Heck Of A Week, JD Vance!

The pest of Budapest!

Apr 11, 2026

JD Vance’s call going to Trump’s voicemail, to the amusement of the Hungarian audience last week

Yes, yes, no one wants to think about JD Vance any more than they have to. Including Donald John Trump! Seems he left Vance out of his inner loop on the Armageddon he was mulling in Iran over the weekend, and instead sent him, along with Melania’s embattled former modeling agent Paolo Zampolli, to go support Viktor Orbán in Budapest instead ahead of the parliamentary elections there tomorrow.

But nobody was picking up the phone!

Except for Pope Bob maybe in Rome. Can’t wait to find out if Hungary succumbed to the charms of Vance and Viktor Orbán’s party of Russian-bot-pushed AI slop pretending that Ukraine is bombing Hungary. Trump chimed in his support on Friday too!

And Vance Xitted only two things last week: his Easter greeting — unlike the boss, he and Junior at least gave a hat tip to the reason for the season — and then after Armageddon had been somehow averted on Tuesday, that speech in Hungary. In which he blasted the “bureaucrats of Brussels,” meaning the EU made of 27 member states to which Hungary voluntarily belongs, for “trying to destroy” Hungary’s economy by not letting them tap into sanctioned Russian oil, and not letting Orbán have $17 billion, which they are withholding until the government attempts to stop its rampant corruption and restores judicial independence.

Those bucks represent 8 percent of Hungary’s GDP. Points out the Guardian,

over the last 22 years, Hungary has benefited hugely from EU funds. By 2018, more than 80% of Hungary’s public investment came from European funds intended to help poorer EU member states catch up with their wealthier neighbors.

Hand-biting, that is also the MAGA/MHGA way! Watch it all if you want, trigger warning for maddening.

Or have just a little sniff. No? You sure? Stinks real bad!

The lowlights, besides that greasy cowlick:

He co-signed Viktor Orbán’s lies that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had threatened Orbán or Hungary somehow.

“It’s completely scandalous. You should never have a foreign head of government […] threatening the head of government of an allied nation.”

No, he said that! With his mouth!

Will Hungarians succeed in getting that corrupt old slug and his Fidesz party off their backs? Maybe! Many in the country of 10 million seem mighty enthused!

Holy Pope Threats!

Also on Tuesday, right before the 8 p.m. Armageddon deadline, the patriarch of the church to which JD Vance vowed to follow in 2019 pointedly commented,

“I would like to invite everyone to think in their hearts of so many innocent children, so many totally innocent elderly people who would also be victims of this escalation,” he said. “I would like to invite everyone to pray, but also to seek ways to communicate. Perhaps with congressmen, with authorities, saying that we don’t want war, we want peace.”

Dok had a whole backstory on Thursday about how Pete Hegseth’s allegedly Catholic humility-free Under Secretary of WAR for Policy Elbridge Colby (also close buddy of also allegedly Catholic Vance’s) summoned Vatican Ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre to try to get him to go strong-arm Pope Bob Leo XIV from Chicago into taking Trump and Vance’s side on them bombing the shit out of whatever innocent people they want. They apparently invoked the Avignon Papacy period of 1309 to 1376, which followed agents of Philip IV of France kidnapping 73-year-old Pope Boniface VIII on Maundy Thursday in Rome and giving him a rough ride to Avignon that killed him within a month. And then there were some French popes, la comptine des enfants avec chanson, whole thing.

Oh to have been a microwave on the wall for how Ambassador Cardinal Christophe Pierre replied to that mouthy, arrogant little disciple.

JD Vance, smarmily, declined to comment.

And How Many Divisions Has Pope Bob From Chicago?

Doktor Zoom

Apr 9

Read full story

Meet JD’s Right-Hand Man

Speaking of doctrines and JD Vance, also don’t miss the recent profile in New York magazine of his closest confidant, one 35-year-old chief of staff Jacob Reses.

He is the mysterious “Jacob” in the leaked Signal chat that showed Trump-administration officials in 2025 planning a strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen. He is a conservative nationalist who was lauded as an emerging leader on the New Right trying to remake the GOP into a more populist party. He is Vance’s most important adviser on domestic politics “by a country mile,” says Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine. “Reses is clearly the Kissinger to the Nixon.”

Unlike his boss, who appears to relish publicly excoriating his enemies and defending the Trump administration on social media, Reses keeps his X account private. There, he has taken to boosting posts embracing the virulent strain of Christian nationalism that has recently taken over the Republican Party. In September 2025, Reses, who declined requests for an interview, reposted Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s approving quote of the following screed: “To save this Nation of Kindness that has bestowed such blessing on us, we Jews can no longer be squeamish about the majority’s invocation of the Christian deity and other aspects of their faith. The neutering of Christianity has been disastrous for all of us and must end.”

Sounds like JD Vance is more like the golem that he, Peter Thiel, and Trump have joint custody of.

Reses has been a devotee of Vance’s ever since his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, turned Vance into a celebrity. In his rapid rise to power, Reses has worked with Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Michael Needham, and Josh Hawley, all of whom constitute important nodes in the constellation of MAGA thought. [...]

By the end of his freshman year, Reses was interning at the Daily Caller with Tucker Carlson, whom he would also thank in his senior thesis. Reses was known as the Republican on campus, a self-serious intellectual who canvassed for Mitt Romney. He was president of Princeton’s College Republicans chapter and managing editor of the conservative journal The Princeton Tory, in which he embraced the tea party and warned against “Obama-era liberal extremism.” As treasurer of Tigers for Israel, Reses was a vocal opponent of the “hummus referendum,” in which a pro-Palestine student group took aim at the hummus-maker Sabra for its links to alleged Israeli human-rights abuses in the occupied territories. And he was a prolific columnist for The Daily Princetonian, where he criticized Occupy Wall Street, railed against identity politics, and defended smoking near building entrances, even though he wasn’t a smoker.

You get the picture. It’s all a good read, and now Vance’s confused philosophies all make sense, in a muddled and “Get Out” kind of a way.

Holy Living-Room Couch War!

And let’s not forget his holy war at home. Wife Usha, who is Hindu, is pregnant, due in late July. Can’t get over Usha saying that they would raise the kids in both traditions then let them pick, and JD saying he hoped Usha would eventually be moved to convert. Sounds like a lifetime of theological battles every holiday, if not every day, but whatever.

And of course both traditions are staunchly against murdering innocent schoolgirls, or lying to protect criminals. Wonder what their kids’ Catholic school teachers have to say about it all?

But that is for another episode of As The Couch Cushion Turns!