A great leader in Europe. Viktor Orban.
He's the he's the Prime Minister of Hungary.
He's a very great leader.
Very strong man. Some people don't like him because he's
too strong.
It's nice to have a strong man running your country.
Viktor Orban. Did anyone ever hear of him He's probably
like one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world
and
he he's the leader of
right. He's the leader of Turkey.
Viktor Orban. And he's the head of Hungary.
And he runs it tough.
Let me tell you. He runs it properly.
He runs it strong. You
got it right twice there.
Of course it's hungry. Not Turkey.
Turkey, folks. Hi again. It's 5:00 in New York.
That was, of course, the disgraced,
twice impeached ex President Donald Trump,
who has made no secret of his affinity for,
and, dare we say obsession with the world's autocrats and
dictators.
A dangerous club of what he says admiringly,
are strong men, leaders who are so strong
Trump is desperate to elbow his way into that group.
It's a clique that includes Vladimir Putin,
Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un,
to name a few. And now one of the members
of the Dictators Club is right here on American soil
for an epic
hang out with America's wannabe dictator.
The autocrat in question is Hungary's Prime Minister,
Viktor Orban. He has been called,
quote, the ultimate 21st century dictator,
a title he earned by,
quote, chipping away at his country's democratic systems through policies
that are hostile to LGBTQ people and immigrants and crackdowns
on the Free Press and the judiciary.
Is that ringing any bells today?
On this day, the State of the Union,
Viktor Orban is in Washington DC meeting with the head
of the Heritage Foundation,
the ultra conservative activist think tank and mastermind of Project
2025 that plans, to quote,
in their own words, dismantle the US government and replace
it with Trump's vision.
Tomorrow Orban is heading South.
Tomorrow, Lago to meet with Donald Trump and discuss how
to
end the war in Ukraine.
And given that Orban is the guy who's been cozying
up to Putin and holding up European aid to Ukraine,
that conversation should be interesting.
Now, Trump rolling out the red carpet for Viktor Orban
might not sound like such a huge deal,
but it has massive implications.
Whereas the New Republic would say,
quote Trump's Mar a Lago,
meeting with Viktor Orban should terrify us all.
As Americans, We may not be overly familiar with who
Viktor Orban is and his own personal journey into autocracy.
But if you know one thing,
know this. Orban's calling card is chaos and cruelty.
Again, ringing some familiar notes,
right? Importantly, experts who study strong men and study how
democracies backslide into autocracy say
Orban's brand of dictatorship could be easier to replicate for
wannabe dictators like Donald Trump.
Easier to imitate than, say,
murdering your enemies in broad daylight like Vladimir Putin or
the militant authoritarianism of Kim Jong Un.
As Amanda Carpenter at Protect Democracy warns,
quote, Orban is a model retaking the executive office and
then consolidating power for maximum authoritarian impact.
Like Trump, Orban was ousted by voters and then spent
time out of office making plans to win the next
election,
seize control of the levers of power,
and abolish democratic checks in the system,
ensuring he would never lose again.
Moreover, Orban is a textbook example of why autocrats are
often much more dangerous the second term in office.
They learn from their mistakes,
their shortcomings, and above all,
the things that caused them to lose power previously.
Orban is well on his way to staying in office
for the rest of his life.
On that, too, Trump aims to do the same.
And that is exactly what we are seeking to examine
with our series American Autocracy.
It can happen here. And that is where we start
the hour with some of our favorite reporters and friends.
Staff writer for The Atlantic and Applebaum is with us.
She is the author of Twilight of Democracy,
The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism,
plus writer and editor for Protect Democracy.
The aforementioned Amanda Carpenter's here.
Her newsletter, if you can keep it,
is a must read. And Rachel
Kleinfeld's here, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International
National piece.
Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.
And what are your thoughts?
I mean, at at one level,
of of course, Orban's heading to Mar a Lago.
He might even use a bathroom where classified state secrets
were stashed until Trump was indicted.
But there is a lot that Trump is saying out
loud and from the podium that has more than an
echo in Viktor Orban's journey.
So what's important about Orban is that he was democratically
elected.
He Hungary was a democracy.
It's still a member of NATO.
It's still a member of the European Union.
Orban had popular support. He won a big election victory,
actually. But what what matters is what he did after
he won.
And he then began to systematically,
piece by piece, dismantle the institutions of democracy.
And he did so without.
In his case, he did so at first,
without breaking the law. He changed the constitution because he
had a constitutional majority.
He altered the judges. He began doing something behind the
scenes.
So, for example, he he played around with the press.
People who advertised in the opposition press suddenly had trouble
getting government contracts.
And because Hungary is a small country,
he also began to dominate the economy,
making sure that his businessman,
his oligarchs, stayed ahead. And and by doing so,
over a number of years,
he made himself impossible to remove from power.
And that is now the model of democratic takeover.
You know, when you want to destroy a democracy nowadays
you don't have a coup d'etat.
You don't need to send the tanks into the presidential
palace and shoot up the ceiling.
What you do is you take it apart piece by
piece.
And others have copied him the polls
the previous Polish government attempted to copy him.
They didn't quite succeed and they lost an election in
October.
The Israeli government has tried to copy him,
and that was actually the big story in Israel last
summer before the before the Gaza war began.
It's not that different from what Hugo Chavez did in
Venezuela.
This isn't necessarily a right wing process.
It can also be a left wing process,
but it's it. Watch. Watch what he has not,
not what he says. I mean,
what he says about LGBT rights or about migration is
horrific,
but it's not so much that those are the games
that he plays to keep your eye away from the
ball.
And what matters is what he does to the judges,
what he does to the civil service,
what he does to the media
and and the the the thing that made him popular,
if I remember accurately was the issue of immigration,
right? He made sure that Hungary was less porous and
and and welcoming at a time when other European countries
were having
massive flows of of migrants.
Is that right?
It was. It was actually even a bit more dramatic
than that because Hungary doesn't have a migration problem.
the United States, you can say there is a migration
issue.
Hungary doesn't have one. Nobody is moving to Hungary.
It doesn't have lots of migrants and it's not an
issue.
What he did was create the impression of an issue.
He created hysteria around it.
He linked himself to far right ideas about replacement theory.
You know that there was a Jewish cabal led by
George Soros that wants to replace white Hungarians with brown
people or foreigners or or or whatever version of it
that that you prefer. And he created this,
this, you know, anxiety. And as I said,
that was in a way,
that's the veil, the, you know,
this kind of fake culture war that he creates to
distract people and to anger people and to play into
people's emotions and people's fears about,
you know, whatever they're afraid of,
you know, about loss of,
of national identity, about globalization,
about the economy, whatever it is.
He made people focus on that.
And while he while they were paying attention to that,
he was in fact changing Hungary's political system.
Rachel, you write about one of the institutions where I,
you know, you don't have to
see behind the curtain in Mar a Lago to know
that Trump covets at this.
You write this elected leaders who use their popularity to
write roughshod over their country's institutions.
In Orban's case, that meant putting all of Hungary's courts
under the control of one of his loyalists.
Trump, I think, thinks he's made some progress on that
progress with his appointees to the Supreme Court.
I think they would beg to differ.
But that is very much an active project on on
Trump's part.
He's gone after the rule of law since his first
day
as president.
That's right. One of the things that Orban did,
as Anne said, was centralized power,
and he centralized power first
through the courts taking over changing their independence.
As you said, Trump has already made some serious headway
in this area in America.
Orban also centralized power over regular people,
firemen, nurses, local local nonprofit soccer leagues that were previously
completely apolitical.
But he made everything into politics.
I think one of the parts of the Orban story
that gets told the least is how he took over
the business sector.
The business sector in Hungary had been a normal capitalist
sector
right before he took power.
And after just eight years he had basically moved into
so many fields with him and his cronies,
Forcing companies to be either paying high taxes or high
rate levels of regulation or give up their companies,
villainizing companies until they gave up,
driving people out of town.
That he had basically turned what had been
a independent sector into something that was really decided who
won and who lost in the business arena was really
much more decided by the Fidesz party.
And that's another area that Trump really wants to move
into,
because these autocrats are not just in it for power,
they're also in it for money.
And there's a huge amount of corruption that lies behind
these power grabs.
And Orban has shown the way.
And I would very much expect that we would see
some of that in America.