Trump Hosts Viktor Orbán For Mar-A-Lago Playdate
Make America Hungary Again?
Lest anyone forget the US is one election away from the end of democracy, Grandpa 45 spent last Friday night cooing and waving his panties at waxen Hungarian prime-minister-for-life Viktor Orbán, who dropped by Mar-a-Lago with his daughter to awkward-man jam to the musical stylings of a classic rock cover band and ogle Melania, who was defrosted for the occasion.
Why does Mr. Hand-Job-Dance have such a raging boner for this guy? Hungary is 57th in the world in GDP, behind Nigeria, Colombia and Kazakhstan, with a population of only 10 million, and political analysts have downgraded it from a democracy to an autocracy. Hm, probably that last one is why.
Gushed Trump from the West Vanilla Ice Ballroom, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic. 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’s the boss.”
He sure is! The evil Tony Danza of Hungary won election in 2010 using the American right-wing playbook, moaning about IMMIGRANTS and GAYS and GEORGE SOROS. It was the last fair election the country ever had. Though Orbán got only 53 percent of the vote, a quirk of Hungary’s disproportionate election law translated that into 68 percent of the seats in parliament for his Fidesz party. With a supermajority, he changed the Constitution repeatedly to allow himself to have and to hold unchecked power for what he calls an “illiberal Christian Democracy.”
Once in the door, Orbán began slow-braising the country in his paprika-scented fascist frog-pot, filling the judiciary with loyalists, firing disloyal civil servants, and taking over 90 percent of the media. He revamped school curricula to reflect “Hungarian values” and attacked “liberals” at universities, publishing weekly enemies lists of academic “mercenaries,” and encouraging students to submit the names of professors who espoused “unasked-for left-wing political opinions.” He built a gigantic barbed-wire fence between Hungary and Serbia, and complained that the European Union should pay for it. He got parliament to vote that he can rule by decree. He passed an anti-gay law that says gay people are the same as pedophiles. He shook down companies like the mafia.
No wonder Steve Bannon calls him “the most significant guy on the scene right now.” A scene that’s just like Studio 54, except with sloppy, sweaty, angry old men plotting to build mercenary training camps and imprison their enemies, to a soundtrack of unauthorized cover songs by Lara Trump and “Satisfaction” played on repeat.
This scene’s It Girl is hardly a fresh face, though. He and the American right wing go back at least to 2008, when Orbán hired Arthur Finkelstein, a political strategist who was also pals with Trump buddies Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, remember them?
Finkelstein, a gay Jewish mathematician born with no sense of irony, got his start producing radio programs for Ayn Rand, volunteering for Goldwater and spending his spare time standing on a literal soapbox screaming at people in the West Village.
He became a political consultant, and used mathematical analysis of polls and “microtargeting” to find the acupuncture points that best needle asses into voting booths. You can thank him for “liberal” becoming a dirty word, and all those freakout messages about welfare queens and immigrant criminals that worked so well for Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bob Dole, Orrin Hatch and pretty much every 1980s-2000s asshole you can think of. Finkelstein then took his show on the road, bringing his wannabe-despot school to clients in Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Kosovo and Israel, taking only a short break in between fighting against gay rights around the world to marry his husband.
Finkelstein died in 2017, but his protégés and simple strategy live on. And of all Finkelstein students, Orbán is his most successful, with his own whole entire country to fence with barbed wire, and media to praise his genius night and day.
What is that winning strategy? Pick an enemy, and be mean. “Vicious and mean,” Finkelstein told a college audience in Prague in 2011. “Negative, negative, negative — ′cause you can’t possibly win otherwise.” On Finkelstein’s advice, Orbán chose George Soros to demonize, and also repetitively screamed about dirty criminal immigrants coming to replace all the nice white people of Hungary.
And lie, lie, lie. “The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not know. In politics, it’s what you perceive to be true that’s true, not truth. If I tell you one thing is true, you will believe the second thing is true. A good politician will tell you a few things that are true before he will tell you a few things that are untrue, because you will then believe all the things he has said, true and untrue.”
Sadly true. Orbán’s success at scaremongering his way to the top with his two-step democracy-weight-loss plan made him an American right-wing darling, the spokesmodel for how a soft coup might happen here, and Hungary a vision for what a post-democratic America could look like.
No less of an autocrat kiss-ass than Tucker Carlson flew to Budapest in 2021 to sit on Orbán’s lap, snuzzle and commiserate about how ugh mean unfair it is that people call them fascists. “They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you and [the] America you stand for. We don't have same-sex marriage and all that kind of things.”
An invitation from Trump to Bedminster followed, and one from credibly accused dick-schlapper Matt Schlapp to attend CPAC in 2022, where Orbán ranted and raved all favorite hits:
“We decided we don’t need more genders; we need more rangers. Less drag queens, and more Chuck Norris. We believe there is no freedom without order.”
“Consider for example George Soros ... I know George Soros very well. He is my opponent. He believes in none of the things that we do. And he has an army at his service: money, NGOs, universities, research institutions and half the bureaucracy in Brussels. He uses this army to force his will on his opponents, like us Hungarians.”
If there’s one thing conservatives love, it’s cover band who do classic hits!
For his part, Orbán returned Trump’s party reach-around by tweeting effusive praise. “We need leaders in the world who are respected and can bring peace. He is one of them! Come back and bring us peace, Mr. President!”
The peace Orbán means is, of course, handing his neighbor Ukraine to Putin while still enjoying the protection of NATO. That would go nicely with his peace of never having to worry on an election night, hear a bad word about himself in the media, or owe money to anyone. The end of pluralist democracy: Vanilla Ice himself could never write a song so sweet.
If Hungary's such an authoritarian paradise now, why doesn't Sebastian Gorka go the fuck home and get the fuck out of my country?
I don’t think average Americans really understand the implications of “immigrants poison the blood of the country.” Unless you’re an indigenous person in the U.S., you’re the descendant of immigrants. There’s no “pure blood” to poison. Most of us are of mixed ethnicity, so Orbán can take his European biases and shove them.