Liberalism’s Last Stand

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Hi Radio Atlantic listeners, this is Isaac Dover, staff writer here at The Atlantic.

So, in the last few years here at The Atlantic, we've spent a lot of time covering the rise of right-wing populism, and not just Donald Trump.

Nationalist nativist movements are booming all around the world.

Well, staff writer Frank Forer has a new piece in our latest edition of the print magazine about Hungary, the small country in Eastern Europe that has seen perhaps the most dramatic and fastest changes.

A year ago, national elections gave the right-wing party a majority that it's used to cement power.

They've stacked courts, redrawn districts, and even rewritten the Constitution.

Many of the changes have come through more passive pressure, though.

Frank's piece zeroes in on how the country's most prestigious university, which not coincidentally was founded and funded by George Soros, has been run out of the country.

And presiding over all of this is a man named Victor Orban, who, next week, will be welcomed into the White House by Donald Trump.

President Trump has tended to have a sympathetic approach to authoritarians around the world.

A few months ago, Frank had the ambassador to Hungary, an old friend of the president, say to him, I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Victor Orban has.

Well,

now Frank's back from Budapest and here with me today to discuss what's happening in Hungary and what role the U.S.

has in all of it going forward.

Frank Four, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Great to be here.

So let's talk about Viktor Orban.

Who is he?

Why do we even care who he is?

So he's the prime minister of Hungary, and he exists at the corner of the European Union.

And the European Union, as we know, is this highly contested organization.

It was this incredibly beautiful dream.

And in the aftermath of the fall of communism, there was a sense that the nations of Europe would band together and in the name of peace and democracy and civilization would create this new constellation of power in the world.

And it seemed like this beautiful thing.

And you had all these states that were part of the former Soviet Union.

They got welded together and their values became more democratic and their markets became more liberal and it seemed like everything was going great.

And then we hit this moment and it's the same moment we hit in the United States, but it's it's happened right in the middle of the Europe where you have a guy like Victor Orban

who

was a young anti-communist who became a liberal politician, who then became

the leader of kind of the populist anti-liberal right in Europe.

And so I think what makes it...

Even though Hungary is such a small country, right?

The population's 10 million.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's about 10 million.

It's a small country, but it's also

a place where kind of we've seen historically contests for kind of the future of civilization.

That during the Cold War, Budapest was a place where there was an uprising in 1956,

and there was a lot of give and take.

And so we care about Hungary because

in the middle of Europe where there was the possibility of of blocking and using this power to try to calm the rise of authoritarianism,

Europe essentially turned a blind eye.

And so an autocrat has kind of flourished.

An authoritarianism in a fairly raw form has flourished where it wasn't supposed to.

Aaron Powell, he is headed to a meeting at the White House.

It is his first time at the White House since 2001.

He was a very different person in 2001.

The politics were very different in 2001.

We'll come back and talk about that in a minute.

But

what does it tell you that Donald Trump is welcoming Victor Orban to the White House?

This is something that Orban wanted for a long time.

Yeah, he was kind of desperate to get a meeting with Trump.

He called Trump straight away after Trump was elected.

He praised him in the course of his campaign.

And I think that Orban has kind of wanted this sort of legitimacy.

He wants Hungary to be seen as a nation that matters in the world.

And there's no better way to show that than to sit in those chairs with the President of the United States.

Yeah, I mean, past White House officials have told me, do not underestimate how much just that photo matters back in the home countries and how the lengths that leaders will go to to be able to do that.

And Orban, was it just with Trump that he wanted to get in, or he saw Trump as the way to get into the White House?

So his relationship with the Obama administration was not great.

He was the recipient of a series of tongue-lashings from State Department officials who didn't like the illiberal direction that he was leading the country.

And Orban has been very strategic in how he's tried to position himself because at the same time, he's seen Trump as an ally.

He's also seen Putin as an ally.

And one big story right now is that the Russians are opening a branch of a major bank in Hungary.

which kind of provides them with a gateway into Europe.

And also, Russian intelligence services have always used Budapest as one of their primary bases of operation.

And a lot about his model is fundamentally Putinist.

In what way?

It's a lot of the cronyism that the state in Hungary has a lot of largesse to offer and a lot of contracts.

It's a small economy, and he's leveraged those incredibly successfully to enrich himself and enrich people around him.

Like Putin, he's managed to decimate independent media without having to resort to a heavy-handed crackdown of the sort that you see in, say, Turkey.

Journalists don't get arrested in Hungary, yet somehow the number of anti-government organs has just shrunk incredibly quickly in the country.

And you have these deals where, you know, advertising disappears at an organization.

They're forced to sell.

you know, a crony of Orban's waltzes in and makes the purchase.

So you do see these patterns repeated.

Is that a model of Putin?

Is that on the model of Putin or is it just

what he's doing?

So

I mean, it's hard to say for sure, but I think that if you look at a lot of the patterns, you would say this is a guy who's studying what's happened in Europe.

And we'll get to this, I think, one of the core narratives of my piece, which is the way that

Orban has dealt with George Soros, who Soros, the wealthy financier, has invested a lot of money in this part of the world.

And he spent so much money in Russia.

And Putin engineered a campaign to eject Soros from Russia.

I think there was a lot about that that Orban absorbed directly and mimicked.

Well, and obviously it's a big part of your piece about the Central European University and Soros' role in starting that and

continuing to shepherd it.

But let's just talk about George Soros for a moment here and set up him in this discussion.

Soros is a name that I think a lot of people are familiar with, but don't really know actually much about him.

He is a boogeyman,

almost literally at this point.

But he is also an actual human being who's 80-something years old.

I think he's 87 years old now.

Was born in Hungary,

he's Jewish,

took on a fake identity as

sort of preteen, right, and in hiding from the Nazis.

And after that, moved to London, got himself involved in finance.

But who actually is this guy that we hear so much about?

So as you describe him,

he's led this incredible career.

He has this amazing trajectory where

he went into hiding during the Holocaust, came from a very aristocratic Hungarian Jewish family.

And the war was terrible.

It came in a flash to Hungary at the very, very end of World War II, where there was this the Nazis' rush to eradicate

Jewry in Budapest.

And because of his family's wealth and because they made a series of fortuitous decisions, he was able to make it out in the end.

But he witnessed incredibly horrible things.

He stepped over corpses in the streets of Budapest.

He saw people murdered.

His mother was raped by Russian supposed liberators.

And

as a teen, he went off to remake himself in London.

And he wanted to be a philosopher.

I mean, he kind of exudes the cafe intellectual style.

I mean, he's a guy.

Have you met him?

Have you talked to him?

I've never met him at this stage.

And I think with this story,

he's loath to talk to the press.

He's hard of hearing, for one.

And so I think that that makes interviews a little bit difficult.

But he's also got this extended operation that's in a very tenuous position.

And everything that he says is fraught with so much meaning and carries so many implications for institutions and people who are affiliated with him.

And so I think he's decided that prudence dictates that he not open his mouth to the press.

I put in an interview request on something else maybe two years ago and it seemed like it was being considered briefly and then I never heard anything back on it.

There is that feeling of it seemed like it's better for him to not talk.

And no matter what, he has done a couple of interviews since then, and

every word gets parsed and gets blown up.

He made a comment about Al Franken and Kirsten Gillibrand, and that became a big thing, even though he has not a lot to do directly with American politics.

Obviously, he funds a lot of liberal groups, but he is this figure.

His philanthropy, I mean, I guess, is a good place to start.

So he goes, he amasses an incredible amount of fortune by pioneering hedge funds and by engaging in

various speculative ventures.

He makes crazy bets on investments.

Yeah.

And has been some combination of smart and lucky.

Right.

Yeah.

Which I mean, which is how you would describe it himself.

Right.

And made enormous amounts of money.

And so you get to the 1980s, and he's made so much money, he doesn't know what to do with it, and he decides to start giving it away.

And he does it

first anonymously, and then it becomes something that he takes a huge amount of pleasure doing.

And at various points in his life, he thinks, you know what?

I'm going to exhaust my resources.

I'm going to spend so much on philanthropy.

I'm not going to have anything left.

But he keeps managing to make money.

And so he was especially obsessed with the anti-communist movements of the 70s and 80s and became friends friends with the Czechs and the Hungarians and the Poles and supported them.

And then he could see the fall of communism coming and decided that he was going to make

one of his really big bets on trying to build a democratic, liberal post-Cold War order in those countries.

And he was his North Star was an Austrian philosopher called Karl Popper, who's a philosopher of science, who came up with the concept of the open society.

He wrote one of the great books of

the Black Swan, right?

That's the Karl Popper thing that

I learned in my philosophy class.

But open society is.

And

he's going to invest in institutions that build an open society, which means that even if he might favor one group of politicians over the other, he wasn't going to

He wasn't going to tilt the scales in the direction of the ones that he favored.

He wanted to create infrastructure, democratic, liberal infrastructure.

And so he does that.

He spends gobs of money in Russia.

He does this in Hungary, where the first thing that he does in the 1980s is that he buys photocopiers, which he sends into the country, which allows knowledge to spread really quickly and ideas to spread quickly.

And these were universities.

There were 12 photocopiers in the entire country of Hungary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so he came in and he would give them to universities and Samizdat would would would proliferate.

And there are academic studies that show that the photocopiers actually played a significant role in helping bring about the fall of communism.

That leads us to how you started on this piece, which is

about Central European University and the story of what happened with it.

Again, this is a

university that Soros founded under this idea that it would help with open society.

It's in Budapest or was in Budapest.

We'll get to that.

And you were there in December.

But why is that the story?

The headline on your piece is liberalism's last stand.

That's a big claim.

That's a lot to attach to.

One university's story and

even these characters, Soros and Orban.

Why is that the way in to telling what you saw going on here?

So there was

about two years ago now,

there was a law passed in Hungary that essentially made it impossible for this university, Central European University, to exist in Budapest.

And a lot of liberals around the world saw this as a tremendously important flashpoint in the struggle to preserve democracy in the face of rising authoritarian populism.

And I viewed it in the same sort of way, that when a university can essentially get kicked out of a European Union country, I mean, it really tells us how far we've descended, where we've normalized behavior that would have been previously

against every single one of our values and something that would have horrified us and we wouldn't have allowed to have transpired.

And so as this was transpiring, I actually felt this kind of aching craving to head to the barricades to report on what was happening.

And so

I convinced my editors here to let me go because it feels like as we look back on the narrative of the last couple of years, you'll see flashpoints.

You'll say, kind of, how did we allow this to happen?

And to me, this was one of them.

Because Orban and Soros

are these figures that

clash in this way over this and are representative of bigger things going on?

Aaron Ross Powell, it's that.

It's also,

if you look at the way that the West conceives of itself, academic freedom is pretty much a central value because it attaches itself to all these concepts

about the open society that George Soros talked about and that predate him.

And so it just seemed like when you could stomp something like that out so easily without the United States really raising much of a fuss, without the European Union raising enough of a fuss, that that's a big deal moment.

Orban and Soros

did not just come into each other's lives.

Their history goes back decades.

And Orban, in some ways, owes

who he became to Soros because of the education that he received because of opportunities through Soros, right?

Yeah, it's a fascinating story of intimacy where

when Soros came to Hungary in the 80s, he was looking for promising institutions, promising people.

His old friends directed him towards Victor Orban and they said, here's an incredibly courageous liberal who's not an anti-Semite, who seems to really get liberalism, and you should help him out.

Was that part of the lead there?

He's not an anti-Semite?

I mean, unfortunately, when you look at kind of the,

well, there's several different strands of anti-communism.

There's kind of a liberal urban anti-communism, which in the context of Hungary was associated with Jews fairly or unfairly.

And then you had a nationalistic one that tended to carry anti-Semitism in its veins.

And so it was a big deal that he wasn't anti-Semitic.

It seemed like he was the rare politician who could bring the liberals and the nationalists together into a coalition that he could direct all of

the kind of anger about communism and the hope for the new order in a direction that ultimately would be liberal.

Aaron Powell, so

the friends introduce them and say, hey, George, you should meet Victor.

Again, he's a young, promising, liberal, wildly charismatic,

not anti-Semite.

And then Soros does what with that relationship.

Well, so Soros

gives him a scholarship to Oxford.

He writes a check to his political party.

And over the years, they maintain a relationship.

It's not like they were good friends, but occasionally they might have a meal together.

You know, Soros could come to him if he had a question about the direction of the country.

And Orban becomes a major politician.

He runs for prime minister.

He, against the odds at a very young age, becomes prime minister because he is so talented.

He presides in a center-right sort of way.

You know, in Hungarian politics, you can always look back and say, you know what, there's a statement here that is kind of unnerving or unsettling.

There's a thing that he did here that suggests an authoritarian tendency.

But ultimately, he runs in kind of a more or less normalized center-right sort of way, then is defeated.

And in defeat, Orban kind of swears that he's going to come back.

And when he comes back, he's never going to lose again.

Right.

So this is, I'm reading from your piece here.

This is Orban.

Early in his career, you say he railed against the, quote, malicious attacks of nationalists who waxed hysterical over Source's philanthropic presence in Hungary.

In those years, Orban proudly called himself a liberal, and his party distanced itself from anti-Semitism and revanchist nationalism.

And then by the time he comes back,

this is how you describe it, he alone would defend the integrity of the family, the nation, and Christendom against the, quote, holy alliance of Brussels bureaucrats, the liberal world media, and insatiable international capital.

I'm going to raise the question that you write in your piece.

How did the Orban of the early 90s, with his long hair and academic aspirations, become the architect of illiberalism?

I mean, a lot of it is just political ambition.

Is that all it is?

He just wanted to be in power, and so he changed his entire belief structure?

Well, I mean, there is that.

There's also an interesting psychological subtext, which is that as he was benefiting from Soros's largesse, there was kind of a simmering resentment that he felt that a lot of a lot of Hungarians felt, where they

they said liberal things in order to because they thought that it would help get them a grant or a scholarship to Oxford or a check to their political party.

But along the way, they were also,

they didn't like the fact that they felt dependent on this guy.

They didn't like the fact that they were having to bend their identities to fit into kind of the milieu of the liberal intelligentsia.

And there's a moment that's that's crystallized in a poem where Orban has come to the parliament and he shows up and he's wearing a suit.

And the leader of the liberal party walks over to him and kind of straightens his tie and pats him on the cheek.

And for Orban, this is a defining moment because he's just been humiliated in front of everybody else and who he feels like, he feels like the elegant liberal is treating him like a rube

for having worn a tie for the first time.

And he's rubbing it in his face.

And that moment kind of

crystallizes something that was real and was always there.

Orban came from the countryside.

He studied in the city.

His friends were all from the countryside.

And

this is what we see here, right?

You know, it's red and blue.

It's urban, it's rural, and the way in which kind of cultural politics can just be suppressed and simmer under the surface and then suddenly erupt.

In that resentment, grievance-lated way that I think would be familiar to some people in thinking about at least some of what's going on in our politics, that it's this backlash that goes on.

It is kind of amazing that this was captured in a poem.

I don't know much about Hungarian poetry, but I don't know that there are a lot of poets sitting in the galleries in the House and Senate writing poems about interactions.

To be fair, it's a very long, epic poem, and this is just one scene.

So

Orban turns on Soros, and not just they're not having dinner anymore, he makes Soros into public enemy number one, right?

And

with

a lot of implicit anti-Semitism and explicit anti-Semitism, it feels like, too.

Is it just, is it cynical politics?

Or was Orban always an anti-Semite?

Did he become an anti-Semite?

What is going on here?

I'm not sure.

I can, I know

whether he was always an anti-Semite or, but I, it, it, like, the anti-Semitism in the campaign against Soros is very real.

Uh,

What do you see that makes it very real?

So the image of the Jewish puppet master is something that is both rhetorically something that he describes, and it's also an image that's invoked in billboards where you see Soros with the opposition leaders, and he's kind of got his arms wrapped around them, and they're holding scissors and cutting a hole in the fence and letting the migrants from North Africa pour into Hungary.

So it's

the idea that he's part of a cabal

is

text.

It's not just beneath the surface.

You know, one thing that you would appreciate as kind of a student of American politics and just the sheer cynicism of this is that one of Orban's primary political consultants was a guy called Arthur Finkelstein, who's kind of a legendarily reclusive Republican consultant who worked for Alphonse D'Amato in the 1980s and kind of was

known as kind of a master of the dark arts and the not terribly robust yet oftentimes quite potent New York Republican scene.

And he moves to Hungary and he helps Sorbonne come up with this anti-Soros campaign.

And I think it should also be noted that there is this global con Arthur Finkelstein who is Jewish

and who also is gay

and he is this like sort of legendary character.

I was at an event with Bill and Hillary Clinton a couple of weeks ago in Washington where Bill Clinton was talking about Arthur Finkelstein.

Bill Clinton's obsessed with him too and the role that he played in the 1996 Israeli elections.

And there's something that's its own story to get into.

But it is kind of amazing to watch a gay Jewish Republican consultant from New York move to

Hungary and help put together an anti-Semitic campaign for an authoritarian regime.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's,

you can't make it up.

We're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about Central European University, which is the heart of this piece.

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We're back with Frank Ford talking about his piece in the latest issue issue of The Atlantic, Liberalism's Last Stand, which is

about all these characters we've been talking about, but really takes shape around Central European University, which George Soros founded, which existed for years as an institution that brought people in from all over Hungary, and then they had widened it and were taking people, students from all over the place.

There

is

a sense that grows around the place as this is sort of the home of liberal thought and education In Hungary, Soros had bigger ambitions for it, but Orban then decides to take it on with this

legal maneuver that is passed essentially in secret that purports to not be about Central European University, but is because it's only about that.

And so

they say you have to have a charter that's in Hungary, even though the university was chartered in New York, that they have to meet all these other requirements that are meant to be so onerous that they can't meet them.

And so the university is going to fall apart, right?

Yeah.

Well, it's not, the university is not going to fall apart, but it's going to depart for Vienna.

And so it's like a totally quirky, lovable institution because it's idealistic in the way that you describe.

So in a place like Hungary, which is so resolutely shut out immigrants, you see women with hijabs sitting in the cafeteria.

You have old dissidents sitting talking to young protesters.

It was a utopian community.

Soros, when he created it, would stay in the dorm.

He really kind of grooved on the place, and

it has tremendous faculty and it's built up an incredible academic reputation.

Probably the best institution of higher learning in that part of the world.

And

the attack on it happens in a broader context, which is that Orban goes after civil society across the board.

He goes after media.

He doesn't really need to even go after the opposition because it's so inept, but he manages to

bring media under his control.

He manages to go after K-12 schools by rewriting the textbooks and changing the curriculum so that it aligns with his political ideology.

He starts to go after the rest of Hungarian universities.

And so he installs a state-appointed chancellor in each of the universities to control the purse strings.

He goes after the main body that funds research, academic research, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and takes all the money and gives it to a crony to parcel out.

And so the attack on this institution, really, he's going after this place that is beyond his control.

So, and therefore kind of dangerous, and is also run by his archenemy.

And so, in order to do this, he has to come up with this legalistic attack that is so clever orban trained as a lawyer and so the attack is a lawyer's attack and uh there's this double speak that is part of the regime where the spokespeople for the regime manage to to to shroud everything in confusion and it kind of serves its effect so that if you're sitting in brussels or if you're sitting in Washington and you watch this unfold, it's easy to kind of buy, you know,

not care as much because it seems like he's got these complicated excuses.

It's this kind of fog of rhetoric that he's able to kind of blow out there.

We're not going after these guys.

This is a bill that's about reforming Hungarian higher education.

And if you argue with them, they make you feel like you're kind of an idiot who doesn't understand your facts.

And so, in that respect, this is kind of really state-of-the-art authoritarianism.

And it works, basically.

And

the university

works.

And Soros tried to do some things to respond to it.

They had students in New York to make up for one of the requirements that this law did.

It's a real question.

Like, if you're a university and you're under political assault, do you behave as a political institution even though you know that changes your identity?

And I think they made a decision that they were an academic institution and they couldn't behave like an NGO.

And so students went and protested.

They filled the streets.

The biggest protests of the Orban era have been in defense of CEU.

They thought that there was some chance that they could have a negotiation with Orban because it's hard to read the guy.

It's hard to know what's genuine and what's political posturing, what's electioneering, what's kind of what's sincere.

And so they decided to test that proposition because there was so much at stake for them.

And they went and they negotiated a deal.

They opened a campus at Bard College in the Hudson River Valley.

Andrew Cuomo's people

got on the phone and they negotiated a new deal with the Hungarians.

And it looked like there would be some sort of settlement at some point.

But

one of the characteristics of authoritarian regimes now is that they're salami slicers, that they're experts at delay tactics and

this confusion that they end up fomenting really just has the effect of quieting the opposition.

And so once the opposition is dampered, they're able to see what they can get away with.

And so there's this continual testing of limits.

So maybe he didn't even actually believe that he would ever chuck this university out of his country, but he started down that road because it was more Soros demagoguery and he kept getting away with it.

and it relocated, or is in the process of relocating to Vienna, where it will exist.

But Orban won and Soros lost.

And this idea of what happens to liberal thought in Europe seems to be that it gets chased out of authoritarian regimes.

This all happens

in the last few months.

And

now

while that's been going on, there have been other crackdowns, other things that Orban has been doing.

And he has, as we were talking about, been very eager to get himself to the White House for that sense of legitimacy.

While it was happening, there's an ambassador to Hungary.

This is somebody who you went to meet with.

His name is David Kornstein.

He is a jeweler, or was a jeweler by trade.

He's 80 years old.

Does not seem to be,

from the way you describe him, all that

educated or interested in diplomatic procedure.

Well, you know, he's, it's interesting.

I don't think I had this in my piece, but he was also a protégé,

as much as an 80-year-old man could be, of Arthur Finkelstein.

And

he considered running for mayor in the early 90s of New York City, and he hired Finkelstein as his political consultant, and

they became pals.

One of the other important stories here is the way in which the Netanyahu government has kind of ignored the blatant anti-Semitism and cultivated Victor Orban as an ally.

And Netanyahu has discovered that Orban will stand up for him in an international forum where he doesn't have a whole lot of other people standing up for him.

And Orban has realized that this friendship with Netanyahu insulates him against a lot of the criticism that he's anti-Semitic.

And so when I went to go meet the ambassador, he strolls in and he's like, I just had lunch with the Israeli ambassador.

And he told me that Orban's a pretty good guy and he's pretty good for the Jews, which was strange because that morning, CNN had published a poll showing that Hungary was the most anti-Semitic country in Europe.

And also, I just picked up a copy of a pro-government news weekly that had a picture of the head of the Jewish Federation on its cover against a black backdrop looking very ominous with cash showering down on his face.

Not terribly subtle.

No,

not really that subtle.

So Kornstein has this moment where you asked him what the Trump administration was going to do about

the moves about Central European University and whether Hungary would suffer as a result of kicking the university out.

And he says, not really.

And then his aide, who seems to be a diplomatic aide, right?

So someone who is

in embassies and they're

a trained Foreign Service officer, pulls him out of the room.

and

Cornstein acknowledges to you that he seems to have done something a little bit

out of line.

He comes back and he says, I'm saddened that they are leaving, but does not, it seems like you pressed him a little bit to go further than that, and he wouldn't and is not.

I didn't need to press him.

He said, look, I'm sad they're leaving, but our relationship with Orban is about a lot of other things, and I'm hoping we can turn the page.

Aaron Powell,

the turning the page is this meeting.

The way that the White House announced it was that

Trump and Orban will meet to discuss ways to deepen cooperation on trade, energy, and cybersecurity, and also to celebrate Hungary's 20th anniversary as a NATO member.

That in itself is kind of interesting because of the way that Trump has been pushing against NATO and does not seem to be celebrating NATO overall, but is celebrating Hungary's 20th anniversary as part of the organization.

Notably,

and it might just be coincidence, but the news of this meeting was put out on the same day that Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, announced that he was canceling a meeting with Germany.

That is the sort of opposition to authoritarian regimes in Europe.

And it seems like this is part of President Trump

finding common ground with authoritarians around the world

and

striking up good relationships with them.

look,

you could even put it more charitably, which is that Hungary is a strategically positioned country.

You could say that Obama criticizing Hungary over human rights didn't necessarily accomplish that much.

And we don't want Hungary to fall into Putin's orbit.

And so that's how they would explain it.

But

I think that if you look at it,

it's crazy crazy how human rights has so been eviscerated as part of our foreign policy calculus, how it's disappeared from our rhetoric, and how we turn a blind eye.

And with Central European University,

we're not talking about dissidents,

Hungarian dissidents.

We're talking about an American institution that was bullied out of a country.

We're talking about how our values were trashed in our face and we didn't really do anything to rush to their defense.

And you look at the world more generally, I do think your interpretation

is true, that there is this access.

I mean, the other way to look at it, though, is that, and I think you'd hear this from a lot of people who are thinking about what President Trump has been doing, is that there's a more honest approach to this.

It's not like the United States started dealing with authoritarian regimes the day that Donald Trump was elected president or the day that he was inaugurated

there are

through decades and through Barack Obama and George Bush and Bill Clinton it relationships with Saudi Arabia with Hungary with

I mean it for all of the

dissatisfaction that the Obama administration felt with Victor Orban it was a

it was like statements saying we don't like what you're doing

but it's not that relationships actually broke down or that, and

it seems like part of what Trump is doing here and

the way that Kornstein put it to you is that, yeah, there are more important things going on than what happens to one university.

I'm not sure that you would have seen

something

all that different out of an Obama administration or out of a Bush or Clinton administration because of how this has gotten away.

You disagree.

I disagree

in the broadest

in two ways.

I mean, well, I agree with you in one sense, which is that the disappearance of human rights is a bipartisan phenomenon that the Obama administration

very self-consciously downgraded human rights

place in its own international calculus.

But I think that Orban is a leader who tests limits.

And I think that A, he was ultimately, he ultimately thought he was sucking up to Donald Trump by going after George George Soros' university.

That's different.

That would not have happened in another administration.

I think that he felt like

he could count on the fact that there would be no price to be paid.

And even maybe you're right.

Maybe an Obama administration wouldn't have sanctioned Hungary.

They wouldn't have gone to the mat for this.

I'm pretty sure that they would have raised a whole lot more of a fuss.

I just remember there were a lot of times during the Obama administration that there would be a statement from the White House to the State Department that said, we disapprove of what's going on.

And they would get emailed around in whatever country it may have been.

Right.

And it didn't ultimately change

anything about the way the governments were relating with each other.

And it didn't change all that much of

what the administration was doing with the country, whether it would be diplomatic relationships or arms deals or whatever else.

Aaron Powell, of course.

I mean, you know,

American power is is limited.

International relations are complicated.

You know, counterfactually, can I be sure that the Obama administration would have done more on this issue?

I think that there probably would have been some statements.

But I.

You know what?

I think that the Secretary of State wouldn't have visited Budapest.

And I don't think that the Secretary of State would have visited and stood there with Orban and said nothing, which is what happened with Mike Pompeo.

I don't think our ambassador there would be

kind of actively cheering the government on.

And so I think that those differences, I mean, you could say, are kind of rhetorical and maybe symbolic, but I think that they ultimately mean something.

And I think dictators behave differently in different contexts.

And he's behaving, I think, much more ruthlessly in this context.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: All right, so let's close with this.

This has all happened.

The president has welcomed Orban to the White House.

He has this stamp of legitimacy now.

He has the pass that Trump and Pompeo have given on it.

Where does that mean that Hungary is headed and where does it mean

the European Union is headed with Hungary there as this

sort of counterweight to where Germany and other leading European countries want to pull it?

So we're actually at a very, very interesting

moment where the European right might fork.

So up until this point, Orban has actually existed in coalition in the European Parliament with other center-right parties.

He hasn't positioned himself as the leader of a separate, independent, nationalistic, populistic bloc.

And there are a lot of complicated reasons why that is so.

Among them, Hungary gets a lot of money from Brussels.

And I think he hasn't wanted to risk that.

And besides...

He's campaign against Brussels, but still take the money.

Yeah.

And he's got the legitimacy that comes with being part of the center right sort of party and they've turned on him a little bit because the head of the center right party there wants to become head of the whole european union and he knows he has to say something against orban and so they suspended orban and his party um in part because of its treatment of central european university and so

you know

like i i I don't see the sense, I don't see the Europeans taking a strong stand against them because nothing in their behavior suggests that they would do that.

But if they were to take a strong stand against them, I mean,

I think the European Union has a lot more cards to play than it's convinced itself.

And so,

you know, I don't have any hope for the United States taking a stand against Hungary.

And I have only slim hopes for the Europeans doing it.

But we're at a moment where they're going to have to make some big decisions about his place within the Union.

And what do you think it means for how other leaders around the world look at what they can do vis-a-vis Donald Trump and American approval or disapproval?

You know, I think that I don't...

I think that he is an important model for other leaders in the Eastern and Central European right.

And they watch what he's done and they try to emulate some of his tactics.

And so as they see Donald Trump pull him into his bosom, I think that that is something that they'll take away as an important message.

But, you know, Orban runs on a parallel track to

Erdogan and to authoritarian leaders in other parts of the world.

So there are these nationalist movements going on across the world, across Europe.

What is knitting them together, and where do you see that going?

Aaron Powell, I don't think they move in a coordinated axis.

I think that there's just a lot of learning that's kind of shared across borders.

So that what happens in Poland or happens in Russia is something that's studied in a place like Budapest.

And you see political arguments being tested.

You see political tactics being tried, and so

one successful legalistic victory is then emulated in other countries.

And such is the nature of politics in a globalized world.

It just happens that the bad things can globalize as quickly as the good ones.

It's nationalism learning from nationalism through globalism.

Yeah, exactly.

There you go.

All right.

Put that on a bumper sticker.

Frank Four, thank you for joining us here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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