Vice President JD Vance became a spokesperson for Russian President Putin by downplaying the disastrous effects Russian election interference has caused around the world, claiming it’s just freedom of speech and that if Europeans are intelligent enough, it won’t affect them.
Under the Trump administration, the United States has become a satellite communications outlet for Russian propaganda.
Vance just shat on every European intelligence agency by defending right wing extremism and fascist dictatorships.
VANCE: We’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election, based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors.
Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections.
But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective.
You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections.
We certainly do.
You can condemn it on the world stage, even.
But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.
JD Vance, Steve Bannon, and the entire MAGA cult are claiming that every intelligence agency around the world is part of a global deep state persecuting Trump and all authoritarian oligarchies.
Vance’s words were indefensible and outrageous.
Russia did not invest just a few hundred thousand dollars in advertising in Romania but orchestrated a vast attack on their infrastructure as a whole to elect their preferred candidate, subverting the will of the people.
The Romanian court’s reversal has given rise to conspiracy theories, but what’s disgraceful is an American Vice President telling European leaders that their democracy is a weak piece of sh*t.
At the heart of the court’s decision stands a declassified Romanian intelligence report. It details how Georgescu’s campaign was bolstered by Russian forces bent on subverting Romania’s national-security interests. The campaign’s social-media operations bore striking similarities to a known influence pattern — the “Brother next to Brother” social-media phenomenon that surged in Ukraine before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Alarmingly, Georgescu’s sudden rise from obscurity to worldwide trending status on TikTok, with no declared campaign expenses, raised immediate red flags. Faced with this evidence, the court chose to annul the elections it had previously certified.
Romania’s election underscores a much bigger problem worldwide: How easy it is for scumbags like Russia to try to install puppet leaders and right-wing strongmen into countries that do not have the infrastructure to combat them.
Romania’s political crisis underscores a broader trend: the persistence of authoritarian regimes seeking to exploit democratic institutional vulnerabilities. The last-minute cancellation of an election — especially on the grounds of alleged foreign influence — is a stark reminder that the European Union project and NATO’s security umbrella are not absolute guarantees. Effective defenses against hybrid threats must be in place long before the moment of crisis arrives.
The only way creeps and scumbags like Trump and Vance can get elected is encouraging election interference from foreign enemies. Throw in billionaires like Elon Musk to flood their campaigns with funds to provide millions of dollars of lying propaganda advertising and you have another Trump administration.
