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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has rebuked fellow Republicans over their disturbing “cult of personality” around Hungary’s illiberal ruler, Viktor Orbán.
Led by Donald Trump, conservatives have spent years fawning over Orbán, someone who has denounced “mixed-race” countries and whose political party has employed antidemocratic means to stay in power.
But tacit support for the Hungarian leader’s bigotry and illiberalism wasn’t why McConnell bashed his fellow conservatives from the Senate floor.
But tacit support for the Hungarian leader’s bigotry and illiberalism wasn’t why McConnell bashed his fellow conservatives from the Senate floor. Instead, the Kentucky Republican — who didn’t mention Trump’s name once — said he was taken aback by Republicans supporting Orbán despite his apparent allegiance to Russia, China and Iran.
“I’ve spoken before about Hungary’s decadelong drift into the orbit of the West’s most determined adversaries,” McConnell said Wednesday. “It’s an alarming trend. And nobody — certainly not the American conservatives who increasingly form a cult of personality around Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — can pretend not to see it.”
McConnell said Hungary’s leaders are “cozying up” to Russia, China and Iran both publicly and in private. He cited cooperation agreements Hungary has made with China and Iran and noted Orbán’s praise for the Russian government, such as that the Kremlin has been “hyper-rational” with its invasion of Ukraine.
“Hungary’s leaders have made no secret of their conviction that the future is one of American decline,” McConnell said.
“Subservience to revanchist powers is not an American value,” he added. “But far more importantly, it is not in America’s interests.”
It was a decent speech, even if cowardly for not mentioning Trump. But McConnell sounded like a man without a party. Because today’s GOP is all in on Orbán, and the Hungarian leader’s love for authoritarians is certainly not a deterrent.
For the Trump-led Republican Party, that’s not a bug — it’s a feature.