In fact, Ambassador David Pressman’s address distilled for me a sense that’s been growing ever since Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, and has crystallized since a second spell in power became as likely as not: No matter what Pressman or a President Kamala Harris might say or stand for, it’s no longer clear what American values are even supposed to be. They can turn on a Hungarian forint.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban is counting on that. He has bet big on a Trump victory, becoming one of the very few world leaders to openly campaign for it. And if it doesn’t work out this time, he’s said he’ll just wait for the next turn of the US electoral cycle. And why not? Orban’s been working against the wishes and interests of both the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization for well over a decade despite Hungary’s membership. He’s suffered only some fines and finger-wagging as a result. In Europe, he’s playing an even longer game to change the EU’s interests and values to match his own. He could succeed; it’s possible.
Orban is, according to Pressman, miscalculating. His partisan approach makes the relationship between “two great nations” contingent on ties between two men — and that could, he implied, end badly for the Hungarian leader. After years of turning the other cheek while Orban disrespected the US, dismantled his own country’s democracy and played footsie with Moscow and Beijing, that tolerance is coming to an end. It “may well mean a different kind of relationship,” Pressman warned, twice, in what sounded very much like a threat.
I doubt very much Orban’s boots are shaking. Maybe they should be. Having inserted himself and his country so deeply into domestic American politics, a Harris presidency might not just double down on its commitment to the alliances she made part of her election campaign, but also to punish the one foreign leader who both undermines them from within and campaigned openly against her. But I doubt it.
That’s the thing about having a values-and-alliance-based foreign policy, as opposed to a transactional one. If US alliances are based on nations’ shared values and interests, rather than on individual deals and whims, then it will likely remain just as difficult to cut Orban’s Hungary loose as it has been to ostracize Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his even more vitriolic anti-American diatribes and NATO obstructionism.There is genuine political opposition to Orban in Hungary, and, for the first time since 2010, there’s also a figure capable of uniting it in Peter Magyar, a lawyer who formed a new party after divorcing Orban’s then-justice minister in 2023, and has been drawing mass rallies since. So if you’re a Hungarian fan of liberal democracy, all hope is not yet lost. Pressman was addressing the Budapest Forum, a conference on liberal democracy that was organized by a university the government has chased out of town. The US ambassador had a receptive audience. There was vigorous head nodding, for example, when he pointed out that the government’s newly created Sovereignty Protection Office had opened just three public investigations, all focused on protecting itself from scrutiny instead of protecting the national interest. The investigations were into Transparency International, a global anti-corruption nonprofit; a domestic anti-corruption news site, Átlátszó (Transparency), that looked into the affairs of Orban’s remarkably wealthy son-in-law; and an environmental nonprofit, worried about lack of due diligence around the construction of a government-backed battery plant.
But Orban has almost complete control of domestic media, so few Hungarians will get to hear what Pressman said. To the extent his remarks were covered at all, it was to quote Orban’s political adviser as saying Hungary wouldn’t take advice on democracy from a country in which the opposition candidate just suffered two assassination attempts. Well, touché.
Pressman is proudly married to another man, with two young children, in a country where the ruling party runs on a daily diet of attacks on the supposed threat that LGBTQ+ rights pose to the Hungarian way of life. As a lawyer, he also defended dissidents and journalists persecuted by authoritarian regimes. He says things that if spoken by Hungarians would attract organized media smear campaigns aimed at making them, as he put it, professionally and socially “radioactive.” This again is true.
He is loathed by American conservatives and pro-Orban Hungarians for overstepping an ambassador’s role. While the US can certainly be arrogant, Pressman’s use of his protected position to speak out in a country with captured media is clearly from the heart. On top of that, Orban doesn’t hesitate to interfere in the affairs of his neighbors, so I have little sympathy for the complaint.
The issue, though, is that Pressman will be on the first flight home if Democrats lose the White House. Whoever replaces him would be an altogether different kind of American, holding a very different set of values; if not this time, then maybe next.
