I Was Ambassador to Hungary. The America I Returned to Alarms Me.

Opinion|I Was Ambassador to Hungary. The America I Returned to Alarms Me.

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.