July 23, 2025

By David Pressman

• Former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, ambassador to the U.N. Security Council, assistant secretary of homeland security and member of the staff of the National Security Council.

As the most recent U.S. ambassador to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, I’m often asked if the Trump administration’s tactics and policies feel familiar. The short answer is yes. But the more important — and unsettling — question is this: Does the way Americans are responding feel familiar, too?

After years watching Hungary suffocate under the weight of its democratic collapse, I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.

Take the judiciary. I met leaders of Hungary’s sole independent judicial body in October 2022 to discuss their work. For months afterward, their faces (and mine) were plastered in the papers, branded as traitors and foreign agents, just because they had raised concerns about the rule of law in Hungary. The response from other powerful judges? Silence.

Or take the private sector. Since Mr. Orban became prime minister in 2010, the state has awarded billions in public contracts to his son-in-law and childhood friend, a former plumber named Lorinc Meszaros. What have Hungarian business leaders said? Nothing.

Last year, when Mr. Orban’s close associates reportedly told a multinational retailer to give the prime minister’s family a cut of its business, did other multinational companies speak up? They did not.

Hungarians with little power or privilege to lose would occasionally protest. But those with power remained reliably, pliably silent.

The American officials and academics who, like me, lived in Hungary during this period would often tell ourselves stories to explain this submissiveness: that docility is rooted in Hungary’s oppressive communist past, that its democracy was simply too young to withstand a strongman.

Then I returned to the United States, and what I’ve witnessed over these past months at home has exposed those stories as wishful thinking.

Here, too, powerful people are responding to authoritarian advances just as their Hungarian counterparts have — not with defiance, but with capitulation, convinced that they can maintain their independence and stay above the fray.

Major corporations whose logos were once plastered on Pride floats parading down Fifth Avenue now choose to remain on the sidelines. Institutions and professions that have long acted as bastions of critical inquiry, civilized contestation and government accountability have fallen silent.

Many law firms have opted to become instruments of a strongman rather than custodians of the rule of law. Former self-identified defenders of our democracy (back when it cost nothing to support democratic principles), including some who served in Democratic administrations, remain partners at captured institutions, earning millions while skirting their moral and civic responsibility to take a stand.

They cling to the illusion that they can preserve their independence and integrity while making deals with a strongman, just as Hungary’s elite believed they, too, could emerge unscathed.

Mr. Orban often describes Hungarians as possessing a unique intellect and cunning that enables them to outlast their adversaries. It is a self-aggrandizing myth and a potent tool of self-deception. Believing you can outfox a fox is how you become its prey. And American elites, confident in their cleverness, have welcomed a fox into the henhouse.

During my time in Hungary, I saw Hungarian mayors tell themselves that they were pursuing a savvy strategy by appeasing Mr. Orban even as he effectively stripped them of their revenues and authority.

Investors and executives bought into this narrative, even as their businesses and entire sectors fell prey to economic policies intended to enrich Mr. Orban’s family and friends.

Hungarian judges bought into it, even as Mr. Orban’s machine slowly swallowed their profession. Some saw capitulation in simple terms: as the only way to preserve their access to resources and keep the people who worked for them employed. “We’ll eventually get through this,” they surely told themselves, “but first, we must go along.”