We examine Donald Trump’s affinity for Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister.
Tomorrow in Florida, Donald Trump will host Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, whom Trump often praises. “He is a very great leader, a very strong man,” Trump has said. “Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong.”
In a recent newsletter, I spoke with some of my colleagues covering Trump’s campaign about what a second term might look like. Another way to understand how he may govern is to examine his affinity for Orban. In today’s newsletter, I talk to Andrew Higgins, who writes about Hungary as The Times’s bureau chief for East and Central Europe.
Tucker as a model
David: People often describe Orban as autocratic. But he’s not a ruler who jails or kills his opponents. Can you describe how he suppresses dissent?
Andrew: Hungary under Prime Minister Orban is far from being a police state like Russia or Belarus. As an opposition legislator said to me last week in Budapest, it is more of a “propaganda state” in which Orban’s governing party, Fidesz, controls the media landscape.
Orban does not jail his opponents or have them beaten up the way Vladimir Putin does, but he has relentlessly squeezed the space available for critical voices by getting business cronies to buy up independent media and starving the few others of advertising revenue. Fidesz-controlled outlets treat critics as traitors and deviants. He has also funded a raft of friendly research institutes and a university that help flood the zone with pro-government views.
When speaking at a 2022 gathering of American conservatives in Budapest, Orban hailed Tucker Carlson as a model of how media should work: “There should be shows like his day and night — or, as you say, 24/7.” In Hungary, that goal has been achieved.
