By any empirically based metric, this has been a lousy week for the global right. Hungarian voters overwhelmingly repudiated their Christian nationalist kleptocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Here at home, Donald Trump took ownership of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, ensuring the continued rise of oil and gas prices at a time when the foremost concern of American voters is the unaffordability of life’s essentials.

Sensing he’d left something undone, Trump also accused the pope of being “soft on crime” (hey, it worked against Michael Dukakis; why not the pope?). And just in case he still retained the support of those right-wing Catholics who’d railed against Francis and were holding their tongues against Leo, not to mention the Protestant evangelicals who’ve never quite made their peace with Catholics, he then decided to post an image on Truth Social that depicted himself as Christ the Healer.

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The 1960s comic Mort Sahl would always interject a line into his act: “Is there anyone I haven’t offended?” Sahl never offered that line up, however, as a political strategy.

Trump’s supporters are disproportionately evangelical Protestants, so attacking the pope merely harked back to the classic evangelical fear of satanic popery (the main reason, along with that hardy perennial of antisemitism, that the U.S. banned immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe from 1924 through 1965). But equating himself with Jesus was a bridge too far even for many evangelicals. Trump was compelled to take down that Truth Social post, though if he now looks at it at all askance, I suspect it’s because he realizes he should have identified himself with God the Father, who was made of sterner stuff than his Son, who was way softer on crime (“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”) than Leo, or, for that matter, Dukakis.

In looking at the defeat of Orbán, there are enough parallels with the current state of American politics to make Republicans even more nervous than they already are. For one thing, discontent with the stagnating Hungarian economy was widespread, and heightened by voters’ awareness that Orbán had redistributed the nation’s wealth both upward and to his cronies, whom he’d turned into oligarchs. There are some parallels to this here at home. Trump’s cultivation of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk, and the deals he’s cut with Silicon Valley billionaires to support a rapid and unregulated expansion of their AI ventures (wildly unpopular with the public at large, fearful of jobless futures and data centers in their backyards), from which, he surely hopes, his family will get a cut—all this is in sync with the kleptocratic policies of Orbán and, for that matter, Orbán’s other great champion, Vladimir Putin.

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Indeed, the course of Christian nationalist nations compels us to wonder if there’s a causal link between Christian nationalism, illiberal democracy, and kleptocracy. Christian nationalism elevates a particular segment of the population, which at some point tends to claim both spiritual and material rewards. Illiberal democracy—the suppression of rival or unbiased media, the attack on other sources of knowledge (universities) and power (courts, unions)—creates a “get out of jail free card” mentality among the leader’s favorites. The defenders of Christian nationalism and illiberalism have yet to explain away the drift of nations pursuing those policies toward full kleptocracies.

What should even more immediately alarm Republicans is the failure of the right’s campaigns, in both Hungary and the U.S., to make any plausible positive claims. Orbán understood he had to divert attention from the economy, so he ran against his opponents by alleging they’d send Hungarian boys to fight in Ukraine, and with whatever culture-war golden oldies he could play once more. Neither worked.

For their part, U.S. Republicans are beginning to sense that running against the specter of “transsexuals in ladies’ rooms” may no longer be as salient as it once was. Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears campaigned across Virginia last year by linking her Democratic opponent, Abigail Spanberger, to the cause of trans rights. Spanberger won by 15 percentage points.

Does anyone believe the Republicans can successfully run on the economy this November, what with voters’ affordability concerns only heightened by Trump’s war (and by his opposition to solar and wind power)? Is anyone convinced that Republicans can still divert enough voters’ attention away from the economy by claiming Democrats are soft on trans rights, to the point that they’ll retain control of Congress? Even after Trump has squandered the Republicans’ advantage on immigration by making “tough on immigration” synonymous with the disruption of communities and the shattering of families?

Democrats still have an aptitude for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, of course, but Trump, like Orbán, is making that harder and harder.

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Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.