Today, President Donald Trump will welcome Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to the Oval Office. Orbán has spent a career casting himself as a freedom fighter. First, against the oppressive yoke of Soviet communism. More recently, against the United States, the European Union, George Soros and others he claims propagate “woke” ideology.
While Orbán spends a fortune projecting himself as an unflinching bulwark of conservative values in a world swallowed up by the blackhole of cultural decline, the reality of his politics tells a different story.
Having spent years representing the United States of America in Hungary, I came to see Orbán as an extraordinarily talented man. But his talent has little to do with advancing conservatism. His true talent is the nihilist flair with which he challenges and ultimately stomps out Hungarians’ belief in the very notion of independence—the idea that any individual or entity prioritizes neutral principles over partisan politics.
Independence is a concept fundamental to the health of any democracy—and it has been systematically dismantled in Hungary. Institutions that otherwise produce knowledge by pursuing truth are coercively captured or co-opted by the state. Those who resist are framed as partisan operatives, foreign agents, or worse. What’s left is a poor country subsumed with politics, propaganda, and polarization; a state that stomps out independence while feigning conservatism.
Magyar Hang, a conservative newspaper in Hungary, knows this well. It is independently owned and controlled—a rarity in a country where a single political machine controls approximately 85% of the media. And because it is independent from Orbán’s direct control, no printshop in Hungary will print it. It matters not that it is conservative.
With no way to print their conservative Hungarian newspaper in Hungary, each week it is printed across the border in Slovakia and then driven across the border into Hungary for distribution. Ironically, Orbán and his friends also had trouble reproducing and distributing their message during the dark days of communism. It was George Soros’ Open Society Foundation who helped out nascent political parties like Orbán’s by providing them with support, including with copy machines to “promote the free exchange of ideas and information, despite state controls.”
Orbán sees independence—whether it be independent media, universities, or civil society organizations —much like Hungary’s former communist overlords. That anyone would work in support of democracy for all is simply a ruse. Those who give their lives for it are, in the words of Trump, “suckers” and “losers,” The Hungarian Prime Minister appears to share this perspective with the American President.
Theirs is a war not so much on liberals or even just a war on independent institutions (central to any democracy), but on the very idea that anything is ever “independent.” To them, everything is politics. Politics is everything. Politics justifies anything.
In Hungary, when organizations such as Atlatszo expose how billions in public funds find their way into the pockets of Orbán’s family, their facts aren’t attacked, they are. To Orbán, institutions like these aren’t independent civil society organizations, but arms of the opposition. Agents of George Soros. For Orbán, as for Trump, independent media doesn’t exist. News organizations that they don’t control are not independent, they are the “opposition.”
Rather than contest facts, Orbán transposes his own politics onto inherently apolitical individuals and organizations. Orbán has even created a bureaucracy to “protect Hungarian sovereignty” from facts published by independent Hungarians.
The consequences of this philosophy can quickly spiral out of control. If there’s no such thing as independence, everything is thrust into this zero-sum game of total politics. If journalists are partisans, their facts are irrelevant. If independent civil society doesn’t exist, protests are plots by billionaires or foreign powers. If serving the Constitution means nothing, the civil service is the “deep state.” If academic freedom is “woke ideology,” universities are partisan enclaves. This is how Orbán’s Hungary works.
That’s why Orbán forced the independent Central European University out of Hungary. It’s why he funnels billions from state assets and shady Russian energy deals into Mathias Corvinus Collegium, which trains loyal culture warriors. It’s why a Christian church like the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship is hounded out of public life, forced to abandon aid programs for the poor; while the Reformed Church, with a former Orbán minister at the helm, thrives under state patronage.
What connects Orbán’s targets is not ideology inasmuch as his contempt for their independence.
Everything is collapsed into a single equation of allegiance. This is what living without independence means: no neutral ground, no shared truth, no legitimate disagreement. Only loyalty. Everything becomes an endless contest of “us” versus “them.”
So when Trump speaks of journalists as the “enemy of the American people,” he isn’t simply distracting from the content of their work. He, like Orbán, is creating a political culture that, at its core, builds its legitimacy not through the strength of ideas, but by eradicating the notion that independence exists.
Yet democracy, at its core, depends on faith in independence. One Founding Father called it “self-evident.” And democracy only works when truth-seeking institutions that rely on facts inform and, if necessary, guard our democratic processes.
Within our government, prosecutors, judges, and civil servants swear an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Outside of government, independent media, civil society organizations, and academia are meant to operate with professional independence. They don’t serve a leader; they serve reality. They don’t do this work because they are partisan. They do it because they’re faithful to the truth.
Authoritarians reward obedience and punish independence until the public believes independence was always a myth. That’s the true contagion of the end of independence—both as a model for governance and as a disease infecting society. Every corrupt deal, every politically-motivated prosecution, and every smear campaign, is a performance, a public execution of independence and the values needed to keep our democracy.
In America, powerful lawyers, university presidents, and corporate executives think they’re tactfully satisfying the President’s ego by performing a little lie, by doing something in a “deal” with Trump that they would do anyway. But like in Orbán’s Hungary, these “deals” serve a clear purpose. They signal the death knell of the one thing our democracy cannot live without: independence.
Every institution that offers its independence up for the chopping block brings us one step closer to the end of independence. Orbán spent decades asphyxiating it in Hungary. Just look at what Trump has accomplished here in a mere nine months.
When the two meet in the Oval Office today, Orbán will plead for American investments and an exemption from Trump’s important Russian energy sanctions. The reason is simple: Hungary’s economy is in shambles and those shady Russian energy deals bankroll Orbán’s campaign to stomp out independence—all while he masquerades as a conservative.
