I've been following Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's increasing influence on the American far right for some time as he hosted the likes of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson and held a CPAC meeting in Budapest. (They're doing it again in April with Orbán once again doing the hosting duties.) He was the darling of a certain faction of the conservative coalition even before Donald Trump won and whose election in 2016 super-charged the "illiberal democracy" ideology here in the U.S. which we now know as MAGA. He likewise hopes to consolidate the European far-right into a MAGA-style movement throughout the continent.
Orbán's CPAC appearance got a thunderous ovation last year and just last week he came to meet with members of the Heritage Foundation which is busily putting together "Project 2025" for the second Trump term. One imagines he had quite a few tips for them. He wrote the book on how to turn a modern country into a repressive autocracy without becoming a full-fledged police state.
