Donald Trump, the proud wannabe American dictator, and Hungary’s longtime authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will meet privately next week at Mar-a-Lago. The New York Times was the first to report on the meeting at Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, citing an unnamed person who had been briefed on the plans. The source said Orbán sought the meeting with Trump. who is closing in on the Republican presidential nomination.
In his state of the nation speech, Orbán said:
“The year of 2024 could be a watershed: a `super election’ year, when people in Brussels, America, India and a dozen other places will decide what leadership they want in the current of global economic transformation and its crashing ice floes. For Hungary, all that is important from this is that we are presented with great opportunities. At the end of the year the global political scene will look very different from how it looked at the beginning of this year.”
In September 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution stating that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, and instead had become “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
Next week’s planned meeting at Mar-a-Lago is the latest example of the mutual admiration society that has developed between Trump and the Hungarian right-wing nationalist.
Orbán was the first European leader to publicly endorse Trump in 2016 and did so again in 2020. And Trump has returned the favor. In 2019, Trump granted Orbán his first private audience with a president at the White House since 1998—when Bill Clinton was president.
And in January 2022, Trump endorsed Orbán. The New York Times wrote at the time:
In his endorsement … Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Orban as a “strong leader” who has “done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, and should be allowed to continue to do so in the upcoming election.”
After Orbán easily won reelection, Trump hosted the Hungarian leader in August 2022 at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. That meeting came just as Orbán faced widespread criticism for racist, anti-immigrant remarks that echoed Nazi rhetoric. CNN quoted Orbán as saying:
“This is why we have always fought,” Orban claimed of Europeans. “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race.”
At an October 2023 campaign rally, Trump again praised Orbán.
“There’s a man, Viktor Orbán, did anyone ever hear of him?” Trump said. “He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey.”
But there’s just one problem: Turkey’s president is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But how much media outrage do you recall over his “gaffe?”
It’s not only Trump who’s embraced Orbán. The rest of the pro-Putin wing of the GOP—notably ultranationalist Steve Bannon—view Orbán’s Hungary as a model for their plans to destroy our democracy.
Bannon has described Orbán as ”the most significant guy on the scene right now” and as “Trump before Trump.” And Orbán even came to Dallas to speak at the August 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference, typically referred to as CPAC.
The Texas Tribune:
During his speech on the opening day of the convention, Orbán received a warm welcome from the crowd and told them he was an “old fashioned freedom fighter.” Upcoming elections in America and Europe, he told the audience, would define the “two fronts in the battle for western civilization.”
“This war is a culture war,” the prime minister said. “We have to revitalize our churches, our families, our universities and our community institutions.”
CPAC itself met in the Hungarian capital of Budapest in 2022 and 2023. At the latter conference, Orban received a standing ovation before he declared:
“Hungary is actually an incubator where experiments are done on the future of conservative policies. Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”
Last week, Orbán didn’t attend CPAC, held outside Washington, D.C. But an international panel included Miklós Szánthó, the director of a right-wing think tank in Hungary with close ties to Orbán, and Szabolcs Takacs, the Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., according to The Guardian.
Want to see what Trump and his MAGA cultists are planning for a second term? Consider what Hungarian opponents of Orbán’s regime told Voice of America in an article titled: “Isolated in Europe, Hungary’s Prime Minister Hopes for Return of Trump.”
For 35-year-old Marton Tompos, an opposition lawmaker with the Momentum Party, Viktor Orban has been in power almost all his adult life. “Hungarian politics is a show. Officially you can have a vote. In practice, the election system is so rigged that there is a very slim chance that any change can happen,” he said.
Critics say the prime minister has amassed power and wealth by co-opting state institutions.
“Mr. Orban’s party is so intertwined with all the institutions, all the authorities, all levels of the Hungarian state, that it’s not really, I would say, a complete democracy anymore, but a hybrid regime, a ‘spin’ dictatorship,” Tompos told VOA.
It’s quite similar to Project 2025, the plan drawn up by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations to bring an Orbán-style “illiberal democracy” to our country.
Peter Kreko, executive director of the Political Capital research group in Budapest, had this to say about the culture war being waged by Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary.
“It’s about immigration, it’s about anti-LBGTQ, it’s about anti-woke, anti-gender. It’s about ‘Make the country great again.’ It’s about our country first, other countries are second. And it’s increasingly about a notion that the Western liberal democratic order is about to collapse.”
And what about President Joe Biden? The White House’s National Security Council told The New York Times that “it was unaware of any plans for Mr. Orban to visit Mr. Biden on his trip.” However, the White House did announce that Biden will meet Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk on March 12.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said:
“The leaders will reaffirm their unwavering support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s brutal war of conquest. The meeting also coincides with the 25th anniversary of Poland’s accession to NATO and underscores the United States’ and Poland’s shared ironclad commitment to the NATO Alliance, which makes us all safer.”
Conversely, as The New Yorker noted on Feb. 15, Trump has been threatening NATO—moves that Biden described as “dumb,” “shameful,” “dangerous,” and “un-American.”
Unfortunately, as Congress’ inability to pass aid for Ukraine shows, Trump’s stances are sticking.
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