The Life in My Years

“Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model. Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Australians—everyone—can and should learn from it.” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, The Hungarian Conservative, December 2022.

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With his engaging kindly smile, the shortish, stocky fellow with his silver/white hair parted down the middle could be any child’s doting grandpa. Wife Anikó Lévai describes her husband Viktor as tender at home, a characterization that’s likely meant as a deflection from the persona of the man who’s been described as “choleric,” “unstable and impulsive,” a “hot tempered” moody man who is “quite aggressive in conflicts.

And while the stout man might be a doting father to his five children, the aggressive, “choleric” side of the man is the autocrat’s imperative, one who has ruled Hungary for 15 years while exhausting his nation’s potential and bleeding his once relatively rich country dry. While the moody Viktor Orban has made himself a pariah within the European Union, he’s become the darling of America’s morally wrecked Republican Party.

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If Project 2025 couldn’t serve as an auger for what America under Trump 2.0 could be (it was literally in writing that anyone could download), then anyone paying attention could have looked to Orban’s Hungary for a sneak peek of a Trumpian America. But the GOP’s love affair with Orban didn’t have anything to do with the price at the pump, so who cared?

If Orban didn’t show up on the radar of an American electorate that could’ve seen incoming trouble, he was on blast when it came to Trump, the GOP and all of the usual right wing mouthpieces who had discovered a role model. And for a party that has become a dishonorable vestige of its former self that blast was a positive.

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In May of last year, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held a convention in Budapest (that’s in Hungary, for those who are still dim on matters international), it’s third such event in Hungary.

When it came to Orban, name brand Republicans were over the moon. So smitten were they that they made your stereotypical teenage girl with a crush seem like a restrained, disciplined monk.

After meeting Orban, Kari Lake, the Arizona woman whose hobby is election denial gushed, “he changed my life (one wonders if Lake has washed her hand since it shook Orban’s). Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland called Hungary “one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.” Steve Bannon described Orban as “one of my heroes in the world today, in addition to President Trump.”

After hosting Orban for a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in March of last year, Donald Trump said of the autocrat, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.”

Sean Hannity, the commentator whose deer in the headlights facial expression is a mask of perpetual confusion, said of Orban, in a statement that, after a quarter of a year of Trump would be hilarious if America’s current situation wasn’t so tragic, “He is defending democracy against the unaccountable billionaires, the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and certain western governments. He is fighting for democracy against those forces which would like to bury it.”

Who is Viktor Orban?
The 63 year old Orban, a lawyer by trade, began his political career as a liberal. In what would become an ironic twist, Orban helped start a liberal leaning college journal titled Századvég (End of the Century), funded by none other than the Republicans’ arch enemy, bogeyman, and go-to pinata, George Soros.

After Orban had gone through his conversion to autocracy, he turned on Soros, smearing the philanthropist as a sinister leader of the global elite. Because that’s what autocrats do, they demand complete loyalty as they betray the very people they used to have friendly ties with, while smearing those new enemies with autocratic boilerplate gleaned from the dictator’s pocket dictionary. (If all of this sounds familiar it should, as turning on former allies and out of favor members of his administration is as much a hobby for Trump as lying and cheating at golf).

In June of 1989, then liberal Orban gave a speech in which he demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. This early Orban, who served as Premier between 1998 to 2002 championed policies such as the abolition of college tuition fees and universal maternity benefits. Orban brought Hungary into NATO in 1999 at a time during which the country was enjoying a revitalized economy. To be clear, this was not the Viktor Orban that the Republican Party had a crush on.

The Orban who would become Steve Bannon’s “hero” was reelected to the premiership in 2010. The 2010 model year was the Orban who took a hard turn to the right. It was the Orban who amended Hungary’s constitution 12 times during his first year in office, with changes that included a shift towards so-called traditional values, nationalism, and references to Christianity. It was the Orban whose party banned same-sex marriage and barred same-sex couples from adopting children.

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If Project 2025 was the printed playbook for a Trump autocracy, Orban’s Hungary was the working prototype.

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Suppressing the media
At a 2022 CPAC conference in Budapest, Orban said, “We must have our own media.” By 2022, Orban already had his “own media,” having put the financial and legal squeeze on what had once been a relatively independent media. “Origo”, one of Hungary’s more popular news companies, was strong armed until it was essentially bought off by an Orban friendly company.

Hungarian journalist, András Pethő, in an article for The Atlantic, describes parallels between Orban’s ultimate control of the press and recent moves by the Trump administration to cow the press.

Petho writes, “I see ominous signs in the U.S. that feel similar to the early phases of what we experienced here. When I read about the Associated Press being banned from White House events, that reminds me of how my colleagues at Direkt36 have been denied entry to Orbán’s rare press conferences. When I see the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump, that reminds me of how big corporations and their wealthy executives, including the owner of my former workplace, bent the knee to Orbán. When I read about ABC settling a Trump lawsuit of dubious merit—and CBS contemplating the same—it brings to mind the way the courts and the government itself can be used to manipulate and bully media organizations into submission.”

Dismantling the government bureaucracy
One of Orban’s first moves towards autocracy was to dismantle the Hungarian civil service structure and replace it with loyalists. Orban was successful due largely to his unquestioned leadership of Hungary’s Fidesz party and the subservience of Hungary’s legislature. Does any of this sound like the work of DOGE, and of Mike Johnson and the feckless GOP House of Representatives?

Over the course of two-thirds of his crucial first 100 days Trump, largely through the work of Elon Musk and DOGE, has decimated the civil service structure. Unlike his first term during which Trump staffed his administration largely with people who, while in many cases were unqualified, for the most part, still valued the Constitution and acted as guard rails, this second iteration of Trump has nominated a gaggle of loyalists whose first duty is to Trump rather than the Constitution. The Senate, cowed by the threat of Trump’s retribution, rubber stamped the president’s nominations, even those nominees who were clearly seen as incompetent and dangerous to the security and well being of the nation.

Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson has shown himself to be a shiftless Trump loyalist of the first order while Congress has abdicated its responsibility to act as a check, in favor of fealty to Trump.

Gay rights
In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, anti-LGBTQ laws were adopted in 2021, which make it illegal to share LGBTQ-related information with minors in advertising, media, schools, bookshops and in family interactions (emphasis mine). The law also equates pedophiles with LGBTQ persons. Just recently, Hungary adopted a law making Hungarian Pride marches and gatherings illegal.

After taking office, Trump signed a number of anti-trans executive Orders.

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Racist anti-immigrant policies
Hungary systematically detains asylum seekers and places them, including families with children in detention centers. Orban often uses anti-immigrant rhetoric such as the time he said, “We do not want to see a significant minority among ourselves that has different cultural characteristics and background. We would like to keep Hungary as Hungary.”

During a speech in Romania in July of 2022, Orban said, “We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race.” In the same speech he characterized countries where European and non-Europeans mingle as “no longer nations”. Orban was scheduled to be an honored guest at CPAC two days later. His rhetoric should have served as a klaxon, an excuse to uninvite him to the convention. But in fact, Orban was speaking the “replacement theory,” rhetoric of the contemporary Republican Party.

And so, Orban spoke at CPAC and said, “Migration has split Europe in two — or I could say that it has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.”

A year and a half later, Donald Trump declared that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

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Stifling free thought
A key component in the establishment of an autocracy is to attack traditional liberal democratic institutions, among them, places of higher education, because freedom of thought and expression are anathema to the dictator.

Using the traditional right wing pretext of promoting “traditional family values,” Orban’s government has banned women’s and gender studies from universities. The government has taken over the administration of universities. In Orban’s Hungary, state appointed trustees run foundations that assume financial authority over the nation’s universities which critics say threaten the autonomy and freedom of institutions of higher learning.

Since Trump came to office, he has threatened to withhold federal funds to universities that don’t fall in line with his ideological demands, including the removal of all DEI programs, and the banning of trans athletes from participating in women’s sports.

Columbia University, a private institution, was financially extorted into giving the government control over the Middle Eastern Studies Department, while requiring Columbia to ban masks on campus. Trump tried, and failed, to almost literally assume governance of Harvard University and when the venerable university pushed back Trump threatened Harvard with financial retribution.

Hungary as a crystal ball
Trump sycophant Steve Bannon, the guy who looks like the town drunk in a bad Western movie has called Hungary “a model for the world.”

If Hungary is a model it’s one that was put together using cheap glue. Compared to the rest of the EU, Hungary is a beat up old Yugo compared to the EU’s Ferrari. In an article in The Atlantic, author Anne Applebaum, writes, “Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.”

Donald Trump should be given credit where credit is due. What took Viktor Orban years to achieve in destroying a nation and becoming a pariah among its former allies, Donald Trump and his merry band of acolytes, cronies, clowns and fools is accomplishing in, to use a term from Trump 1.0, “warp speed.”

And maybe this is a good thing. Orban’s transformation of Hungary was so gradual and deliberate that nobody seemed to notice until it had become a fait accompli. Trump’s ham handed, sledgehammer approach has been far less than stealthy and has thus galvanized opposition, though one could argue that the opposition has still been too sluggish.

Alarms unheard
Orban and his close relationship with the GOP, and Donald Trump in particular, could’ve been, should’ve been, a warning sign for American voters. It should have set off alarms years ago but, as I’ve written a number of times on this site, American voters have never been interested in the shady company that their future president was keeping. Personal comfort and immediate gratification too often take precedence over the greater good and empathy for the marginalized. And democracy? Please – too abstract.

As a prime example, few people were bothered over Trump’s dinner guests two years before election day. There was Ye who proudly called himself a Nazi, declared his love for Hitler and who has a side gig selling t-shirts bearing a swastika; and Nick Fuentes who has long been effusive in his admiration for Hitler. Maybe the public could be excused because the mainstream media barely uttered a peep over a major presidential candidate schmoozing with Nazis.

Democracy, basic freedoms and rights, and the creepy company that the Republican presidential candidate and the bulk of the party leadership was keeping; all of that should have been the story. But the media had already normalized behavior that in normal times would have been scandalous front page news.

It’s not too late. Americans can learn about Orban and his relationship with the Republican Party and they can look at Hungary as a foreshadowing and move for a course change. But what am I thinking? Americans? International awareness? Democracy? Thought? Empathy? If minds and hearts don’t change, the future of America looks very Hungarian.