Donald J. Trump’s repeat of the lie that Haitian immigrants are “eating the cats” of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio sucked all the air out of the ABC debate between the Republican nominee and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris last week. In the week since, Springfield has been besieged with bomb threats, presumably from pro-MAGA, anti-immigrant populists.
The second apparent assassination attempt on Trump in two months, this time sans the bloody right ear, is shifting our political conversation, but the false story involving the allegedly poor relationship between legal Haitian immigrants and local pets remains, unfortunately, the key takeaway from the debate.
All but forgotten from the debate is Harris’ argument that world leaders have been “laughing” at the ex-president over the way he is suckered into praising dictators who compliment him.
“Let me just say about world leaders, Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man,” Trump retorted. “He’s a tough person. Smart prime minister of Hungary. They said, ‘Why is the world blowing up?’ He said, ‘Because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid.’ And I don’t like to use the word ‘afraid,’ but I’m just quoting him. ‘China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.’ Look at what’s going on with North Korea, by the way. He said ‘Russia was afraid of him.’”
This should not alarm anyone who has been paying attention to Trump’s campaign, his four years as president, or the three years between. There was no alarm when former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who popped up early this year as the sycophantic “interviewer” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and embarrassed even the dictator in his level of fawning, attended the Republican National Convention and hung out with Trump last July.
What’s alarming about Trump’s logrolling (as Spy magazine would have called it) of Orbán’s mutual admiration is that it has become normalized.
Neither Harris nor Linsey Davis and David Muir – the ABC News journalists whom Trump has accused of handing over their questions to the Democratic candidate in advance -- challenged or questioned or in any way followed-up his citing of the Hungarian strongman.
Orbán long has had widespread support among pro-MAGA voters, who admire the way he handles immigrants, which includes criminalization of attorneys and activists who help asylum seekers, according to the BBC, a policy defies European Union law.
Orbán is Putin’s closest ally, his only ally in power in Europe, who last year vetoed NATO contributions to Ukraine’s military defense until NATO agreed that Hungary would not have to contribute its own funds or military personnel to the effort.
Meanwhile, for much of the past few months the Trump campaign has tried to disavow knowledge of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, despite the many Trump associates and former administration officials who contributed to its 900-some pages. But even if Trump now rejects P25, his admiration for Orbán reflects his propensity for a more powerful presidency, boosted by the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling on presidential immunity, and his inclination to replace non-partisans in the federal bureaucracy with political appointees.
Orbán’s Hungary has stripped power from his country’s judiciary while his Fidesz party has tightened its grip on independent media.
In his book, The Reactionary Spirit; How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, author Zach Beauchamp writes (as excerpted in The Atlantic) that Orbán “devised a playbook for paying lip service to democracy while hollowing out its institutions until an incumbent basically can’t lose.”
Fairness and balance require that I point out MAGA conservatives fear progressive extremism, “wokeism” and authoritarianism to about the same extent that liberals – and anti-Trump conservatives – fear Trump’s pledge to only be “dictator only on day one” and his prediction “there will be a bloodbath” (even if the ex-prez was talking about what would happen to the auto industry without his tariff proposals). And now Ryan Wesley Routh comes along to prove, allegedly, that political violence from the left can be at least as destructive to political civility as violence from the right.
And yet, Trump can object all the way through November 5, or worse, through January 6, that he has no intention of even reading Project 2025.
But remember, Trump called Orbán “one of the most respected men” – possibly the ex-president’s favorite adjective of all – and, a “strong man.” In the context of what Trump said in the debate, it seems possible he doesn’t know how pejorative “strong man” (or “strongman”) is for a political leader who is supposed to be in charge of some sort of democracy. More chilling is the possibility that Trump knows precisely what the term means.
Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.