“A Trump-Vance administration sounds just right,” the Hungarian operative tweeted, alongside an image of them outside Vance’s senatorial offices.
The feeling is mutual: The fondness that U.S. conservatives have for Orban’s Hungary is well-documented. No matter the European country’s small population and insignificant economy, its transformation under the long-ruling prime minister into a bastion of illiberal nationalism has won admirers across the West. Orban’s repeated electoral victories, his cowing of liberal civil society and independent media, his nativist grandstanding against migration and his revamping of the Hungarian state in his image are all seen as an inspiration, as an example of sustained right-wing victory to be emulated elsewhere. Never mind the widespread assessment that Orban is refashioning his country into an electoral autocracy.
In his relatively short political career, Vance has repeatedly voiced his support for the nationalist project nurtured by Orban. During his senatorial campaign, Vance extolled the virtues of Orban’s traditionalist policies regarding marriage, including loans to married couples that were forgiven the longer they stayed together and had children. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation,” he asked at an event, before attacking the “childless left.” (The American birth rate remains higher than that of Hungary.)
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A vocal skeptic of funding Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion, Vance has aligned with Orban’s somewhat Kremlin-friendly positions on the war. He has attacked the European Union for withholding funds to Hungary and Poland’s previous right-wing populist government because of concerns over the rule of law being undermined in both countries; Vance accused Brussels of “imposing liberal, imperialistic views” on the rest of the continent. (He separately denounced Poland’s new center-right coalition government as it tried to reform state media institutions that had been wholly captured by loyalists to the previous government.)
Vance has also welcomed Orban’s seizure of control over universities in a bid to further pursue his ideological project and anti-liberal culture wars.
“I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orban has ever done. I don’t know everything he’s ever done,” Vance said in a recent CBS interview. “What I do think is on the university — on the university principle, the idea that taxpayers should have some influence in how their money is spent at these universities. It’s a totally reasonable thing. And I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.”
Orban and Trump have a well-established bromance. After last week’s NATO summit, the Hungarian prime minister jetted to Florida where he called on Trump at Mar-a-Lago. This year, Trump sent a video message to a gathering in Budapest organized by the influential Conservative Political Action Committee, a U.S.-based organization, where he praised Orban, saying he was “proudly fighting on the front lines of the battle to rescue western civilization” and pointing to their shared “epic struggle to liberate our nations from all of the sinister forces who want to destroy them.”
Their personal bonhomie mirrors their ideological convergence, as Zack Beauchamp lays out in his new book, “The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World,” in which he examines the nationalist zeitgeist challenging liberal democracies.
“When you read Hungary’s admirers in the American press, they insist that Hungary remains a democracy. Hungary is a model not of authoritarianism, according to these commentators, but of effective Christian conservative governance,” Beauchamp wrote.
He adds that Orban “has self-consciously instrumentalized a central component of conservatism, its commitment to seeing value in tradition and existing social norms, in service of an authoritarian and kleptocratic agenda. To acknowledge this reality would make it impossible for conservatives who claim to stand for democratic ideals to celebrate Hungary in any real sense.”
Yet they most certainly celebrate Hungary and yearn for the sort of dominance Orban has over his opponents. The selection of Vance — who once described Trump as potentially “America’s Hitler” but now accuses anyone of engaging in such rhetoric as being complicit in last weekend’s assassination attempt — underscores the uncompromising ambitions of a possible Trump second term. Those have already been teased in a 900-page hard-right policy document known as “Project 2025,” hosted by the influential Heritage Foundation think tank, which outlines a vision for the wholesale capture of the U.S. federal court and the dismantling of the administrative state.
“The exhaustive plan calls for, among other things, dismantling the Education Department, passing sweeping tax cuts, imposing sharp limits on abortion, giving the White House greater influence over the Justice Department, reducing efforts to limit climate change and increasing efforts to promote fossil fuels, drastically cutting and changing the federal workforce, and giving the president more power over the civil service,” my colleagues explained.
Trump has tried to disavow any connection to the project, but it is the work of dozens of former officials in his administration, including many people who may find their way back into the government should Trump win a second term. Vance’s presence as his putative deputy makes those denials even more implausible: He wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president and one of the architects of Project 2025, titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.”
In an interview with a right-wing outlet, Roberts recently declared the U.S. right is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” He also earlier acknowledged the debt he and his counterparts owe to Orban. In 2022, in conversation with a Hungarian publication, Roberts called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.”
