President Joe Biden slammed Donald Trump for his friendly meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister whose open advocacy for what he has called “illiberal democracy” has made him a lodestar for the Trumpist right.
“You know who he’s meeting with today down in Mar-a-Lago? Orban of Hungary, who’s stated flatly that he doesn’t think democracy works, he’s looking for dictatorship,” Biden said in a Friday campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it.”
Trump, who has a long history of praising Orban, was effusive on Friday. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” Trump said while introducing the Hungarian prime minister at Mar-a-Lago, according to a video posted by Orban. “He’s a noncontroversial figure because he said, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss.”
The Trump campaign said the two met to discuss “a wide range of issues affecting Hungary and the United States, including the paramount importance of strong and secure borders to protect the sovereignty of each nation.”
Biden’s criticism of his likely 2024 counterpart’s affinity for one of the world’s budding autocrats comes on the heels of his fiery State of the Union address, in which he similarly went after Trump for recent comments in which the former president said he would “encourage” Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if NATO countries fail to meet their security funding requirements. Biden described the comments as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable” in his Thursday address, which began with a plea for more aid to Ukraine.
For his part, Orban has continued to maintain ties with Moscow during the war and recently delayed a $54.3 billion European Union aid package for Ukraine. In the leadup to his meeting with Trump, Orban told a diplomacy forum in Turkey that “the only serious chance for peace is if [Trump] is able to come back and to make peace,” adding that he felt that if Trump had been president when Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, “there would have been no war now.”
“We need leaders in the world who are respected and can bring peace,” Orban wrote of Trump on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday. “He is one of them. Come back and bring us peace, Mr. President!”
This has become somewhat of a favorite line of Orban’s: In 2023, when the Hungarian leader spoke at an installment of the Conservative Political Action Conference that was hosted in Budapest, he told the U.S. conservatives in attendance that he was “sure if President Trump would be the president, there would be no war in Ukraine and Europe. Come back, Mr President. Make America great again and bring us peace.”
Orban wasn’t just in the U.S. this week to give his endorsement to Trump. On Thursday, he spoke at the conservative Heritage Foundation, a one-time redoubt of Reaganite conservatism that has recently remade itself as a hub for right-wing Trumpist populism. The foundation is behind Project 2025, an initiative to create a “government-in-waiting” of true MAGA populist believers come a future Trump term.
“The greatest fight in international politics is between the globalists and those who believe in national sovereignty,” Orban wrote following his discussion with Heritage president Kevin Roberts at the think tank, in which topics included “supporting families, fighting illegal migration and standing up for the sovereignty” of the two countries. “I was happy to see at the @Heritage Foundation that we sovereignists have many friends in the US as well.”