Letter to the editor: Vance's bleak week

First published in the Brunswick Beacon, 04.23.26

It started when Trump sent Vice President Vance to Hungary to help Viktor Orban, aka “Putin’s ‘poster boy,” who told Putin, “I am at your service” and blocked European aid to Ukraine. Orban made Hungary Europe’s most corrupt country and its democracy an autocracy — it’s the only European nation to be rated just “partly free.”

Vance told Hungarians to “go to the polls this weekend, stand with Viktor Orban.” He dangled Trump’s pledge to use “the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy” — provided they voted for Orban. Vance was humiliated when Peter Magyar defeated Orban in a historic landslide. Neither Trump nor Putin congratulated Magyar.

Then, Trump sent Vance to broker peace with Iran. Negotiations went badly after Vance said this about Iran’s lead negotiator, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, “I actually wonder how good he is at understanding English because there are things that he said that frankly didn’t make sense.”

To nobody’s surprise, Vance’s ham-handed one-day stab at peacemaking failed. Vance compounded his failure by inadvertently calling Trump’s subsequent Strait of Hormuz blockade “economic terrorism.”

When the Pope called for peace, Trump wrote, “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

Vance added his two cents, saying the Pope’s opinions weren’t “anchored in truth.” A self-described “baby Catholic,” Vance said His Holiness should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology” and “stick to matters of morality.” Perhaps Vance forgot the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

When Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus, Vance called it “a joke.” Some 235 million American Christians aren’t laughing.

Janine Sacramone

Leland