On March 8th, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán visited Donald Trump at his palatial Mar-a-Lago retreat, where media reported much bonhomie and mutual respect. Almost unreported was Orbán’s visit to Washington, where he met Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation at its headquarters and spoke privately to an audience of right-wing politicians, analysts and public personalities. To more liberal observers, it was nothing short of shocking that Orbán declined to meet with officials in Biden’s administration yet met with such a right-wing think tank instead.
Since Roberts’s appointment as head of Heritage in 2021, this formerly mainstream conservative organisation has swung to the position that its role is “institutionalising Trumpism. Roberts has been vocal about his admiration for Orbán, tweeting that it was an honour to meet him. The admiration appears to be mutual.
“Hungary is the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.”
—Viktor Orbán, addressing the CPAC in 2023
Roberts is quoted as saying that Orbán’s statement was true and should be celebrated. He has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.
Last year, under Roberts’ direction, Heritage joined the Hungarian Danube Institute in a formal partnership. The Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government. It is effectively a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric. The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the US.
The American public have no idea how much funding may be flowing The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán is behind something called Project 2025, the plan Heritage has led, along with dozens of other right-wing organisations, to map out a future right-wing presidency. directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.
In Hungary, Orbán has changed the political landscape by:
- undermining democracy
- filling the Civil Service with loyalists
- attacking immigrants, women, and minorities
- taking over businesses for friends and family
- moving his country away from rules-based international order
In an interview this January, Roberts said Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the US government.
“The Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
—Kevin Roberts, president, Heritage Foundation
Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace. In their vision, the US must:
- restore the family as the centrepiece of American life
- dismantle the administrative state
- return self-governance to the American people”
- defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, & bounty against global threats s
- secure our God-given individual rights to live freely
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. But more objective explanations might observe:
- “Restoring the family” means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights; it means celebrating overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision
- “Dismantling the administrative state” means civil employees who thwarted Trump’s agenda 2016-2020 should be fired and replaced with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
- “Defending our nation’s sovereignty” means ending the rules-based international order hammered out in the years after WWII. This means deserting the UN, NATO or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- “Securing our God-given individual rights to live freely” reeks of religious rule but ultimately focuses on standing against “government control of the economy”—the idea that regulation of business and taxes hampered economic liberty. This ideology mat have moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% in the US since 1981.
Purging the civil service is a hallmark of dictators, whose loyalists then take over media, education, courts, and the military.
“With the government firmly in the hands of a dictator’s loyalists, things like water or schools or Social Security cheques depend on your declaration of loyalty, and there is no recourse. You cannot escape to the bar or the bowling alley, since everything you say is monitored. Even courageous people restrain themselves to protect their children.”
—Timothy Snyder, scholar of authoritarianism.
That Trump, Heritage and Orbán have all stood firmly against aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Putin shows a penchant for dictatorship. Plan 2025 is the blueprint for a small, self-selecting elite to take over America, using money as a weapon.
As the thin end of the wedge in all this, Republican-dominated state legislatures have already attacked voting rights, banned abortion without exceptions and defined a fertilised human egg as a person; They have banned books, attacked public education and gutted business regulation.
America’s Founding Fathers were clear about the relationship between rights and government, in a vision quite different to Project 2025. “\
“Governments are instituted among Men. Such governments are not legitimate unless they derive power from the consent of the governed.”
—Declaration of Independence, 1776
#1104—814 words
davidsberry 