Trump’s love for Viktor Orbán hints at what another Trump term will look like

Donald Trump has not only run the Republican primaries like an incumbent, but on occasion, he gets to play-act the role of president right at home. On Friday, he hosted Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister,, for a quasi-state visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate, described by discerning critics as “the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by third-world kleptocrats”.

Orbán has spent the past 14 years making his country into a kleptocratic autocracy right in the middle of the European Union. Obviously, Trump does not need general guidance from Orbán; he is already endowed with authoritarian instincts. But, for all the obvious differences between Orbán’s small European nation and the US, Orbán’s rule holds concrete lessons which the American right is ready to adopt. Given the excitement with which Trump acolytes have been promoting Orbán – and their frequent pilgrimages to Budapest as the capital of “national conservatism” – Hungary offers a preview of a second Trump term.

Lesson number one: if you want to control the country, you must completely control your own party. After losing two successive national elections at the beginning of this century, it looked like Orbán’s career might be finished. Instead, he managed to govern his Fidesz party with an iron grip. It is not an accident that far-right populist leaders everywhere treat their parties as personal vehicles, with no real internal debates, let alone dissent, tolerated.

That has consequences for a political system as a whole: the leader faces no restraints from political heavyweights who are fellow partisans – and who would have credibility with followers – when acting on the national stage. By 2020, Trump had already been