In 1972, “only Nixon could go to China.” In 2025, only Trump could go to Budapest.
Fifty-three years ago, the United States was still the leader of the free world — the indispensable nation. Now, American democracy is collapsing. President Donald Trump, the American right and the MAGA movement have put themselves in the orbit of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and other authoritarian regimes.
We have truly stepped through the looking glass into an upside-down world and inverted reality. Or more precisely, we have been pushed through it.
On Tuesday, POLITICO reported that Trump is preparing to travel to Budapest to host a trilateral so-called “peace summit” between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to open negotiations with an eye toward ending the war. The Secret Service is already planning for Trump’s attendance in the capital of Prime Minister Orbán’s authoritarian state.
But as POLITICO noted, it’s unclear whether the summit will actually happen. Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit on Aug. 15 was followed by a meeting on Monday at the White House between Trump, Zelenskyy and a group of European leaders. After Trump announced on social media he would join Zelenskyy and Putin for a summit, Russians began “to slow walk any such encounter” between the two adversaries. In comments released ahead of his interview on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” and reported by the New York Times, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov cast doubt on the idea. “There is no meeting planned,” he said. “And this agenda is not ready at all.” When asked about a meeting in Budapest, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to “confirm or deny locations.”
The role of place has great symbolic power in politics — and Budapest is not neutral ground. It is home base for the type of competitive authoritarianism, if not naked fascism, that Trump and his MAGA forces are quickly imposing on the United States.
The role of place has great symbolic power in politics — and Budapest is not neutral ground. It is home base for the type of competitive authoritarianism, if not naked fascism, that Trump and his MAGA forces are quickly imposing on the United States. There would also be the dark irony of holding such a peace summit in the Hungarian capital.
“It was the Budapest Memorandum, signed by the U.S., U.K., Russia and Ukraine in 1994, that guaranteed Ukraine’s borders and territorial integrity in exchange for their surrendering to Russia what was then the third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world,” said Thom Hartmann, author of “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink,” and a political analyst. “If Russia hadn’t criminally breached that agreement, no ‘second meeting’ in Budapest would [now] be necessary.”
In Alaska, Trump welcomed Putin as a friend — instead of as the leader in a war of aggression against an American ally. Trump appears to be playing the role of handmaiden, handing Ukraine over to Russia piecemeal and surrendering to Putin’s other demands.
Writing in the Guardian on Aug. 13 ahead of the Alaska meeting, Rafael Behr of the Guardian successfully predicted what would happen: “[Putin] has no intention of ending the war just because the White House demands it, but he knows he must pretend to want peace. And he knows his best hope of defeating Ukraine is to manipulate Trump into bullying Kyiv towards capitulation, while imagining that his own humiliation at Kremlin hands is some kind of personal victory.”
Hovering over Trump’s potential summit with Zelenskyy and Putin is how he views dictators, autocrats and other enemies of democracy as role models and aspirational figures. “The strongman Trump admires the most is Vladimir Putin, someone he seems in awe of,” political scientist Barbara Walter said. “No American president has ever given so much legitimacy to one of the world’s most ruthless leaders.”
Walter characterized Trump’s behavior toward Putin as “authoritarian learning.” She explained, “Leaders determined to stay in power watch each other closely, copying how someone was able to systematically dismantle democratic institutions with little pushback. Russia’s “foreign agent” laws were replicated in Egypt and Hungary. Turkey’s behind-the-scenes capture of its courts became a model for others. Trump has absorbed these lessons. His push to reinstate “Schedule F” to purge civil servants, his politicization of the Justice Department, his constant attacks on journalists are strategies he has borrowed from his authoritarian ‘friends.’”
Susan Stokes, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and faculty chair of the Chicago Center on Democracy, agreed. “Autocratic elected leaders know and admire each other, and their mutual admiration undergirds their networks and informal alliances. The very idea of using high office to subvert democracy often comes, in part at least, from abroad.”
Some political observers have speculated that Trump’s potential Budapest summit is intended to serve as a distraction from the Epstein scandal. Others believe the president will meet with Putin and Zelenskyy to fulfill his fantasy of being seen as a great dealmaker, a wartime leader of sorts and perhaps even a Nobel Peace Prize winner. There is also a theory that Trump’s potential meeting in Budapest is a ploy to boost his anemic support among the American people, which currently stands at 40%.
For me, any speculation is secondary to how Trump’s proposed Budapest meeting is the latest of many examples of his abandonment of American and Western democracy.
It would be an error to conclude that Trump’s potential meeting with Putin and Zelenskyy in Budapest is some type of surprise move. In reality, such a meeting would be the result of a much larger, years-long plan toward advancing the “Orbánization” of America.
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As the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum explained in March, Orbán “plays an outsize role” in American politics on the right. Trump and his MAGA allies are obsessed with importing the Hungarian model to the U.S. Applebaum pointed to a telling series of conservative events and statements by MAGA leaders and thinkers, including the decision of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) to allow a “pro-Orbán think tank” to host their conference in Budapest in May 2022, and the prime minister’s reciprocal speech three months later at a CPAC meeting in Dallas. In 2024, Orbán met with Trump several times. “Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as ‘one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance’…Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary ‘not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.’”
If successfully implemented, the Orbánization of America would chill civil rights and liberties, muzzle the press, erode free and fair elections and impose full-on White Christian authoritarian rule. It would mean blood-and-soil nationalism, with nonwhites, Muslims, migrants and immigrants cast as “poison in the blood” of the nation — all under the rule of Trump and his MAGA successors as de facto dictators.
Hartmann put it this way:
What’s even more astonishing is how the conservative movement in America — I grew up in it, went door-to-door with my dad for Barry Goldwater in 1964 — is going along with Trump’s rapid efforts to convert America into a fascist state and prevent Democrats from regaining federal power where they may hold him and his toadies accountable the way America sent Nixon’s Attorney General, White House lawyer, and others to prison for their corruption. Troops in our streets are the exact thing I remember John Birchers and Republicans freaking out about back in the day; now it appears they’re just fine with the “tyranny” they previously warned against and claimed we all needed to fight back against by any means necessary.
Such a political vision would not be viable if there were not many millions of Americans who have been trained to welcome it. The right-wing propaganda and experience machine has been preparing the way by training MAGA supporters, American “conservatives” and the larger right-wing to idolize authoritarianism. Research by PRRI shows that a majority of Republicans and white right-wing Christians — the base of Trump’s MAGA movement — are authoritarians who reject multiracial pluralistic democracy.
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Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist who serves as the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, said he doubted a Budapest summit would happen. “Even if President Zelenskyy and Putin try to meet,” he explained, “it will not be in Budapest, which is not an appropriate place in any sense. If they meet, it will be either Istanbul, Zurich or Beijing.”
Regardless of the location, Sonin cast doubt on such a meeting happening at all. “Ukraine and Russia are too far apart at this moment and will be until the situation on the battlefield or inside one of the countries changes dramatically, which is not a real-world prospect. The sticking point is not the language in some documents, but the simple fact that Putin will never agree [to] any kind of real security guarantees for Ukraine…if (when) Russia attacks again. And Ukraine cannot stop fighting unless there is something like these guarantees, otherwise Putin will attack again.”
Sonin also offered a mixed view on Orbán’s success in Hungary. “Outside the United States and the old West, every strong elected leader tries hard to dismantle institutions,” he said. “This was true 100 years ago. It is true now. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hungary was not the most likely to collapse — but it has never been a given that it would not. (In fact, it is not yet clear that it collapsed — of course, Orban is a corrupt machinator, but it does seem that he was voted in competitive and free elections — [and] also that he will be voted out next year.)”
Orbán was patient and disciplined in his years-long autocratic capture of Hungary’s government and society. He has now been prime minister for 15 years. By contrast, Trump and his MAGA forces are using a blitzkrieg approach to devastate America’s democracy and society. Trump has needed only seven months. Each day, his autocratic power and dictatorial aspirations continue to grow.
The question now is whether Trump’s blitzkrieg will translate into a lasting MAGA authoritarian political order.
