When Dwight Eisenhower wanted to ensure that Japanese voters stuck with U.S.-friendly prime minister Nobusuke Kishi in the 1958 elections over socialist and communist challengers, the clandestine machinery of the national-security state whirred into action. American spies recruited key officials within Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party to funnel inside information to the Central Intelligence Agency and arranged a secret meeting at a Tokyo hotel with a former prime minister to deliver campaign funds to the party — in events so deliberately obscured that historians and intelligence analysts began to piece it together only a half-century later.
When Donald Trump wanted to make sure that one of Kishi’s successors kept Japan’s government in Liberal Democratic Party hands, he dispensed with the cloak and dagger. He just tweeted it out.
“The Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has already proven to be a strong, powerful, and wise Leader, and one that truly loves her Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post addressed directly to Japanese voters three days before they cast ballots in January. “it is my Honor to give a Complete and Total Endorsement of her, and what her highly respected Coalition is representing.”
The surreptitious foreign election interference of the Cold War has given way to brazen cross-border campaigning from Washington and Moscow, nowhere more visible than in the run-up to last week’s Hungarian parliamentary vote, where both governments let at least some of their efforts to aid Prime Minister Viktor Orbán play out in the open.
The White House appeared to draw from the same playbook it uses to boost down-ballot Republicans closer to home. There were supportive visits from the vice president and Cabinet officials, engineered for amplification on social-media, backing up Trump’s promise that “the full economic might of the United States” would help Hungarians if they voted the right way. Then a get-out-the-vote reminder from Trump, along with the same “complete and total endorsement” language he used for Takaichi — and indistinguishable from how he backed candidates for Texas agriculture commissioner and Nassau County executive.
While Russia continued to work from an older model — reportedly plotting covert social-media campaigns from its Budapest embassy and even allegedly scheming a potential botched assassination of Orbán by its intelligence services — it also played explicitly to Hungarian public opinion. In the weeks before the vote, the Kremlin promised Hungary would receive preferential access to Russian gas supplies and released Hungarian prisoners of war.
The beneficiary of those gestures lost overwhelmingly, but Orbán’s defeat is unlikely to mark an end to American or Russian use of the tactics they used to boost his standing in the eyes of Hungarian voters. The calculations that led great powers to select the more public of the available options are likely going to lead them to make the same call again elsewhere.
“My guess is that what has changed is that at least some publics are somewhat less opposed for foreign involvement in their elections than they used to be,” said Dov Levin, a University of Hong Kong international-relations professor who has emerged as a leading scholar of the ways countries muck around in others’ votes. “These days, it’s considered almost a matter of fact.”
Levin’s interest in the phenomenon dates to 2010 when, as a graduate student in UCLA’s political-science program, he stumbled upon an account of Italy’s 1948 election in which the United States was credited with playing a crucial role keeping the center-right Christian Democrats in office. After Harry Truman recommended the U.S. government “make full use of its political, economic, and if necessary military power” to block a communist-affiliated left coalition from winning Italy’s first post-war election, the Central Intelligence Agency sent millions of dollars to rival parties and ran a clandestine propaganda campaign to boost the incumbent prime minister Alcide De Gasperi.
American officials valued secrecy from the outset, under the presumption that Italian voters would recoil if they knew a foreign government was trying to sway their votes — all while trumpeting democracy’s virtues as part of Italy’s departure from authoritarianism. When Frank Sinatra offered to barnstorm Italy with Italian-American celebrities to influence the vote, the State Department turned him away.
Few political scientists had ever dedicated much scrutiny to what this meant for the campaigns affected, as international-relations scholars focused on guns and butter and those who studied electoral persuasion may have found the subject too bewilderingly global. Enchanted by the opening, Levin decided to make the how and why of foreign election interventions the focus of his dissertation research.
Levin mined press accounts, government records and spy memoirs to create a dataset that included every known instance of foreign intervention by the United States and the Soviet Union, then Russia, between 1946 and 2000. Levin identified 117 partisan electoral interventions during that period and coded a few key variables for each: capturing a range of geographies (touching every continent) and methods (from extending help with polling analysis to threatening to pull loan guarantees). When looking over the entire dataset, Levin wrote, “one important fact that stands out is the covertness of most such interventions.”
That choice was rational, Levin concluded, the result of parties and candidates concluding it would not benefit them to be seen as connected to foreign powers, and their backers abroad deferring to the local read of public opinion. “There is always when it comes to overt versus covert the basic question of: can I take the risk of a potential backlash?” says Levin.
His book Meddling at the Ballot Box was published in 2020, made newly relevant by Russian efforts to help elect Trump that were documented in exhaustive detail by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — an obscure tactical corner of 20th century geostrategy pushed to the 21st century front page.
“Vladimir Putin gave everyone you could call a ‘real-life illustration’ of what it is, and that it’s still relevant in the post-Cold War era,” says Levin. “And that certainly increased greatly interest and attention in this topic.”
The Kremlin did not intend for its role to be public, certainly not in real time. The hackers who penetrated the Democratic National Committee in search of embarrassing materials worked to cover their tracks, and the social-media trolls who stoked domestic tensions from afar disguised themselves to appear as though it was organic political activity by Americans. Putin denied that the hackers and trolls had been working at his government’s direction even as he winked at them as “patriotically minded” private citizens.
“I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected,” Trump wrote in May 2019, after the publication of Mueller’s report.
But the experience seems to have awakened an awareness by Trump that he, too, could be bolder in deploying both the “two major types of political warfare — one overt and the other covert,” as U.S. diplomat and foreign-policy strategist George Kennan defined the options in 1948.
When control of Israel’s Knesset had been on the ballot that April, days before Mueller’s report was released, Trump had angled to boost his close ally Benjamin Netanyahu by upending U.S. policy to recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel. Netanyahu recognized it as the type of campaign assistance that Levin classifies as “a costly benefit by the intervener to the target which was non-economic/material in its nature/main value,” saying he would rename the contested region “Trump Heights.”
Yet when another ally, former British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, launched a campaign to lead his country’s governing Conservative Party that summer Trump offered support so uncommonly direct that Levin does not even account for it in his typology of “main electoral intervention methods.”
Trump gave an interview to The Sun to make what appears to be his first overt presidential endorsement of a foreign candidate. Johnson “would do a very good job,” Trump told the London tabloid, justifying his decision to choose him over Conservative rivals by likening it to his involvement in domestic Republican primaries.
“I could help anybody if I endorse them. I mean, we’ve had endorsement where they have gone up for forty, fifty points at a shot,” Trump said. “Now that is here, but I understand over there would be a great endorsement.”
In the years since, Trump has made explicit campaigning for foreign leaders a staple of his approach to international affairs. In addition to Takaichi and Orbán, Trump has gone on to endorse Poland’s Andrzej Duda, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Honduras’s Nasry Asfura, to mixed results from local electorates.
“President Trump is a great American statesman who will speak or work with anyone, and he makes no secret about those he likes or supports because he is the most honest and transparent President in history,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said by email. “Many individuals who align with President Trump’s ideology are getting elected to top offices around the world because everyone wants to replicate his immeasurable success on behalf of the American people.”
Levin has tracked these developments with a bemused scrutiny, sometimes struggling to differentiate between the instances in which Trump has decided he can best help his allies by screaming his endorsement in all-caps and the times when maybe he just can’t help himself.
“U.S. government officials were very careful in what they would say about foreign countries, foreign leaders, and so forth — usually extremely careful to avoid saying any word right before an election,” says Levin. “I would not necessarily say that each and every comment from Donald Trump before an election in a foreign country is necessarily strategic and thought out. But in cases where there is more than just a random Truth Social message, it looks like there is some kind of strategic thinking more or less in line with how these types of interventions are usually done. “
Ironically, given Trump’s disdain for alliances and “America First” rhetoric, election interference may be the area where he demonstrates the most natural globalist instincts. He institutionalized the practice in his administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which defined “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” to be a tenet of American foreign policy.
The Hungarian campaign showed that commitment in action. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Budapest in February, a trip that had all the hallmarks of a Cabinet member’s campaign swing to boost a vulnerable incumbent in his or her home state — with the same coded language that makes it possible to use taxpayer funds for partisan politicking.
“I don’t think it is any mystery – and should not be a mystery to anyone here – how the president feels about you,” Rubio said at a press conference with Orbán, remarks that the prime minister’s team quickly clipped into a web video distributed through government channels. “We want this country to do well. It’s in our national interest — especially as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country.”
Unlike in the Cold War, the White House and Kremlin were on the same side in Hungary’s domestic politics. Foreign minister Péter Szijjártó returned from a visit to Moscow in March with both two Hungarian-Ukrainian prisoners of war whose release had been a cause of Orbán’s and Russian guarantees that its oil would continue flowing to Hungary.
As the election approached, the White House dispensed with Rubio’s diplomatic language. Vance joined Orbán for a stadium rally days before the vote, where he put Trump on speakerphone from Washington to reiterate his “Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary,” as Trump put it in both a post on his Truth Social network and a web video that Orbán shared.
“We didn’t go because we expected Viktor Orbán to cruise to an election victory,” Vance said in a Fox News interview after Orbán’s defeat days later. “We went because it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time.”
The day after Hungary’s election, Reuters reported that U.S. officials in Paris had recently met with leaders of France’s National Rally party, including Jordan Bardella, who is expected to be the party’s next presidential nominee. The Reuters story acknowledged that the Americans might be casting about for a horse in next year’s race but that Bardella’s party might not actually want the support — or at least prefer it be kept private.