Donald Trump on Thursday is scheduled to have another authoritarian playdate with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The meeting, juxtaposed to the NATO summit President Joe Biden has been hosting this week, highlights the stark contrast between a campaign that’s chosen to align itself with dictatorial foreign leaders and an administration that’s aligned with democratic ones.
By the week’s end, Biden will have delivered a forceful speech and held various meetings in support of maintaining America’s alliances and the democratic values they uphold. Trump, on the other hand, will have admitted he barely knew what NATO was before he became president and will have met with one of the group’s most unreliable members in Orban.
Trump and his followers have openly celebrated Orban’s illiberal ways over the last few years, with right-wing activists going so far as to host a Conservative Political Action Conference event in Hungary in 2022. In March of this year, Trump claimed “there’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban,” going on to call him “fantastic” and boasting about his authoritarian style. “He’s a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right?” Trump gushed. “He’s the boss.”
Orban, for the record, has condemned “mixed race” nations, has cracked down on press freedoms, has said his vision for Hungary is “illiberal democracy,” and has overseen the rigging of Hungary’s political system to favor his political party over others. In many ways, he has done to his country what Trump and his allies aspire to accomplish in the United States.
Which apparently includes turning Hungary into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proxy. Orban has turned Hungary into a dubious — if not deliberately destructive — NATO partner through his efforts to distance his country from the group and his coziness with Putin. Just last week, Orban met with Putin privately to discuss Ukraine and emerged from the meeting parroting Putin’s talking points.
Trump, of course, said in February that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t pay into the group what he thinks they should — a theme he has returned to repeatedly (as my colleague Steve Benen wrote in 2020, Trump “still doesn’t fully understand the basics of the alliance’s finances”). And after their meeting earlier this year, Orban said that Trump told him that if he’s elected president, he won’t give “a penny” to Ukraine, essentially allowing Russia to continue its deadly power grab.
Thursday’s meeting between the two men is likely to touch on Orban's unilateral machinations to engineer a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. But the meeting itself is a revealing signal of how a Trump administration is likely to alienate America’s allies, with potentially disastrous results — in contrast to a Biden administration that would continue to maintain those bonds.