There is an old proverb that says, “You are known by the company you keep.” Donald Trump just hosted Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, at Mar-a-Lago and spoke glowingly of Orban and their meeting. That should tell everyone all they need to know about Trump’s mindset and be a preview for what he has in mind for his second term if that comes to pass.
Orban has worked very diligently to dismantle the democratic systems that existed in Hungary since he became Prime Minister for a second time in 2010. He is usually associated with the phrase ‘illiberal democracy.’ He has imposed policies that are hostile to L.G.B.T.Q. people and immigrants. He has increased his own authoritarian control by cracking down on the press, the education system, and the judiciary. Additionally, he has created a government structure that funnels money to himself and his cronies and economically penalizes those that don’t fall in line.1 He is basically a nicely tailored and well-spoken dictator!
Many American right-wing Christian nationalists and various other conservatives seem to resonate with Orban when he talks about wanting a ‘Christian Democracy.’ The fact is, Orban is not religious at all and has never been seen in church but has formulated and promoted that phrase because he gets political mileage out of it. It’s similar to the very non-religious and amoral Donald Trump claiming to the evangelicals that he is the great protector of religious freedom. It’s politically expedient for both men, even though neither has any religious belief system at all, but the religious faithful eat it up like vultures on a dead carcass.
Orban is widely considered to be Putin’s closest ally in the European Union and just like Trump, he has blocked EU funding for Ukraine more than once. He does so not only to help Putin but to use the need for the EU to provide funding to Ukraine as a way to extract concessions and money from the EU to prop up his own economy (and more than likely his own bank account and those of his cronies).
Orban has been called the ultimate twenty-first century dictator because he has been able to gain his authoritarian control through perhaps questionable but legal means (he is a lawyer after all) and he exerts his control primarily through economic power. If people or companies end up on the Orban ‘naughty list,’ they will soon find themselves not being able to find a job or get government contracts. No jail. No gulag. No bullets. Just an enormously powerful economic cudgel.
If anyone has any doubt about the direction a second Trump term will take, just look at the people he admires and associates with – Viktor Orban (dictator), Vladimir Putin (dictator), Kim Jong Un (dictator), President Xi (dictator), Benjamin Netanyahu (on trial for corruption) and Roy Cohn (his favorite attorney who passed away from AIDS but not before being disbarred). This, of course, is not even counting all the people in Trump’s orbit who have served time in jail, are on their way to jail, or who are currently up to their collective asses in legal alligators. Like the proverb says, “You are known by the company you keep.” Enough said.
