Today in Florida, Viktor Orbán will meet Donald Trump, the man who, as strange as it would have seemed only a year ago, is likely to be the next President of the United States. This is an extraordinary turn of events for both Hungary and its prime minister, who has never hidden his fondness for Trump. For once, things are looking up, and as hard as it may be for Magyar conservatives to be optimistic, now is as good a time for optimism as any since Fidesz won a fourth term in 2022. Why?
First and foremost, because Trump has a commanding lead in the presidential contest.
This was not supposed to happen. Trump left office in 2021 in disgrace over the January 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. And liberal district attorneys in various U.S. locales filed charges against Trump, which, aside from the (dubious) legal merits of the claims, serve the political purpose of trying to crush his presidential aspirations.
It has not worked out for the American left, at all.
Trump only became more popular with his base after the criminal charges were filed, as these MAGA voters regarded the indictments as more evidence that the system is out to destroy Trump. In Atlanta, the jurisdiction where Trump faced the most legal danger, District Attorney Fani Willis has become mired in a lurid corruption scandal involving her secret lover, a private attorney whom she chose to prosecute Trump in the election fraud case.
Willis might not be disqualified from the case, but the trial will surely be postponed until after the November election, which from a political point of view, is as good as a dismissal of the charged.
Meanwhile, Trump has had the great good fortune to face Joe Biden, a decrepit man of 81, whose every foray into the public sphere shows that he is well into senility. A recent New York Times poll [https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/times-siena-poll-coverage] was filled with bad news for the incumbent president. Trump is leading him among registered voters. Most Americans, even those who say they will vote for Biden, believe he is too old to be an effective president. The improving economy is not helping Biden. And the disaster on the U.S. southern border, which has seen millions of illegal migrants cross under the Biden administration, has been a catastrophe for the president’s standing with voters.
What’s more, the Democrats are stuck with fragile old Biden. It is effectively too late to replace him, and if they did, the party would be compelled to choose Vice President Kamala Harris, who is even less popular than Biden. If they didn’t, the Democratic Party leadership would be accused by the media and factions within the party of sexism and racism for overlooking a woman of color. The Democrats are trapped by their own woke political standards.
Of course, anything can happen between now and the November election, but
things are looking sunny for Team Trump. And that’s great news for Hungary.
Why?
With Donald Trump in the White House, the abusive relationship between Washington and Budapest will end.
U.S. Ambassador David Pressman will be replaced by someone who actually understands the need for an ambassador to be diplomatic. And with the European Union having reduced itself to being a vassal of the Greater American Empire, Hungary will likely be able to count on support from Washington in its everlasting disputes with Brussels.
Some American commentators have complained that Prime Minister Orbán has stepped outside of his proper role by involving himself in American presidential politics. Presumably they do this with a straight face, utterly unaware of their own hypocrisy.
Washington has been interfering in Hungarian politics for some years. Only one year ago, USAID director Samantha Power visited Budapest to spread millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to so-called pro-democracy organizations. With the Biden Administration trying to plant the seeds for a Color Revolution in a NATO ally, charges that Viktor Orbán is playing outside the rules by embracing Trump are absurd.
This week, Victoria Nuland, the number three official in the U.S. State Department, abruptly retired. Nuland, a prominent neoconservative Democrat, has been a central strategic figure in every administration of this century, except for Trump’s. She left her fingerprints on the biggest strategic failures in U.S. foreign policy, including the Iraq War, the Libyan intervention that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi but turned Libya into a failed state and portal for African migration into Europe, and U.S. manipulation of Ukrainian politics.
In 2014, the Russians famously captured audio of a phone conversation between Nuland, who had charge of the State Department’s Ukraine portfolio at the time, and the then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, in which Nuland discussed Washington’s machinations to install a pro-American regime after the overthrow of the elected government in the Maidan revolution. In a typical eruption of American imperial arrogance, Nuland said on the call, ‘Fuck the EU’.
If Trump returns to power, the Nulands will likely be swept out of the State Department; Trump’s team knows now that they failed in his first administration to deal with the Deep State and are not going to make that mistake again. Yet Nuland’s anti-EU attitude may be retained—but this time, oriented in a way favorable to Hungary.
This Trump-Orbán summit bodes well for Hungary. But it also bodes well for the United States, especially for American conservatism. Trump has much to learn from Orbán, who understands the currents of Western politics better than U.S. conservatives do. Most of all, Orbán grasps that old-fashioned liberalism, which attempted to establish and defend a neutral public square, is dead, and the left killed it. In the U.S., Democrats and left-wing figures in civil society openly politicize liberal institutions, while pretending to be neutral.
For example, there is a huge controversy in the US over pornographic LGBT material geared towards children in school libraries. Democratic politicians, media voices, and others on the left scream bloody murder about conservatives wanting to ban books. When ordinary voters see what is actually in these books—drawings of oral sex, scenes of sodomy between teenagers, and so forth—they are shocked and disgusted. But the media rarely if ever talk about the details, leaving uninformed people to conclude that Republicans are behaving censoriously.
Conservative politicians almost never respond effectively to these charges. They are terrified of being called bigots, or culturally backwards, by the media. Plus, their heads are still stuck in some ways in a classical liberal world, where the government should keep its hands off the libraries and universities. That would be fine if the left felt the same way. But it doesn’t and hasn’t for a long time.
The American system, and the American character, is different from Hungary, so it’s not possible to reproduce Orbánism faithfully in the United States. Nevertheless, Orbán can and should school Trump and his aides about the importance of recognizing that the left has brought the culture war to all our institutions, whether we on the right like it or not.
Conservative political leaders have to fight the war we are in, not the one we prefer to be in.
It is also the case that Orbán leads a government that is economically to the left (by American standards), but culturally to the right. Polls show that in the United States, that is precisely where most Americans stand. Neither the Democratic Party (economically left, socially left) nor the GOP (economically right, socially right) understands this—or if they do, they cannot stand up to their donor class, and move the party on policy to where most Americans are.
Trump showed in his first term that his instincts are in the economic left/cultural right space. Orbán can help Trump put flesh on those bones, so to speak.
Finally, the sad dénouement of the Russia-Ukraine war has vindicated the position Orbán took from the beginning. Despite warmongers in Washington and Brussels denouncing him as a Putin stooge, the Hungarian prime minister insisted from the start that a negotiated peace is the only possible conclusion to spare Ukraine the devastation that has now become a fact of life. Neither Russia nor Ukraine could hope to prevail without crushing losses, Orbán figured—and he was prophetic.
Given Trump’s foreign policy instincts and given the failed outcome of U.S.–NATO strategy in Ukraine, Viktor Orbán stands to become an important foreign policy adviser to a second-term President Trump. True, they oppose each other on China policy, but for China skeptics in Fidesz, Trump in the White House could serve as a restraining force on the emerging Budapest-Beijing partnership.
Overall, the Trump-Orbán meeting is a sign of real hope for national conservative government in both the U.S. and Hungary. But what if Trump loses the election in November? Will Orbán’s failed gamble, then, hurt Hungary’s standing with America?
Maybe, but you have to ask yourself: with a Biden campaign spokesman on Thursday describing the democratically elected leader of a NATO ally as ‘Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán’, how could it possibly get any worse?
