Dictator Meets With 2025 Wannabe

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Visit Trump Following NATO Summit and Putin Meeting

ormer President Donald Trump will meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Florida on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter, less than a week after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The visit is likely to fan concerns that the Hungarian leader is working as an intermediary between Putin and Trump.

Trump and Putin professed a fondness for one another during the U.S. president’s first term—often garnering bipartisan criticism. More recently, the Republican leader has said he believed he could convince Putin to end his war in Ukraine and release Americans detained in Russia if he were elected to a second term.

Orbán will travel to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort after the conclusion of the NATO summit in Washington. His visit to Moscow became a central point of discussion at the gathering, where other allies pledged additional air defenses for Ukraine in its continuing campaign against the full-scale Russian invasion that began in 2022.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has not asked the Hungarian leader to lay the groundwork for some sort of Ukraine-Russia peace deal, according to one of the people familiar with the Orbán visit, who was granted anonymity to discuss it. The person described the visit, which will take place days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, as more of an informal get-together.

Orbán also paid a visit this week to President Xi Jinping in China, following a trip to Azerbaijan earlier this month.

Trump campaign spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Hungarian government didn’t immediately comment.

Hungary took over the European Union’s rotating presidency July 1. EU officials have criticized Orbán’s travels, arguing they could undermine the 27-member bloc’s positions on global issues.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday that Orbán “made it clear when he came to Moscow that he didn’t go there on behalf of NATO.”

“Different NATO allies interact with Moscow in different ways,” he added.

The Hungarian leader and Trump have cultivated a close relationship, with Orbán visiting Mar-a-Lago in March. Trump feted him with a tour of his residence, dinner with former first Lady Melania Trump, an hour-long meeting with senior aides, and musical performance by a band covering Roy Orbison songs.

President Joe Biden seized on that meeting at a subsequent political rally in Philadelphia, saying Orbán “doesn’t think democracy works” and was “looking for dictatorship.”

The Biden administration has criticized Orbán over his friendly relations with Putin, as well as legislation in Hungary that the State Department warned could “intimidate and punish” critics of Orbán’s government.

Electoral success for the far right is one thing, maintaining power is quite another. But in Hungary, with the premiership of Viktor Orbán, today’s populists have a live case study of how to solidify gains into long-lasting influence. Perhaps no one is paying closer attention to Orbán than MAGA Republicans.

When we speak of Orbán, we should first identify the essential characteristics that modern populists on the right must possess to achieve success. These two dimensions are: charismatic appeal and an ability to address people with simple, convincing messages about national pride, prosperity, and their capacity to defend against external threats, whether perceived or real. And, more discreetly, their expertise in building-out political infrastructure, which allows them to take control of their country’s political, legal, and media institutions.

Few of today’s populists exhibit both traits. Jarosław Kaczynski of Poland’s Law and Justice party succeeded in capturing state infrastructure (2015-2023), but ultimately lacked the charisma to retain office.

Leaders like Trump possess the first quality, but struggle with organization and system-building. Recognizing this, the former President’s team has since launched the Agenda 2025 program and made strategic hires in preparation for a more effective second term. The influence for this work seems to stem from Hungary. On an almost daily basis, supporters and media allies of the MAGA Republicans laud Orbán. Senator J.D. Vance, who is widely seen as a prospective running mate for Trump, recently stated that the U.S. “could learn a lot” from Hungary. While Trump, himself, has proclaimed: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He's fantastic.”

This praise exemplifies the growing appeal of what I call the “Budapest Playbook” and the roadmap it provides to others on the populist right about how to keep power. It includes gaming the electoral system and districts to favor the ruling party; subordinating intelligence services to political control, aligning the prosecutor’s office with political will, undermining judicial independence, hollowing out the constitutional court and filling it with party loyalists, and seizing control of the media through a propaganda ministry. These measures, taken together, can yield near-unlimited power, and help an aspiring autocrat maintain their influence over the long-term, while democratic institutions are hollowed out.

Orbán’s “success” on these fronts owes much to his ability to avoid unpopular measures while erecting a political infrastructure and new economic elite based on personal connections. Today, in Hungary, every major institution is now led by a person hand-picked by Orbán. A new class of billionaires like Lőrinc Mészáros, a childhood friend of Orbán—who has risen from a humble background to become the country’s richest man and a facilitator of Russian funding for allied populists, including Marine Le Pen—are also beholden to Orbán.

Casting himself as a “heroic protector” of the people, Orbán often claims that Hungary is locked in an existential struggle with Brussels and other international forces, and uses national consultation surveys to support his stance. These consultations, which give the illusion of democratic inclusion, invariably contain leading questions and shift blame for government failings to figures like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the liberal Hungarian American billionaire businessman George Soros, the latter being a frequent target of state-backed smear campaigns. No doubt, elements of this rhetoric are familiar to populists, but a fully developed “power-factory” is still just an aspiration for most.

A possible inflection point for the populist right in Europe, and the looming return of Donald Trump in the U.S., is why voters and state apparatuses the world over should pay attention to the Budapest Playbook. Orbán’s subversion of Hungarian democracy in little over a decade speaks to the speed at which state capture can be achieved.