WASHINGTON ― After modeling anti-democratic, pro-corruption changes at home on Viktor Orbán’s “reforms” in Hungary, President Donald Trump and his allies now have available to them important lessons from his drubbing Sunday in time for the November midterm elections.
Orbán, for instance, was sunk by the same affordability concerns now dogging Trump and his fellow Republicans. His attempts to blame foreign interference for Hungarians’ struggles fell flat. Yet, rather than use the autocratic ruler’s landslide loss after 16 years in office as a learning opportunity, key Trump allies are showing little sign of self-reflection.
“The fight continues. We are heading to the U.K. in July,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a top Trump White House adviser during his first term and now a senior official of the CPAC conference, which in recent years has held multiple events in Hungary in support of Orbán and his policies, including one in late March.
Schlapp echoed other Trump supporters in pointing to a familiar villain: Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros, who had to relocate most of the programs of the Central European University he founded from Budapest to Vienna because of harassment under Orbán.
