To many eyes, the first two months of the second Trump administration have delivered an unpredictable and unprecedented series of assaults on the judiciary, the public service, the media, universities, cities, fundamental freedoms and international alliances, all couched in an implausible online conspiracy-theory language of immigrant invaders, gender threats and menacing globalists.

But that all looks eerily familiar to Hungarians. For them, this has been a fast-motion repeat of what they’ve experienced in the past 14 years under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a similarly personality-driven leader of the extreme – right down to specific policies and to phrases Donald Trump and his administration have used to describe imagined enemies.

In fact, the difference between Mr. Trump’s alarming but largely chaotic first term and his highly programmed and plot-driven second appears to be partly due to the example of Mr. Orban, who met with the Trump team multiple times over the last four years, hosting their signature Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022 and becoming the only foreign leader Mr. Trump regularly cited approvingly during his election campaign.

“While no one could have imagined the exact pace and nature of what Trump is doing, I could have told you that it would be very quick,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Hungarian member of parliament. “This psychological element of taking power and doing everything at this overwhelming pace, this is part of the Orban game – he showed that you can go very far in changing the environment if you do it very quickly so that your critics or adversaries are basically paralyzed. That is something the Americans seem to have learned from him.”

In the late 1980s, Ms. Szelényi was a co-founder, with Mr. Orban, of the Fidesz party, which played a big role in the country’s 1989 democratic revolution against its Moscow-controlled communist regime. Mr. Orban seized control of the party in the mid-1990s and shifted it increasingly to the right, provoking Ms. Szelényi and other members to quit.

After Mr. Orban entered office with a large majority and a decidedly authoritarian message in 2010, Ms. Szelényi returned to parliament with an opposition party she co-founded, retiring in 2018.

Her book Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orban and the Subversion of Hungary is a detailed chronicle of the Orban method, and outlines several tactics Mr. Trump appears to have picked up for his second term.

One is the manipulation of the courts and the Constitution. Mr. Orban learned to ignore court rulings – such as a 2020 one against racial segregation in schools – and to replace professional judges with people seen as party loyalists and to create new types of courts which, he hoped, would rubber-stamp his more unconstitutional acts.

Mr. Orban has had a parliamentary two-thirds supermajority for most of his decade-plus in power, allowing him to repeatedly rewrite Hungary’s constitution. That path will likely be closed to Mr. Trump, but that has not prevented him from attempting to re-interpret the Constitution this year on its clearly stated right to citizenship for anyone born in the United States.

Another example is Mr. Orban’s success in shutting down, taking over or banishing any media and educational institutions he has perceived as critical of his rule. He has used legal and financial pressure to remove owners from major media outlets, and forced Hungary’s most prestigious higher-education institution, Central European University, to flee to Vienna. (Ms. Szelényi is now director of its Democracy Institute.)

Mr. Trump has evidently imitated this path, launching huge lawsuits against TV networks for normal journalistic practices and pressing their owners to settle, and cutting off funding to major universities seen as harbouring what the Trump team considers politically incorrect views.

Which leads to a third Orban element. In 2020, the Hungarian PM amended the country’s constitution to declare that in any family, “The mother is a woman, the father is a man” – part of a campaign against equality-minded views he denounced as “woke,” a word that, like “gender,” had not existed in the Hungarian language. (This week, Mr. Orban’s party passed a law banning all Pride events.)

Mr. Orban then used his CPAC conference to declare that such themes should be central to the right’s message. Mr. Trump, who previously referred sparingly to these fringe obsessions, began with an executive order declaring that “there are only two genders,” and banished words such as “equity” from government documents.

“These things had been non-issues in Hungary – it’s a case where Mr. Orban has sold a package to the Trump circles by analyzing their own interests, where he found language they like and sold it back to them,” says Ms. Szelényi.

Sealing the sale is the fact that Mr. Orban is about to enter his 15th year in office – another example Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to imitate.

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