Danielle Kurtzleben

And this is a guy who has liked him for a very long time.

Trump also just really likes strongmen, authoritarians.

He has expressed interest.

If not always love or embracing of, he has always expressed respect for strongmen, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, any number of these strongmen from around the world.

Like at this point, after Trump has alienated or at least upset a lot of leaders in Europe, including some on the right, with his threats to take over or invade Greenland, with tariffs, with all sorts of things, Viktor Orban very well

you could make the argument that he is Trump's strongest ally in Europe at this point and that Trump doesn't want to lose that.

The one other thing I would add is that at the end of last year, 2025, the White House put out this document of its national security strategy.

And the White House said that it wants what it called patriotic parties to remain in power in Europe.

Um,

And also for European countries to disincentivize or just keep out a lot of migration because – and I'm going to read this to you.

It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and military strong enough to remain reliable allies.

And that is because should present trends continue, they wrote, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.

So the fear apparently is that too much immigration, too much economic integration.

will make Europe unrecognizable and may change Europe too much.

And therefore, we think that's a national security risk.

Yeah, I mean, what I would add is our colleague Mara Liason did some really great reporting on this way back in 2022 when it was first announced that CPAC was going to have a conference in Hungary.

And the question was like, why on earth that of all places?

And you heard from conservative elites and people who consider themselves thought leaders at the time that, yeah, there are things that the U.S.

might want to consider here.

There's something that this conservative writer who's really popular on the right, his name is Rod Dreher, told Mara, which is,