Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
Then-President Trump with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán at the White House, May 13, 2019
Foreign policy came up quite a bit during Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. At one point, Harris needled Trump, claiming that she had spoken to leaders of other countries around the world, and they were not impressed by him. “I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States. And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump,” she said.
In response, Trump went on a bewildering tirade boasting about how much a certain Hungarian autocrat thinks of him, revealing the fraudulent core of his supposed “America First” nationalism.
Here’s the former president:
Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men—they call him a strongman. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid … North Korea was afraid of him … Look, Viktor Orbán said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president.
At first blush, it is pretty rich for Trump to say the world wasn’t “blowing up” when he was president four years ago (not three, by the way, that would be 2021). Four years ago, we were still in the pit of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was made substantially worse by Trump’s catastrophic bungling of every aspect of the crisis except vaccines, particularly in the early stages when he tried to pretend it wasn’t happening.
In any case, Trump’s choice to lavish praise on Viktor Orbán was perhaps the clearest guide he provided to what he’d do if elected this November. Orbán was a key figure in Hungary’s transition away from communism as the Eastern Bloc crumbled, who has since turned the country into an authoritarian state. He has rigged the electoral system so that his party, Fidesz, wins almost automatically; freedom of speech and the press do not exist; LGBT people are repressed, and so on. Thanks to the rigged voting system, Orbán’s party has a two-thirds majority in parliament, allowing him to change the constitution at a whim, which he has done 13 times so far.
So Orbán is a classic quasi-dictator ruling through a fraudulent pseudo-democratic system. But unlike similar ruler Vladimir Putin (at least before his invasion of Ukraine), Orbán is not in any sense widely “respected.” Hungary is a small country of just 9.6 million that is constantly getting into fights with European Union officials over blatantly violating EU laws and regulations. It has little military to speak of. Under Fidesz rule, it has become extremely corrupt, with Orbán’s school pals becoming hugely rich through their connections.
In particular, Orbán’s economic record is unimpressive. Far from some kind of nationalist “Hungary First” program to develop domestic industry, Orbán has intentionally turned his country into an economic dependency of the German automobile industry, exploiting its proximity and relatively low wages to lure outsourcing. The auto sector makes up about a fifth of Hungary’s GDP.
This is completely at odds with Orbán’s virile strongman self-presentation; he is, in fact, a bootlicking toady to the executives of foreign companies, serving up his own people on a platter so they can be mercilessly exploited. More than that, though, his policy is also economically risky. Diversification is a good general rule of thumb for economic health, whereas a nosedive in one sector, like car sales, could severely dent the entire Hungarian economy. Sure enough, German automakers (like American ones—more on that in a second) have been caught napping by Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers. If BMW and company can’t make up lost ground to BYD and the other Chinese firms, Hungary could be headed directly to deindustrialization and economic crisis over the next decade.
It is politically nuts to bring up a guy like Orbán as worthy of respect in a presidential debate. Most Americans probably haven’t even heard of him, and those who have know that he’s a tin-pot dictator. Yet conservatives from the leaders of the Heritage Foundation to Tucker Carlson to Trump lavish Orbán with praise anyway, simply because he represents the type of system they want. Keeping American industry on the technological frontier, creating good-paying jobs for their constituents, drinkable water and breathable air, even international might and prestige—they don’t care about any of that nonsense. What they want is to be permanently ensconced in power, where they can wage total culture war on the people they hate: liberals, immigrants, women, trans people, socialists, and whoever else catches their eye. All the while, the rapidly decaying real economy will be stripped for parts by Trump’s wealthy cronies.
As Robinson Meyer points out at The New York Times, Trump’s vengeful attack on clean energy during his presidency blew up a nascent (and severely overdue) pivot among American automakers towards efficiency and electrification, directly handing Chinese automakers an even larger head start in the EV race. Another Trump term, should he carry out his promises to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate laws, would do the same thing again, except this time also to the nascent renewable-energy and green-technology sectors breathed into life by Biden and the last Democratic Congress.
The conservative movement has long had a dour, pessimistic view of America totally at odds with reality. But should Trump win, they might just make it come true.
