Last month, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump. Posting afterward on X, Orban — a longtime supporter of Trump’s — wrote, “The future has begun!” alongside photos of him meeting with Trump and with Elon Musk. That admiration appears to be mutual: Trump has expressed respect for the small European nation and its policies — which include a crackdown on judicial independence, academic freedom and the media — as have several of his populist conservative allies, among them Vice President-elect JD Vance. A few years ago, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which led the creation of Project 2025, said, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” In turn, Orban, who leads Hungary’s Fidesz party, recently claimed that “we have entered the policy writing system of President Donald Trump’s team” and “have deep involvement there.”
In addition to its notable domestic policies, Hungary occupies an unusual position in global geopolitics. It is a member of the European Union and NATO, two organizations that have long been associated with the defense of the liberal world order. But Orban is a friend to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and has taken positions in opposition to NATO and the E.U.’s support of Ukraine, rattling both alliances (including when he recently went to China to meet with President Xi Jinping). And the E.U. Parliament has said that Hungary, with its erosion of citizens’ rights, can no longer be seen as a full democracy. It now calls the country an “electoral autocracy.”
For the past two and a half years, President Biden’s representative to Hungary has been Ambassador David Pressman, a former assistant secretary of homeland security and a human rights lawyer who has had a contentious relationship with the Orban administration. As he prepares to leave his post, he sat down with me from Hungary’s capital, Budapest, to talk about his tenure, Orban’s relationships and policies and why what is happening in Hungary matters.
The U.S. Treasury Department just issued sanctions against one of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s lieutenants for corruption, and the Hungarian foreign minister called you out personally for that, saying that sanctions are “personal revenge” on your part. As your tenure ends, there seems to be no love lost between you and the government of Viktor Orban. How would you say you’re ending your time there? I would start by saying the government of Hungary has taken a very unfortunate position vis-à-vis the United States and particularly the Biden administration, in that it has attempted to cast the policies that the United States government has been implementing vis-à-vis Hungary — on issues ranging from corruption to media freedom to democracy to judicial independence to defense — as somehow the policies or activities of the Democrats, as opposed to the policies of the United States of America. The prime minister has attempted to effectively transform an allied relationship between the United States and Hungary into a relationship between two individuals: the person that he sought and supported to become the president of the United States, President-elect Donald Trump, and himself. And I think definitionally, that’s a pretty perilous place to be. An alliance is designed to be long lasting, to transcend politics, and the approach of the Orban administration has been to pursue something quite different.
I am curious about why they’re calling you out personally. One of the narratives that the government expounds is that virtually any problem that is happening in Hungarian society and Hungarian politics, whether it’s the economy that’s struggling or Hungary’s isolation globally, is somehow the responsibility or the result of foreign outsiders who are attempting to undermine Hungary’s sovereignty, and often that’s personalized. George Soros was a device that the Hungarian government has and continues to use as this shadowy, oligarch Jewish billionaire who is attempting to undermine Hungary’s sovereignty at every turn.
Soros is, of course, originally Hungarian. That’s right. And the intent of the government vis-à-vis me as the representative of the United States government in Hungary, even before I arrived, was to personalize and try to marginalize my voice. Before I set foot in Hungary, there were boats quite literally going down the Danube River with my name and a skull and crossbones on it. These aren’t organic expressions. These are the manifestations of a government-led campaign that’s propagated through a media ecosystem here that is pervasively controlled and directed by the government. It’s a strategy on the part of the government because, when voices emerge, whether they be the voices of Hungarian civil society or opposition politicians, or in certain instances the voices of foreign governments and allies like my own that are raising questions about Hungary’s democracy, the government sees it as an existential imperative to try to marginalize them and isolate them.
You started your tenure there at a really interesting time. It was 2022, about six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the relationship between the Hungarian government and the American right had become close and was growing closer. What was your understanding of the environment you were entering as a Democratic appointee? And what were you hoping to achieve? One of the things that I hoped to achieve that I think we did achieve is to begin to reorient U.S. policy to deal with the kind of leadership and government that exists in Hungary in a way that would actually produce results. So it’s readily apparent to me that prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, frankly, the United States and many of our allies could simply look the other way with respect to what was happening internally in Hungary. It didn’t matter all that much. The fact that democratic institutions were eroding didn’t rise or cross the strategic threshold of importance. And yes, these issues were raised in the Trump administration, in the Obama administration, but the results were just not there because this is a government that does not respond to traditional forms of engagement. With other allies, we have dialogue, we can go in and say: We have a mutual interest in this threat in this area on this issue. Let’s work together to try to address it. Let’s work through our differences. And candidly, with the Hungarian government, that doesn’t work. What works with the Orban government, but I would argue more generally with governments that are emerging around the world that are sort of these proto-authoritarians, are not the tools that we traditionally apply and use in the context of normal diplomacy.
What you’re describing is a much more oppositional relationship. Diplomacy is designed to get results. On issue after issue, we have had to move Hungary from no to yes, and we have done so successfully. So whether it is the packages of sanctions in response to Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine that Hungary was initially a no on and then went along with; whether it is the expansion of the NATO alliance to include Finland, which it was a no on, it then said yes to; or Sweden, which it was a no on, and then said yes to — diplomacy has been the tool through which the United States, working with our allies and partners, has had to move Hungary from its position of isolation and blocking to cooperation. And the way that we do that in this relationship is different, unfortunately, than the way that we can do that with virtually any other ally.
I’m still haunted a little bit by the image of boats down the Danube with a skull and crossbones and your name on it. Me too.
It’s an odd welcome. What was it about you in particular that you feel was threatening to the Orban government? I think it was about my work on democracy and human rights, but it was encoded in my gayness. It’s an interesting thing that I’ve experienced here: No matter what substantive issue I’m engaging on, whether it’s Hungary’s continued dependence upon Vladimir Putin for its energy supply despite intensive efforts to encourage them to diversify or the independence of the judiciary in Hungary, the way that the Hungarian government tries to respond and publicly contextualize our critique is by making it somehow about woke, liberal, Democratic activists. I remember my very first meeting with a senior Hungarian official, a really nice guy, but he began the meeting by saying, Ambassador, I know that you want to speak to us about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and gender ideology. And I actually had to interrupt the guy and say, No, actually, I want to speak to you about your relationship with Vladimir Putin. So I think that the language that they used was to encode the critique in a frame of, “This is L.G.B.T.Q.” — in their words — “ideology infecting our society,” even if what was generating the legitimate political concern didn’t have much to do with L.G.B.T.Q. issues at all.
Your job is to have a relationship not only with the government but also with the people of Hungary. So how do you then maneuver around that perception of you? A lot of outreach. I think it’s important for people to hear from the United States directly, particularly given the amount of propaganda that they’re being fed on a daily basis by the government’s own media machine. You know, I did not anticipate coming into this job that I would be one of the most famous people in Hungary. But the government made a strategic mistake. I was on the front page of the main newspaper every single day. They provided me and the United States with a degree of visibility that we have not otherwise had. And so while the attacks from the government media were focused on trying to make me seem weird or foreign or gross, we tried to use the platform and visibility to explain our interests, our relationship.
When you say that they were trying to make you seem weird or gross, what were these articles saying? There’s a whole strand of reporting that’s suggestive that I’m a pedophile, which is a pretty extraordinary thing. I’m a father of two children. I’ve been in a relationship with my partner now for close to 24 years. I remember, I was with fellow ambassadors from the diplomatic corps, marching in the only Pride march outside of Budapest in a city called Pécs. It was sort of ragtag, small. And as they always were, the government media’s cameras were principally trained on me, and I remember my colleague, the Irish ambassador, who was there with me, had brought his daughter. And he had just arrived, and he wanted to introduce me to his daughter, and he leaned over and said, “This is the United States ambassador,” and we shook hands. And that evening on the news, the headline story was that the United States ambassador leads the Pride march in Pécs, which is of course absurd, and was surrounded by children, and we even saw him interact with the children. And it was said in a way that they didn’t have to finish the sentence. The message was clear.
There has been this growing relationship between the right in the United States and in Hungary, which is one of the reasons Viktor Orban has become more well known in America than he might have otherwise been. CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) has held multiple conferences in Hungary. We’ve seen thinkers on the right, like the president of the Heritage Foundation, media personalities like Tucker Carlson, incoming Vice President JD Vance, express admiration for Orban. What have you observed about that relationship while you’ve been ambassador? As the American ambassador, I want to be a little careful about speaking about American politics. But what I will say is that Orban’s government has broadcast to communities, including political communities in the United States, that they are a country that is standing up for family values, that they are a country that’s fighting woke ideology, that they’re a country that’s fighting migration. Their tagline is: no migration, no gender, no war — things that resonate in political constituencies in the United States but also elsewhere in Europe and around the world. But what that does is it obfuscates something else that is happening. And what else is happening is a very dangerous system of rewards and punishment that has been set up in Hungary, where the government has effectively taken control of two things, money and the media, and then uses those two things to punish individuals who ask questions or express views that are dissonant with the government’s policy. And they use their control of the media to render those individuals radioactive. And so, the admiration for the Hungarian government that is sometimes expressed on the basis of some of the social issues or hot-button political issues, including in U.S. politics, I often wonder if those individuals actually understand the nature of what this government is standing for in its relationship, both with Russia and with China, but also the system of kleptocracy that has taken hold and is eroding democratic institutions here.
Orban has really shifted many things. As you said, he’s a champion of traditional, quote-unquote “family values.” He’s cracked down on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He’s embraced anti-immigrant positions. Vance has talked admiringly about how Orban changed higher education in Hungary. Can you talk me through how Orban did that? What the Hungarian government did was effectively take what were public universities and public assets and transfer them to private hands. They set up something called public-private foundations, transferred all the assets of that university to the public-private foundation and then appointed a board of trustees for that foundation that was Fidesz party loyalists to a tenure for life. So what it did effectively was take what were public resources and put them under the infinite control of a single political party.
Does this all limit what you can study in Hungary? What professors can say? The teachers that I’ve spoken with are keenly aware that if they say or do the wrong thing, if they engage in a political space or a political discussion with a dissenting point of view, they’re afraid. And I guess that’s sort of the point. And it’s not happening in isolation. You’re seeing the same sort of centralization, the same sort of nationalization taking place across virtually every segment of society. When I arrived here, there were street protests over a new law that was created for teachers, which effectively, it’s a little complicated, but effectively nationalized teachers, moved all of them under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior and gave the government the authority to be able to more liberally fire them, punish them or transfer their positions. So you could be teaching in Budapest one day, but then the next day you’d be teaching two hours away. Again, what that level of control does is it makes you fearful of stepping out of line, because the consequences are so dramatic. And it works. And you saw the same thing in the judiciary as well: Judges can be reassigned to different districts around the country. Teachers can be reassigned to different schools around the country. And if you think about that, that’s a pretty powerful instrument, that if you speak up or say something wrong, suddenly your career has dramatically changed.
Can you explain how Orban’s attack on independent media has played out over time? By independent accounts, 85 percent of outlets are controlled by the Hungarian government. I think what the prime minister realized after — you know, he was elected to office, he had a term and then he lost before coming back to office in 2010 — and I think what he realized in that interim period was it wasn’t enough to just control the economy. He also had to control the media in order to stay in power. And so what commenced was effectively oligarchs’ purchasing independent media outlets in bulk and then donating those outlets to a purportedly independent foundation called KESMA, and on the board of KESMA are all of the Fidesz party loyalists. And we know that the government provides direction to those media outlets as to what stories they should write.
Just to give you a flavor of how pervasive this is: When I arrived here, I met with the two leaders of this entity called the National Judicial Council, which is effectively the organization of judges that’s supposed to be the autonomous voices of judges within the system. And the day after I met with these two judges, they were on the front page, branded as traitors. These two guys who had no profile were suddenly everywhere. There are 3,000 judges in Hungary, and I’ve subsequently spoken with many judges. And what I will tell you is that every single one of those judges heard about this, saw it and got a message that if they stepped out of line, they too would be made famous. So the control of the media is instrumentalized. When I walk away from this experience, one of the things that is most alarming to me is just how easy it is to actually control people. It doesn’t take secret police. It doesn’t take guns. It doesn’t take gulags. The reality is that if you have the ability to overwhelm the media ecosystem with lies, you make the cost of engaging in public debate so high that it becomes an existential one.
What you seem to be suggesting is that control of the media really is at the crux of a lot of what’s happened in Hungary because it allows what people think to be controlled. Just to think about it domestically briefly: In the previous administration, if you think about the power of a single tweet — imagine you’re in an environment where it’s not about a single mean tweet. It’s actually CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Fox — every single outlet is saying the same thing about the same person. It’s so overwhelming, it’s so scary and it changes people’s behavior.
Let’s talk about the broader landscape, because it’s not only American conservative movements and Orban’s party that have these alliances. We’ve seen a sort of global movement on the populist right, cooperating, meeting, forming relationships, exchanging ideas. What do you think we should understand about that broader international movement? Institutionally, I have enormous respect for the Foreign Service and for the State Department. I’ve served at the State Department now under three presidents. And the State Department trains its officers to engage in a form of diplomacy that is, as we were discussing earlier, sort of the opposite of what is actually needed to tackle and shape the choices of these proto-authoritarian governments like Viktor Orban’s and those who are emulating him. Orban has described Hungry as “a petri dish for illiberalism.” And I think he’s actually right. This is a petri dish. This is an experiment. But I guess my thought and reflection after being here for these years is, if Hungary is going to be a petri dish for illiberalism, and these other proto-authoritarian leaders are going to look to it to model their behavior, it also has to be the testing ground for new forms of engaging with that government to try to meaningfully shape their choices in a way that further strengthens democratic institutions and values. It requires things that are unnatural to traditional diplomacy.
Like what? Like being unflinchingly candid about what we’re seeing. Orban’s government is not intransigent, they will move, but they just will move in response to policies and forms of engagement that are much more blunt, much more forceful than we’re accustomed to using, particularly with allies.
Do you still see Hungary as an ally? Hungary is formally an ally. But at the same time, Hungary behaves like no other ally. I’ll use the prime minister’s own words. The prime minister himself has described the United States as one of Hungary’s “top three adversaries.” That’s the Hungarian prime minister’s description of his relationship with the United States. Hungary has a view of its role in the alliance that is very specific. Hungary believes that if it contributes 2 percent of its G.D.P. to military spending consistent with the Wales pledge, if it shows up for exercises, that it’s satisfied its end of the bargain. But that’s not true, because what makes the alliance special is, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world stands for something. It’s an alliance of democracies. We want Hungary in the alliance. We want to be partners with Hungary. But what Hungary brings to the table is its shared values and shared commitment to democracy. And if that changes, then it raises a set of questions.
The way you’ve been describing this is that somehow Hungary is outside the European Union. But in recent European elections, we’ve seen a real swing to the right. Seven E.U. member states now have far-right parties in control. And in other countries, including France and Germany, far-right parties have made real gains. Do you think Orban’s model is spreading in Europe itself? I think the short answer is yes, and the question is, How are the rest of us going to respond to that?
What do you think the Trump-Orban alliance will mean going forward? Well, I hope that the alliance between Hungary and the United States is an alliance between nations, and I will say that despite the political rhetoric from the prime minister and his government, the concerns in America about what’s happening in Hungary are pretty bipartisan. I don’t want to be Pollyanna about this, but the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jim Risch, a prominent Republican, himself put a hold on arms sales to Hungary because of Hungary’s actions delaying the accession of Sweden to NATO. And he took the unusual step of making that hold public because he was so outraged by the behavior. I have hosted some of the most conservative Republican members of the United States Senate in Budapest. And they have themselves publicly spoken out about what they’ve seen and the concerns they have. The president-elect’s own secretary of state designate, Marco Rubio, in the first Trump administration wrote to President Trump expressing his concerns about democratic erosion, backsliding and the relationship between the Hungarians and the Russians. So, I offer this only as ballast to suggest that the relationship is actually more complex than I think the political rhetoric suggests.
It can be really easy here in the United States to ignore things happening on the other side of the world. Why should Americans care about Hungary or your experience there? Hungary is a living example of how vulnerable democratic institutions actually are and how easy it is for ill-intentioned leaders to exercise control over citizens. And that’s on steroids when they control all of the media ecosystem. And how quickly a country and a people can be chilled into silence. When the political debate becomes so personal, so repugnant, so loud, the choice to engage in it, who wants to do that? And the moment you stop engaging, the moment you stop leaning in and you stop speaking up, the capture of the state institutions advances very quickly. Hungary is an embodiment of that phenomenon.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The post The Outgoing Ambassador to Hungary Is Alarmed by What He Has Seen appeared first on New York Times.
