actually these jobs were rebuilt, they are not actually new, they were re-added after the COVID pandemic. For instance, there was the infrastructure investment bill, which was mostly about the so-called green issues, such as terminating drilling, suspending the Keystone XL pipeline, and thus driving up the energy prices and gas prices. Just yesterday a young person was interviewed in California saying that it will be difficult for them because when Trump was president gas was about $2 a gallon, and right now, it’s about $4 a gallon. Now, of course, it’s not so simple, but the so-called bread-and-butter issues are important.
On the other hand, the Republicans would do better if Trump also tempered down the rhetoric, and starts to be more presidential, so to say, as he tried to do in the debate between himself and Biden, where he didn’t use such strong rhetoric as he used in 2020. Especially after the assassination attempt, there will be some sympathy for him. The images as he was raising his fist, with the American flag in the background, in defiance of critical violence, with blood on his face—that’s a very strong image that could be burnt into the minds of the American people. And since right now we are living in the world of images, unfortunately, and not in the world of words, that might be a very, very potent weapon in the hands of Republicans demonstrating that Trump is up to his task, as opposed to Biden, who is frail mentally and physically as well.
You mentioned the debate. That happened about two weeks ago, and it seemed like that was a big defining moment of this election season. Even 19 sitting House Democrats called on Biden to step down as the nominee. Meanwhile, right now, we are in another defining moment, the assassination attempt. So do you think this sort of pushes back in importance Biden’s debate performance? Or do you think that’s still going to haunt him until November with many even in his own party losing confidence in him?
First of all, the debate was to some extent the Democrats’ own fault. So previously, the mainstream media, the White House, and, of course, the people around him, were not ignorant about his state of mind and about his physical capacities.
There had been quite a strong cover-up, so to say, on behalf of Biden,
by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, which are the so-called mainstream liberal media. And that is why it was quite a shock to a lot of people to see Biden face up and in reality. Of course, that was a process.
His physical and mental capabilities have been gradually deteriorating since 2020. But a lot of people didn’t know about that. So that is why it was ‘a defining moment’ for a lot of people because they are now confronted with the reality. Allegedly, 50 million people were watching CNN at the time. And of course, a lot of people later on wanted to see what was going on, even if not watching the whole debate because that would be unusual for the American people’s attention span. But there were moments when Biden was staring into nowhere with an open mouth, babbling, with no one able to understand what he was saying, and Trump capitalized on the situation. So Trump was more what I call presidential. Now, in fact, if you take a look at the facts, Biden was more accurate than Trump. Trump is famous for taking certain numbers very liberally. By that token, Biden was also getting a few facts wrong, but fewer than Trump. But most of people don’t really know anything about macroeconomics, don’t really know about the small prints of various acts or bills, and so and so. They are very much influenced primarily by the images and not what people are actually saying.
Now, after this performance, more and more people started to come out into the open to go public about their scepticism with regard to Biden’s ability to serve four more years. And after the debate, George Stephanopoulos, the ABC anchor who had also been Clinton’s spokesman, conducted an interview with Biden. He was very tough on the President. He asked one or two questions that might be a little bit embarrassing. But later on, Stephanopoulos privately said that he wouldn’t believe that Biden would be able to serve four more years.
Yeah, and then there was this interesting episode with Hollywood. Hollywood is very important for the Democrats, first of all, because of money. So the studio heads, producers, actors, and actresses contribute huge amounts of money to Democratic causes. George Clooney and Julia Roberts were organizing this event for Biden where they were collecting $30 million in campaign contributions. Then a few days after the debate, Clooney wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying that he didn’t believe that Biden should be running for president. So if George Clooney and celebrities like him are calling on Biden publicly to step down, that means quite a lot because they are influencers, so to speak, and quite a number of people are following the political preferences of their heroes or heroines.
At the time when there was this romance between this Kansas City Chiefs star football player [Travis Kelce] and Taylor Swift, a lot of people said that if Taylor Swift came down on the side of Democrats during the Super Bowl, that would add millions of votes to the Democrats. So that’s another issue, that a lot of people think that if one celebrity like Robert De Niro or Taylor Swift voted Democratic, then they should also vote for them. But that’s simply a fact of life in the US. So if these celebrities go public and call on Biden to withdraw, plus quite a number of so-called fat cats, people who have donated a lot, have suspended giving money, millions of dollars, or tens of millions of dollars to Democrats, that’s a little bit uncomfortable for Biden. But right at this moment he’s still hanging on and it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to replace him with someone else because time is very short.
We have fresh news from the convention in Milwaukee. Donald Trump has made his pick for vice president, JD Vance. Do you have any opinions on that? And do you think it will help him? He’s a very young guy. He will be the third youngest vice president in US history after Breckinridge and Nixon. He is from Ohio, and that’s a safe red state. So in that regard, I don’t think he’s going to help. So why do you think President Trump made that decision?
JD Vance can bring quite a lot of things to the table. First of all, we have already talked about the issue that young people are very disappointed with the choice they have. 80 per cent of the people, most of them young, believe that Biden shouldn’t be running. 40–50 per cent of the people say that Trump shouldn’t be running either because he’s too old. Yeah, but in the end, here is someone who is young, 39 years old, and can be attractive to especially young male voters. Young male voters are very important for the Republican party because white males two to one support the Republicans. So if more and more of them support the Republicans, that’s a gain for Donald Trump. Second, his life story is very attractive, coming from quite low beginnings, from the so-called ‘hillbilly’ parts. And in fact, he has written a book with the title Hillbilly Elegy, which has been translated by the way into Hungarian. And
it has been quite a success, a lot of people have read his book in Hungary as well.
It is about how the American dream is becoming more and more unavailable for a lot of people.
Vance went to the military, he was a marine. He then went to Ohio State University, then to Yale Law School, which is one of the most prestigious law schools in the United States. He became a senator, and right now he is a vice presidential candidate. So his life story is very, very attractive, of someone who goes from rags to riches, from the log cabin to potentially the White House as a vice president.
Second, Ohio is a sort of swing state. So it’s very important that he’s from Ohio, and perhaps despite the fact that Trump has a very comfortable lead in Ohio, reinforcing the image and reinforcing the Republican lead over the Democrats in Ohio is very important. There’s a saying in the US that the way Ohio goes, the way the United States goes. So it’s not a very scientific, scholarly comment, but the experience is that in the past couple of presidential cycles, the way Ohio voted, that was the way the United States voted. So to be a little bit more precise, if a Republican candidate won the race in Ohio, then the Republican candidate won nationwide. If a Democrat, it was a Democrat winner, too.
In the last election, Donald Trump won Ohio by eight points and still lost.
Yeah, but Ohio is sort of symbolic. And it also sends a message because the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket is Kamala Harris, who is from California, and a woman, and a woman of colour. So it indicates the Democrats’ wish or aspiration to take the votes of the East Coast-West Coast voter base, plus women, plus the people of colour.
JD Vance is from Middle America, the Midwest. That is the so-called ‘flyover country’ for the Democrats who say that you can’t find anything between the East Coast and the West Coast, just hillbilly boys, rednecks, and nothing else. So the Midwest, Middle America, white, young male: that is, as I said earlier, a very strong Republican voting bloc. So both of the vice presidential candidates indicate the intention of whom the Democrats and the Republicans would like to address and attack first and foremost. From this point of view, Vance being picked as vice president is quite logical, at least in hindsight.
My last question: we have a former president running for a non-consecutive term, which hasn’t happened since 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate. He also had an assassination attempt on his life by the way, which is a coincidence. As for a major party, that hasn’t happened since 1892 with Grover Cleveland. How much of an impact do you think this could have in favour of Trump, most likely, that we have a former presidential ticket as a challenger?
Well, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was running for the third-party ticket. So that would be different from the current situation. The 1980 presidential election is more relevant when Edward Kennedy was challenging the incumbent president, but right now no one is challenging the incumbent president at the moment, at least openly.
Donald Trump is quite unique coming back as a former president and becoming a candidate for the same party. There was one such case, and that was Grover Cleveland at the end of the 19th century. He was president for one term, then he was defeated and then after one turn came back and became president once again between 1893 and 1897. So there was one case. He was by the way a Democrat. The only Democrat president between 1860 and 1912. In 1912, in the previously mentioned presidential election, Roosevelt split the Republican vote, and that is how Woodrow Wilson became president. So Grover Cleveland is the best example, the best parallel with Donald Trump. There have been other interesting cases, borderline cases resembling the present situation, but now the two Cleveland presidencies are the best direct parallels with the potential Trump presidency between 2025 and 2029.
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