In his sweeping attempts to remake the federal government, President Donald Trump is using a playbook first perfected in Hungary by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
While Trump’s actions are often described as “unprecedented,” his rapid campaign to seize control of independent democratic institutions echoes similar moves by Orbán as he led an autocratic takeover of Hungary starting in 2010.
In a meeting at the White House on Friday, Trump praised Orbán and said more political leaders should follow his example.
“I stick up for Viktor Orbán. Not a lot of people do because in many cases they are jealous,” Trump said while while sitting alongside the prime minister. “They wish they did what he did. They’d have no problems if they did what he did.”
Since returning to office, Trump has taken a number of steps to consolidate power and weaken his perceived political enemies, firing federal workers en masse, canceling grants to universities and threatening to tax or strip the tax-exempt status of their endowments, vowing to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations over their news coverage and attempting to suspend security clearances of law firms, among other things.
Experts say these actions are similar to Orbán’s program after he returned to office.
Experts on recent Hungarian politics say these actions are similar to Orbán’s program after he returned to office in 2010.
“The main thing is that you control everything by controlling money,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a constitutional scholar at Princeton University who has lived in and studied Hungary for decades. “So Trump controls universities by threatening their grants, their tax-exempt status. It’s all financial stuff when you get down to it, and that was something that Orbán pioneered.”
“The parallels between what Trump has been doing and what Orbán did are, shall we say, not accidental,” Scheppele added.
Over the years, Trump has welcomed Orbán to both his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, effusively praising him as the “boss” of his country. He has praised Orbán’s hard-line stance on crime and immigration and more recently suggested he’s backing Orbán’s bid for another term as prime minister next year.
Orbán has overseen sweeping constitutional changes have effectively allowed his ruling party to consistently win a supermajority.
While Hungary still has elections, Orbán has overseen sweeping constitutional changes and gerrymandering of legislative boundaries that have effectively allowed his ruling party to consistently win a supermajority of Hungary’s parliament.
Like Trump, some of the most prominent players on the American right have talked openly about Orbán providing a blueprint for a Christian nationalist takeover of the federal government. In 2023, Orbán was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual meeting of top conservatives, in which he hailed Hungary as a blueprint.
“There is one thing that makes our country an important place: the fact that Hungary is an incubator, where experiments are being conducted for the conservative politics of the future,” he said. “Hungary is the place where we not only talked about defeating progressive liberals and turning in a conservative Christian political direction, but the place where we have actually done it.”
In 2018, while speaking in Hungary, former Trump adviser and prominent MAGA media personality Steve Bannon called Orbán the “Trump before Trump.”
Bannon has recently endorsed several ideas that would effectively eliminate guardrails against a more autocratic government, suggesting that Trump might have a legal way around the 22nd Amendment’s limit of two terms for presidents, and calling for eliminating the Senate filibuster in order to push through Trump’s agenda.
“We gotta put aside these structural barriers,” Bannon said at a Conservative Partnership Institute event a day after Republican candidates lost key races around the country. “We have to understand that if we don’t take this to the maximum — a maximalist strategy now, with a sense of urgency, and in doing this, seize the institutions — if we don’t do that now, we lose this chance forever. Because you’re never gonna have another Trump.”
Beyond Trump, the Christian nationalist effort is one that a growing number of figures across today’s American conservative movement would like to see fully gain control of the U.S. government. Christian nationalist ideology is already foundational to Hungary’s political state.
“We are the only government in Europe which considers itself as a modern Christian government,” Orbán said from the White House. He added that other governments in Europe “are liberal, leftist governments.”
In his early years, Orbán would quite explicitly state his vision for a new form of domestic governance — much in the way that Trump has publicly espoused his own views of a deconstructed federal government that rids itself of bureaucratic entities that, he contends, stifle the efforts of the president.
In a 2014 speech, Orbán directly asserted his desire to transform Hungary into an “illiberal state,” in which the government shapes society’s institutions.
Despite American constitutional scholars and historians of authoritarianism warning about Orbán’s work to effectively dissolve Hungary’s democracy, Trump’s admiration for the autocratic leader is a constant refrain.
Speaking about Orbán on the campaign trail in early 2024, Trump said, “It’s nice to have a strongman running your country.”
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