Trump and Orbán Are Tied at the Root

JD Vance flew to Budapest this week to campaign for a foreign leader. Trump called in by speakerphone to address a Hungarian crowd. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the same trip in February and told Viktor Orbán directly: "President Trump is deeply committed to your success, because your success is our success." Hungary votes today.

Most readers already know this part. What gets less attention is the question underneath it: why does the most powerful government on earth need one specific man to win in a country smaller than Ohio?

The answer starts with a name almost nobody outside political consulting circles knows. Arthur Finkelstein spent four decades shaping Republican politics in near-total secrecy, working for Nixon, Reagan, Jesse Helms, and George H.W. Bush. He was so reclusive that colleagues said those who matter in politics knew him, and no one beyond that, which was exactly how he wanted it. Starting in 2008, he relocated to Budapest and rebuilt Orbán's failing party from the ground up, designing in secret the political identity Orbán still uses today. The formula he built there was the same one that later defined Trump's campaigns: manufacture a single face for everything the base fears, hold them in permanent siege posture, never let the enemy dissolve. Orbán used George Soros. Trump used whoever served the moment. The formula is identical because it came from the same man.

Finkelstein's protégés, known inside Republican politics as "Arthur's kids," went on to staff Trump's campaigns directly. Tony Fabrizio, one of his closest disciples, served as Trump's pollster in both 2016 and 2024. Before he died in 2017, Finkelstein also introduced Paul Manafort to the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch network he had been cultivating across Eastern Europe. Manafort collected tens of millions of dollars from that network before offering to run Trump's 2016 campaign for free. The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded that Manafort's ties to Russian intelligence while managing the campaign represented a "grave counterintelligence threat." Trump pardoned him in December 2020.

Trump and Orbán did not arrive at the same politics independently. One architect built the Hungarian model first, trained the people who ran Trump's campaigns, and introduced the Russian-linked network into Trump's orbit before either man held national office.

Now for the spy chief.

In 2016, Richard Grenell's consulting firm accepted $103,750 from a foundation funded and supervised by the Hungarian government. Grenell's own lawyer confirmed in writing that Grenell knew the Hungarian government was the sponsor. Grenell never registered as a foreign agent, a federal requirement for anyone conducting public relations on behalf of a foreign government, and the same statute that sent Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates to prison. Trump then installed Grenell as acting Director of National Intelligence without a Senate confirmation hearing, handing him unrestricted access to every intelligence file held by all seventeen American agencies, including files on foreign interference in American elections. Nobody in a position to stop it did anything about it.

The third thread is running today. McLaughlin and Associates, founded by two more of Finkelstein's protégés, served as Trump's internal polling firm during the 2024 presidential campaign. This week, that same firm released its final poll of the Hungarian election. Hungarian government-funded think tanks have also been sharing what sources described to CBS News as "how to win elections" strategy directly with Trump campaign allies, paid for with Hungarian taxpayer money.

These are documented transactions. The same network built both political operations and introduced Russian-linked operatives into Trump's 2016 campaign. Trump's intelligence chief carried undisclosed financial ties to the Hungarian government into the most sensitive job in American national security. Trump's own polling firm is working the Hungarian election on the same day Trump's vice president is standing on Hungarian soil.

Orbán has had sixteen years. He rewrote the constitution, captured the courts, absorbed the press, and redrew the electoral map in his own favor. He completed the project Trump is currently attempting, with a sixteen-year head start and no meaningful opposition left standing. If Hungarian voters can remove him today anyway, it will represent the fall of a fascist canary in a worldwide coal mine.

This is far from over, and every authoritian should be afraid right now.

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Works Cited

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Brennan, M., & Triay, A. (2024, November 2). Inside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's not-so-secret mission to elect Trump. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/viktor-orban-mission-to-elect-trump/

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