Vol. 170: A great day for Hungary, but….

What’s that mean for Trump?

Are you as excited about Hungary’s election results as I am? Are you as thrilled as the New York Times, which called Prime Minister Victor Orban’s resounding defeat this month “a model for defeating Trumpism”?

I confess that nothing lately has quite animated me as the news that ordinary citizens had non-violently dumped a supposed dictator-for-life. But are we maybe getting a little too excited about the Trump-Orban analogies? That’s my question.

Victor Orban was “Trump before Trump,” as Trump’s pal Steve Bannon once admiringly described him. During his 16 years as prime minister, Orban rigged Hungary’s election rules, installed loyalists in once non-partisan government jobs, undermined judicial independence, repressed his political opponents, and hounded independent media and universities. Much like you-know-who.

Desperate Syrian refugees

Orban also funneled government money into conservative organizations and think tanks aimed at undermining the European Union and promoting an authoritarian world order. He was Vladimir Putin’s biggest ally inside NATO as well as the original architect of what he called Western illiberalism.

Like Trump, Orban incited popular sentiment against immigrants, gays, and religious minorities. In 2015, Syrian refugees desperate for a new homeland hurled themselves on the tracks at a Hungarian railway station when a train they thought was carrying them to Austria was stopped by Hungarian police to take them to a detention camp. This deliberately nasty act was intended to deter other refugees from heading to Hungary. It was Orban’s version of ICE, years before Trump’s cruel variety of ICE even existed.

“The migrants’ despair,” noted the Hungarian writer Noémi Szécsi at the time, “was because they didn’t want to be stuck here— in the country where we Hungarians are destined to live our shabby little lives.”

Gracious concession

Trump openly admired Orban, and our own Vice President JD Vance traveled to Hungary this month to campaign for him. When Orban ran for a fifth term this year, observers like me assumed he was as unbeatable as, say, Putin is in Russia or Xi in China. Yet it turns out that most Hungarians care more about putting food on their tables than tyrannizing gays, immigrants, atheists, and political liberals.

So, Hungary’s voters decisively turned Orban out of office. His opponent, Peter Magyar, won 53% of the popular vote, compared to 38% for Orban, and Magyar’s party apparently won a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament, probably sufficient to undo many of the dictatorial policies Orban had put in place.

Could something so revolutionary happen here? Maybe. But Hungary’s model differs from ours in a few striking respects.

For one thing, Orban accepted his defeat graciously. He did not suggest the election had been rigged or stolen. Can’t picture Trump doing any such thing. Do the words “gracious” or “concession” even exist in his dictionary?

Hungary’s overachievers

For another thing, America is a nation of immigrants (at least until Trump came along). Hungary, on the other hand, has long been a nation of emigrants. Ask yourself what two traits the following overachievers (past as well as present) share:

Franz Liszt, Eugene Ormandy, Sir Georg Solti, George Soros, Fritz Reiner, Estée Lauder, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Koestler, William Fox, Adolf Zukor, Paul Newman, Leslie Howard, Tony Curtis, Mitzi Gaynor, Andrew Grove (founder of Intel), Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), George Rosenkranz (father of oral contraception), Ignaz Semmelweis (father of antiseptic medicine), Peter Goldmark (father of TV), Bela Bartok, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, John Lukacs, Harry Houdini, Joseph Pulitzer, George Pataki, Alfred Bendiner, Art Buchwald, Ernie Kovacs, Frank Capra, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hedy Lamarr, Bela Lugosi, Michael Curtiz, Peter Lorre, Peter Falk, Don Adams, Jerry Seinfeld, Tommy Ramone, and the current CBS News chief Bari Weiss.

The answer: They’re all descended from Hungarians, and they all did their overachieving after they or their ancestors left Hungary. (In Hollywood’s early days, one movie studio posted this sign: “It is not enough to be Hungarian. One must also have talent!”)

How come these failures in Hungary succeeded so wildly in America and western Europe? When immigrants move from poor countries to rich ones, noted the economist Paul Collins in his 2013 book, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, “their productivity rockets upwards,” because they are “escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.” Of course, that book was published before Trump got to the White House. Trump frowned on immigrants from what he called “shithole” countries. (He preferred immigrants from Sweden.)

The 20th-Century Philadelphia tycoon Albert M. Greenfield— a Russian immigrant (the subject of my 2014 biography, The Outsider) who rebuilt Center City and restored Society Hill— once remarked, “Most of the world’s great achievements were accomplished by men who were born poor.” Not the sort of idea easily comprehended by the likes of Orban, or Trump.

Lenin and Hitler

Can our nation of immigrants finally respond to Trump the way Hungary’s nation of emigrants finally responded to Victor Orban? A cautioning word from Robert Zaller, the retired Drexel history professor and confirmed skeptic, may help bring us back to Earth:

“Lenin’s Bolsheviks won 25% of the last free vote held in Russia (and seized power through a revolution). Mussolini, with 7% of the seats in Italy’s Parliament, was installed by a monarchical coup. Hitler’s Fascists won 32% of the vote in Weimar Germany’s last election (down from 37% in the immediately preceding one) and also got in through a coup. Trump alone was the people’s choice.”

(Actually, Trump got only 49.8% of the popular vote when he won the 2024 election. And only 46.1% in his 2016 victory. Those may not be the landslides Trump claims, but they’re much better numbers than Lenin or Hitler ever managed. And those guys caused more trouble than Trump, at least so far.)

Wisdom from Pulp Fiction

So, is Orban’s defeat a model for Trump’s defeat? As Shakespeare put it, “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” On the other hand, when Shakespeare wrote that line (in Hamlet’s soliloquy) he was specifically referring to suicide as an answer to suffering, pain, and uncertainty.

Maybe we should give the last word on this matter not to Shakespeare and Hamlet but to Winston Wolfe, the Mafia cleanup specialist played by Harvey Keitel in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction. When his fellow hoodlums congratulate him for so effectively concealing the evidence of their crimes, Wolfe warns them: “Let’s not start suckin’ each other’s dicks quite yet.”

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com