If you look at how Victor Orban came into power, you will realize that Donald Trump is following in his footsteps. Orban had been the leader of Hungary before, and was voted out. His second election win was 14 years ago.
Orban used the time between his re-election campaign loss and the next election he would run in to prepare a plan. If he ever made it into power again, he’d make sure he never had to leave. It’s been said that a wannabe autocrat’s most dangerous term is his second. Here in the U.S. we are about to vote in an election that would give Trump his second term.
If you study the ways that Victor Orban slowly chipped away at democracy, you’ll realize that the Republican candidate in our 2024 Presidential election has already begun to do the same. He isn’t even trying to hide it! We’ve seen the Project 2025 plan laid out by the Heritage Foundation that tells us step by step how Trump will destroy our democratic institutions so he never has to leave the White House again.
This is why the news that Trump met with the autocrat AND the leader of the Heritage Foundation at Mar-a-Lago should terrify us all.
The meeting
Orban didn’t attend the SOTU in D.C. or visit the White House. The purpose of his trip to the U.S. was to meet with the Heritage Foundation and ex-President Trump.
From the Associated Press:
Orbán posted on his Instagram account footage of him and his staff meeting with Trump and the former president’s staff, then of the prime minister walking through the compound and handing Melania Trump a giant bouquet of flowers.
In the video, Trump praised Orbán to a laughing crowd. “He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right?” Trump said of the Hungarian prime minister. “He’s the boss.”
Watch the video of Orban and Trump in Mar-a-Lago from Orban’s Instagram account
Victor Orban’s rise to power
From Euronews:
To his supporters, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban represents true European values: Christianity; the predominance of the nation-state; government for the masses, not the elites.
To his critics, he’s an opportunistic populist who cares only about his own power and has made Hungary a pariah within Europe.
Since the early 1990s, “he transformed from a liberal politician first to a national-conservative, and later to a populist radical-right leader.”
Daniel Hegedüs, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Here is where you’ll start to see some similarities between Orban and Trump:
During this period independent media were shut down, while friendly newspapers were lavished. Courts were packed with cronies. The electoral system was re-written. Nationalism was ramped up, especially amid the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe, when Orbán’s government erected fences to keep out the mainly Muslim refugees. Internationally, Orbán made friends with the authoritarian governments of Russia and China, whose interests he has protected during EU voting.
Is that crazy or what?
This is just the beginning, in fact you can read more here, where you’ll learn how he used culture wars to demonize the trans community, along with the rest of the LGBTQ population to avert the followers’ attention and use their fear/anxiety to put him into power and keep people occupied as he dismantled democracy. This short piece is meant to shed some light on why this meeting may have taken place. Not only does Orban hold water for the Kremlin, he has a proven system for getting re-elected and never having to leave again.
