That left Jake Sullivan, the president’s nationwide safety adviser, within the awkward place of declining to say whether or not Mr. Orban is a dictator. “I’m not going to talk on behalf of the Biden marketing campaign,” he instructed reporters at a briefing. “You must direct these inquiries to the marketing campaign.” He did categorical “our deep issues about Hungary’s assault on democratic establishments.”
Heather A. Conley, the president of the German Marshall Fund of the US, a analysis group that promotes democracy, famous that Mr. Orban had injected himself into America’s politics, attending the Conservative Political Motion Convention and declaring after his Mar-a-Lago go to that it will be “higher for Hungary” if Mr. Trump returned to energy.
“Tragically, Hungary has change into each a overseas coverage and a marketing campaign problem,” she mentioned. Nonetheless, she added, calling Mr. Orban a dictator has concrete overseas coverage implications. “Ought to a NATO member, head of state, authorities be declared a ‘dictator,’ the nation could be positioned in a particular penalty field till the dictatorship is over,” she mentioned, recalling the navy junta that took over Greece from 1967 to 1974.
Final week’s presidential cannibal storytelling provoked a backlash of its personal. Mr. Biden was speaking about his uncle’s loss of life in World Warfare II. “He bought shot down in New Guinea, and so they by no means discovered the physique as a result of there was — there have been numerous cannibals, for actual, in that a part of New Guinea,” he mentioned at one cease.
By no means thoughts that the story doesn’t even look like true. In line with Pentagon data, his uncle, Second Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan, was a passenger on a navy airplane that crashed within the Pacific off the northern coast of what was then the territory of New Guinea on Might 14, 1944, after its engines failed. Mr. Finnegan and two crew members disappeared and have been presumed useless, however the report doesn’t point out that the airplane was shot down, a lot much less that anybody encountered cannibals.
