The last month hasn’t been especially kind to international candidates aligned with Donald Trump. In Canada, for example, the country’s Liberal Party was struggling badly against its Conservative rivals — right up until Trump returned to the White House, took steps to shatter the relationship between the U.S. and its allied neighbor, announced plans to try to acquire Canada and make it America’s 51st state, and launched a damaging trade war for reasons that have never made sense.
Late last month, Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was seen as overtly aligned with Trump, and not only did his party suffer as Liberals held on to power, but Poilievre also managed to lose his own seat in Parliament, a seat he had held for over 20 years.
Less than a week later, an eerily similar set of circumstances unfolded in Australia, where the candidate most closely associated with the American Republican — Peter Dutton, a hard-right candidate who “embraced MAGA-style politics” — not only fell short of his goal of becoming prime minister, he also lost his own seat in the midst of a surprisingly good year for the country’s center-left Labor Party.
The trend isn’t over just yet. The New York Times reported:
In a setback for Europe’s surging nationalist forces, Nicusor Dan, a centrist mayor and former mathematics professor, on Sunday won the presidential election in Romania, defeating a hard-right candidate who is aligned with President Trump and has opposed military aid to Ukraine. With more than 98 percent of ballots counted, preliminary official results gave 54 percent of the vote in the presidential runoff to Mr. Dan, 55, the mayor of Romania’s capital, Bucharest. His opponent, George Simion, a nationalist and fervent admirer of Mr. Trump who had been widely seen as the front-runner, drew only 46 percent.
Shortly before voting ended, the far-right candidate claimed without evidence that “many deceased people” had appeared on the country’s electoral lists — a claim that was very much on-brand for the Trump-aligned candidate.
As a separate Times analysis recently explained, Trump’s second term is still relatively new, “but already his policies, including imposing tariffs and upending alliances, have rippled into domestic political battles around the world.” But while the results out of Romania led to sighs of relief throughout Europe, NBC News reported that two of Trump’s wealthy White House advisers responded to Dan’s victory by “casting doubt on the state of democracy in Romania.” [David Sacks] expressed dissatisfaction with the state of Romania’s democracy. Sacks, a wealthy investor, denounced the result Monday in a post on X as ‘statistically unlikely, if not impossible.’ The statement amounted to an accusation of fraud, although Sacks provided no evidence, and he criticized Romanian authorities for disqualifying a leading pro-Russia candidate, Calin Georgescu. … [Elon Musk] weighed in separately. On X, he amplified an accusation by the head of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, who said the French government had asked him to ban conservative voices in Romania from Telegram ahead of the election.
To the extent that Republican conspiracy theorists are concerned about evidence, NBC News’ report added that the U.S. embassy in Romania sent several teams to observe the country’s electoral process, and after the votes were tallied, the interim U.S. head of mission Romania congratulated the winner. In other words, what we’re left with is an unfortunate but familiar dynamic: On the one side, there are the legitimate election results, embraced by leading democracies and U.S. diplomats, while on the other side, there are Trump’s wealthy White House advisers peddling baseless claims.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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