Opinion: It’s clear why Trump likes autocrats. But why are American conservatives following him?
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives for a European Union summit in Sibiu, Romania, on May 9. Right, President Trump on March 28. By Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum Columnist focusing on national politics and foreign policy Email Bio Follow Columnist May 13 at 6:04 PM They were not members of the communist party, just sympathizers. They didn’t carry out any murderous policies, just turned the other way when others did.
On Monday, President Trump hosted one of these exotic foreign ideologues at the White House. Viktor Orban, prime minister of a country with just under 10 million inhabitants — less than the population of North Carolina — has set out to persuade British and American intellectuals to join his war against liberal democracy.
It’s not hard, of course, to see why this might appeal to an amoral operator such as Trump, who openly admires the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia. As Trump’s ambassador to Hungary recently put it, in an overly honest interview in the Atlantic, Trump “would love to have the situation that Viktor Orban has, but he doesn’t.”
With great fanfare, Orban put a length of razor wire along his country’s border with Serbia a few years ago, to stop Syrian refugees who were trying to get to ... Germany. Nobody was trying to get into Hungary then; nobody is trying to get in now. But the fantasy of an ethnically pure state, pushing back against immigration and multiculturalism, continues to appeal to a certain kind of American who wishes their country could do the same.
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