In March 2024, Donald Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. After years of receiving praise and pilgrimages from the American right, the autocrat had begun appearing at conservative events in the U.S. Instead of visiting the White House to see then-President Joe Biden, Orbán spoke at the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 — before heading to Florida. “He’s a non-controversial figure," Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago upon Orbán's arrival, "because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”

Trump loves that.

Orbán's Hungarian regime has often been characterized as modern authoritarianism or a "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," one in which power is accumulated by the ruling party over time through creative quasi-legal means. He focused on transforming institutions by changing election laws, allowing him to create legislative supermajorities while winning a mere plurality of the vote. He packed the courts with loyalists, found friendly oligarchs to buy up independent media and took over universities — or forced them to close down. He hammered on culture war issues of immigration, nationalism and family values.

Observers have seen these methods as the way to perpetuate a soft-authoritarianism, enacted........

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