Donald Trump hasn’t made much of an effort to hide his over-the-top support for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, despite — or more likely, because of — the prime minister’s authoritarian takeover of his country. As an Associated Press report noted in March, the Republican’s embrace of the Hungarian leader reflects the former president’s support for “autocratic leaders who are part of a global pushback against democratic traditions.”
In other words, Trump’s affection for Orbán helps capture the GOP candidate’s antipathy toward democracy.
But when praising the prime minister, the former president also tends to use a specific word. In January, for example, he defended Orbán at a rally, telling supporters, “Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong. It’s nice to have a strongman running the country.”
During his latest Fox News interview, Trump used nearly identical phrasing. The New York Times reported:
At his town hall tonight, Donald Trump praised Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, who has embraced policies American conservatives have looked to as a model. Trump bemoaned the state of international conflicts that have raged in the last few years and seemed to suggest he could solve problems with force. “Sometimes you need a strongman; he’s a strongman,” Trump said of Orban.
Right off the bat, the fact that Trump and his allies have embraced Orbán and his authoritarian approach says a great deal about the radicalization of Republican politics and the party’s weakening support for democracy.
But let’s not brush past Trump’s newly stated belief that countries sometimes “need a strongman.”
Circling back to our earlier coverage, the most benign explanation for such rhetoric is that the former president knows effectively nothing about political science, political history, and political philosophy, and as such, it’s possible that he has no idea what a “strongman” even is. From Trump’s perspective, perhaps the word just sounds nice because it combines “strong” and “man.” It’s not as if people should want a weak man leading a country, right?
But as NYU’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who literally wrote the book on the subject, told Time magazine a few years ago, “Strongmen are a subset of authoritarian who require total loyalty, bend democracy around [their] own needs, and use different forms of machismo to interact with their people and with other rulers.”
All of which brings us to the uncharitable explanation: Trump knows full well what a “strongman” leadership style entails, and when he declared that countries sometimes “need a strongman,” it was the latest piece of evidence that the Republican nominee is effectively running on an authoritarian platform.
New York magazine’s Jon Chait explained that Orbán’s admirers among American conservatives tend to deny the Hungarian’s authoritarian tactics. Trump flips this approach on its head: “The mainstream conservative line is that Orbán is good, but it’s a smear to call him a strongman. Trump says he’s good because he’s a strongman.”
The Republican has repeatedly been surprisingly candid on this point.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump told a Mar-a-Lago audience in the spring. Referring to Hungarian leader’s autocratic approach, he went on to say Orbán is “a non-controversial leader because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”
As regular readers know, this keeps happening. Ahead of the 2016 elections, the then-GOP candidate was on record praising Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and even China’s handling of the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Seeing images of brave Chinese democrats standing in defiance in front of tanks, Trump sided with those who deployed the tanks.)
Ahead of the 2024 elections, he’s doing it again. The Republican nominee continues to make positive comments about the man who earned the “Butcher of Baghdad” label. He offers gushing admiration for Beijing’s “ruthless” control over China’s population. He struggles to contain how impressed he is with his benefactor in Moscow.
And he applauds Orbán because he simply dictates, “This is the way it’s going to be.”
Trump keeps telling everyone the kind of leader he wants to be. Voters would be wise to listen.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.