Last we checked in on Sen. Jerry Moran, he was sitting out the 2024 presidential race.
“I don’t endorse candidates,” the Kansas Republican told Axios in July. “Never have.”
With a month left in the campaign, he seems to be sticking to that position.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t sending signals.
How else to interpret comments Moran made last week after he led a delegation of GOP senators to Hungary and met with so-called “civil society leaders” there?
It’s worth reading the whole thing.
“Our delegation and many of our congressional colleagues are increasingly concerned by Hungary’s deepening and expanding relationship with Russia and the continued erosion of its democratic institutions, ” Moran said, in a statement posted Saturday by David Pressman, the American ambassador to Hungary.
“Hungary also continues to disregard the concerns raised by its allies and partners about deepening its ties with China,” Moran added. “It is in our shared interest for our countries to work closely together. We urge Hungary to listen to the concerns of its allies and to act on them.”
And, well, whoa.
Yes, the statement is carefully phrased. And no, there is no endorsement for or against any particular presidential candidate in Moran’s words.
But if Moran refuses to take a stand for or against Donald Trump, it is difficult to read his Hungary statement as anything but a critique of Trumpism .
Trump, Orban and authoritarian strongmen
Trump and Hungarian leader Viktor Orban are ideological soulmates, after all, with a shared interest in right-wing authoritarianism. Orban, as The Hill pointed out on Saturday, has lots of fans among American conservatives “ for pushing a self-proclaimed ‘illiberal democracy’ that includes strong restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ policies.”
His government has passed “laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are critical of the ruling party,” says Freedom House, which gives Hungary only a “partly free” rating in its index.
Elections still happen in Hungary. But in just about every way that matters, Orban has used state power to hinder the opposition and tilt the playing field in his own favor.
Trump — along with the MAGA movement he leads — thinks all this is just ducky. They want to make the United States look more like Hungary.
“They say he is a strongman,” Trump said of Orban last month, “Sometimes you need a strongman.”
That is what Moran is talking about when he decries the “continued erosion” of Hungary’s democratic institutions. He is right to be concerned.
Reagan-like belief in freedom, support for Ukraine
The Republican Party has remade itself over the last decade to reflect Trump’s moods and whims. Moran never joined the “Never Trump” movement — but neither has he made a dramatic ideological transformation like so many of his GOP colleagues.
Indeed, the 70-year-old who first went to Washington, D.C., as a congressman in 1997 seems very much to still be an old-school Reaganesque Cold Warrior, a man who retains a belief that America’s leadership still matters in this big, messy world.
“The preservation of freedom requires enormous effort,” Moran said in an impassioned Senate floor speech in April, urging his colleagues to support a new round of aid to Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia. “Indeed, liberty demands the marshaling of every resource necessary in its defense against those who would see it destroyed.”
Trump, meanwhile, says he told a European official he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” if other NATO countries don’t step up their defense spending. That reflects a long pattern of subservience to the Russian dictator. A lot of Moran’s younger colleagues seem happy to go along.
The party, it appears, is leaving him behind.
So it’s notable that the senator decried Hungary’s democratic backsliding. It’s notable he did so in the context of the Russian threat. But it’s also notable he did all this quietly — in an ambassadorial post unlikely to attract widespread American attention.
That’s not exactly “every resource necessary” to defend freedom, either here or in Hungary. For now, though, it might be the best Jerry Moran can do.
Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.
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