Saturday rewind: What Trump lost in Hungary
Watch in-depth interviews with a leading scholar of Orbán's autocracy and prosecutors holding an ICE agent and Live Nation's monopoly to task.
“Before Trump, there was Orbán.”
So says Princeton Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, the leading scholar of former Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s system of autocratic legalism.
Since his landslide election last Sunday, opposition leader Peter Magyar has begun the work that he promised of “system change,” and one of his most groundbreaking revelations was that Orbán’s Hungarian state had been diverting taxpayer money to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), a practice that Magyar promised to investigate as a potential “criminal offense.”
Magyar’s statement would only be surprising for those who have not been following MAGA’s ties to Hungary’s departing strongman.
As previously reported on All Rise News, those ties run deep: CPAC has held four annual conferences in Budapest, celebrating and strategizing ways for the United States to emulate Orbán’s anti-democratic government. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 modeled much of Trump’s agenda on Orbán, including dismantling the administrative state, centralizing executive power, and exerting control over the media and universities.
“There are lots of elements of how Orbán captured the state that the Project 2025 people captured,” Scheppele said, citing strategies to weaponize the national budget and attack the civil service.
In the U.S. context, Scheppele recognized this in the defunding of universities and public institutions and mass firings of civil servants.
“Those who remain are terrified to lose their jobs and they'll follow you wherever you go,” Scheppele said.
She said that such extreme measures allowed Orbán to consolidate power in Hungary within three years, rigging elections in his favor through extreme gerrymandering and banishing opposition leaders from state media.
“It went very fast, and after he had everything locked down in Hungary, he then started to get international ambitions,” she added.
In the full interview, Scheppele explains how a system that reinforced his power fell so precipitously and decisively after 16 years in power. She also explains how the private institutions that upheld his power and grew his international network remain in place, continuing to inspire Trump and others on the global right.
Watch my interview with her in full on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
Other videos below the paywall:
* California AG Rob Bonta celebrates a jury “thrashing” Live Nation’s monopoly.
* A key witness who helped disbar Trump lawyer John Eastman breaks his silence.
* Prosecutor Mary Moriarty discusses her groundbreaking charges against an ICE agent.
