Last month, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump. Posting afterward on X, Orban — a longtime supporter of Trump’s — wrote, “The future has begun!” alongside photos of him meeting with Trump and with Elon Musk. That admiration appears to be mutual: Trump has expressed respect for the small European nation and its policies — which include a crackdown on judicial independence, academic freedom and the media — as have several of his populist conservative allies, among them Vice President-elect JD Vance. A few years ago, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which led the creation of Project 2025, said, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” In turn, Orban, who leads Hungary’s Fidesz party, recently claimed that “we have entered the policy writing system of President Donald Trump’s team” and “have deep involvement there.”
In addition to its notable domestic policies, Hungary occupies an unusual position in global geopolitics. It is a member of the European Union and NATO, two organizations that have long been associated with the defense of the liberal world order. But Orban is a friend to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and has taken positions in opposition to NATO and the E.U.’s support of Ukraine, rattling both alliances (including when he recently went to China to meet with President Xi Jinping). And the E.U. Parliament has said that Hungary, with its erosion of citizens’ rights, can no longer be seen as a full democracy. It now calls the country an “electoral autocracy.”
For the past two and a half years, President Biden’s representative to Hungary has been Ambassador David Pressman, a former assistant secretary of homeland security and a human rights lawyer who has had a contentious relationship with the Orban administration. As he prepares to leave his post, he sat down with me from Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to talk about his tenure, Orban’s relationships and policies and why what is happening in Hungary matters.
The U.S. Treasury Department just issued sanctions against one of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s lieutenants for corruption, and the Hungarian foreign minister called you out personally for that, saying that sanctions are “personal revenge” on your part. As your tenure ends, there seems to be no love lost between you and the government of Viktor Orban. How would you say you’re ending your time there? I would start by saying the government of Hungary has taken a very unfortunate position vis-à-vis the United States and particularly the Biden administration, in that it has attempted to cast the policies that the United States government has been implementing vis-à-vis Hungary — on issues ranging from corruption to media freedom to democracy to judicial independence to defense — as somehow the policies or activities of the Democrats, as opposed to the policies of the United States of America. The prime minister has attempted to effectively transform an allied relationship between the United States and Hungary into a relationship between two individuals: the person that he sought and supported to become the president of the United States, President-elect Donald Trump, and himself. And I think definitionally, that’s a pretty perilous place to be. An alliance is designed to be long lasting, to transcend politics, and the approach of the Orban administration has been to pursue something quite different.
