Senior Fellow at the Center for Fundamental Rights Bryan Leib, who is in the running to become the next US Ambassador to Hungary, has called on his potential predecessor David Pressman to remove a post from the Embassy’s website.
The public message on the social media site X (formerly Twitter) is addressed to incumbent US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and asks him to instruct Ambassador Pressman to remove the ‘inflammatory’ post. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has been nominated by President Trump to be the next head of the State Department, is also tagged in the replies by Leib.
The post in question is titled ‘Hungary’s Gambling Problem’, which is already a less than tactful title to give a public address by a foreign diplomat. It includes a video of a speech and its transcript given by Ambassador Pressman in the early morning hours of 6 November, before the outcome of the 2024 US Presidential election was known. The post, as Leib points out, is still the first thing that comes up on the homepage of the Embassy’s website.
‘Prime Minister Orbán treated this election like a card game at a casino. And he placed a very big bet. Whether he believes that he won or lost this hand, he was gambling not with money but with the US–Hungary relationship. A relationship that has been altered by his gamesmanship. The damage caused runs deeper than a four-year term of a President, because it is rooted in an impulse to transform something big and lasting, a relationship between Allies—between strong nations—into something smaller and fleeting…So Prime Minister Orbán chose to take his alliance with the United States of America into a casino, and he let it ride,’ Ambassador Pressman said at the time.
Evidently, that proverbial gamble very much paid off for PM Orbán, as Donald Trump won the election.
Ambassador Pressman has been a long-term critic of the Orbán administration in his host nation of Hungary, and, in turn, Bryan Leib has been a long-term critic of Ambassador Pressman’s opinionated way of diplomacy. Similarly, in his recent tweet, he calls out Pressman again, writing, ‘This type of political theater and activism is unacceptable,’ and adding, ‘David, you’ve done enough damage. Show some respect and dignity—remove this post immediately! This is not diplomacy and you know it. Take it down!’
Even prior to the election, Leib has stated that US–Hungary relations would return to their ‘golden age’ if President Trump were to be re-elected to the White House; and also wrote that ‘respect, not activism’ is needed again in diplomatic relations between the two nations in an opinion piece for The Washington Times.
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