Last week the US Embassy in Budapest announced that from 7 March, Robert Palladino will assume leadership as Chargé d’Affaires. The senior US diplomat, who played a significant role in shaping the first Trump administration’s foreign policy, has already arrived in Budapest and welcomed Hungarians in a post on X. However, this did not deter his predecessor, former US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman, from continuing his smear campaign against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his government. After The New York Times and NPR, Joe Biden’s envoy appeared on CNN, discussing his favourite topic with Christiane Amanpour.
Setting aside the usual accusations—biased claims about restrictions on media, academia, the judiciary, and civil society, as well as allegations of high-level corruption—Pressman’s recent interview contained a particularly revealing moment. At one point, he effectively confessed how he and the former Democratic administration truly perceive Hungary and its people. Spoiler alert: it is not far from what we have been saying for the past years.
‘Hungary is the site of one of the great struggles of our time, which is the battle between democracy and authoritarianism,’ Pressman stated, twisting Orbán’s earlier remark about Hungary being a lone conservative island in the ‘woke ocean’ of Europe. His perception of his former host country explains much about his destructive tenure, which drove US–Hungary relations to an all-time low.
First, it makes clear that the former ambassador’s main objective was to defeat ‘authoritarianism’—by which, in his narrative, he meant the Hungarian government. And by ‘defeat’, he evidently meant attempting to oust Viktor Orbán from power. For any diplomat to pursue such a goal in a foreign country is unacceptable, even more so when that country is a NATO ally of the United States.
‘Since Pressman viewed Hungary as a “battleground”, it is unsurprising that he showed little concern for the damage he inflicted in pursuit of his “glorious” goal’
Since Pressman viewed Hungary as a ‘battleground’, it is unsurprising that he showed little concern for the damage he inflicted in pursuit of his ‘glorious’ goal. After all, everything is fair in love and war. That logic explains the sanctions imposed on officials close to the Hungarian government—including Antal Rogán, Chief of Staff to Viktor Orbán—, the social media smear campaigns funded by US taxpayers, the termination of the double taxation treaty between the two countries, and so on.
What is particularly revealing about Pressman’s latest interview is how quickly he contradicts himself. After essentially admitting to waging an all-out skirmish against Viktor Orbán over the past two years, he then claimed that the Hungarian government made a ‘strategic error’ by portraying him as a ‘marauding outside force that was attempting to overthrow the Hungarian government.’
One might assume that this so-called strategic error lay in the fact that Pressman was not actually a foreign force attempting to unseat a democratically elected government. But that is not his argument. Instead, he asserts that the Hungarian government’s real mistake was giving him a platform—by bringing him into the domestic political discourse and media. ‘They ended up giving me and my team a platform that is, as you know, pretty unusual for a US ambassador. And we certainly tried to leverage that to communicate with Hungarians,’ he said. Notably, he made no effort to refute the accusation that he had a hidden agenda to overthrow the government. And as the saying goes: silence gives consent.
Yet after two long years, Pressman has ‘fled’ the battleground following Donald Trump’s return to the White House. While he continues his efforts to wage war remotely, US–Hungary relations are already on the mend. Last week, Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, where the latter assured him that the Trump administration is fully open to reviewing and repealing the retaliatory measures of the Pressman era.
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