A Meeting Between Trump and Orban Shows Dangers for U.S. Democracy and Ukraine
'[Orban] says this is the way it’s going to be, and that’s the end of it,' says Trump
On March 8, Donald Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. The meeting was highly unusual. Trump holds no political office, yet is meeting with world leaders as if he does. Neither Orban nor the Biden White House sought a meeting with each other. Beyond the unusual diplomatic circumstances, the meeting illustrated how American democracy and Ukraine would be at risk should Trump win another term in 2025.
Orban is a model for Trump: the Hungarian leader represents a successful authoritarian figure ruling in the shell of a democracy. At Mar-a-Lago, Trump praised Orban. "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?” he said to a laughing crowd. “He’s the boss.”
Since winning election fair-and-square in 2010, Orban has brought the independent judiciary to heel, gerrymandered voting districts so his party, Fidesz, can continue winning a two-thirds supermajority with a rural base, and brought the media under his control. In 2014, Fidesz won 45 percent of the vote, but thanks to electoral changes, maintained its supermajority. The Hungarian specialist Kim Scheppele analyzed that under the old rules, Fidesz would have won a majority, but not a supermajority that allowed it to freely change the constitution. Reporters without Borders ranks Hungary as 72nd in the world on press freedom -- second-worst in the EU -- representing a drop of 50 some-odd places since Orban took power in 2010. Hungary is not Russia: journalists and opposition figures aren't imprisoned or killed. Rather, opposition politicians have no power under supermajority rules and independent journalists have had their phones hacked with Pegasus spyware.
Prior to visiting Trump, Orban spoke at a private event at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization which is leading Project 2025, a well-funded effort to reshape the executive branch in Trump's image. Orban fired civil servants en masse and put party loyalists in key roles like election supervision; Trump, too, plans to fire civil servants from what he calls the "deep state" and replace them with loyalists.
Orban, who has refused to send Kyiv weapons, said on X that Trump could "bring us peace," referring to the Ukraine war. Trump has said repeatedly that he could end the Ukraine war in "24 hours." However, that goal could only be realized if the U.S. forced Ukraine to agree to a cease-fire on Putin's terms, which would condemn millions of Ukrainians to living under a brutal occupation and could lead to Moscow toppling of the democratically-elected government in Kyiv, as Kremlin officials have indicated that they would not stop with maintaining control over the regions they already hold.
Trump and Orban are the two most prominent figures in the U.S. and Europe who have held up Western aid to Ukraine. House Republicans aligned with Trump have continued to block a $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine, as the country runs low on ammunition and air defenses. A discharge petition, a complicated legislative maneuver in which a majority of representatives bring a bill to the floor in defiance of the speaker, remains one of the few hopes for the bipartisan aid bill, which overwhelmingly passed the U.S. Senate last month. Last month, Ukraine withdrew from Aviidvka, a small town in the country's east, and U.S. and Ukrainian officials blamed the blocked aid for the loss. Orban held up a 50 billion Euro European aid package to Ukraine for about a month, although he relented in February.
Orban folded because he is isolated within the E.U.: as one leader of a country with a population of 10 million, he has little influence alone. However, should Trump return to the White House, he would have a powerful friend across the Atlantic. And Trump, who last month encouraged Russia to attack any NATO member who does not meet its financial obligations to the mutual-defense bloc and has called for "fundamentally reevaluating NATO's purpose and NATO's mission" would likely rely on Orban as a European interlocutor.
Orban and Trump are also the most prominent Western leaders to embrace Putin. Orban has been one of the few European leaders to have met with Putin in-person since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In his 2024 campaign, Trump has continued to praise Putin and refrained from criticizing him. In September, he praised Putin for condemning his criminal charges. In December, he approvingly quoted Putin's condemnation of American democracy. Trump's social media posts about the death of Alexei Navalny in Russian custody have included no criticism of Putin.
The day before Trump and Orban met, President Biden gave a State of the Union address opening with Ukraine and casting his reelection as saving democracy at home and abroad. For the moment, the unexpectedly rousing speech quieted questions about the 81-year-old's age as he goes through the crucible of a presidential campaign. However, Orban and Trump have other ideas about how to run a democracy and what kind of world order they would like to see, and they are making every effort to realize them.