When you say that they were trying to make you seem weird or gross, what were these articles saying? There’s a whole strand of reporting that’s suggestive that I’m a pedophile, which is a pretty extraordinary thing. I’m a father of two children. I’ve been in a relationship with my partner now for close to 24 years. I remember, I was with fellow ambassadors from the diplomatic corps, marching in the only Pride march outside of Budapest in a city called Pécs. It was sort of ragtag, small. And as they always were, the government media’s cameras were principally trained on me, and I remember my colleague, the Irish ambassador, who was there with me, had brought his daughter. And he had just arrived, and he wanted to introduce me to his daughter, and he leaned over and said, “This is the United States ambassador,” and we shook hands. And that evening on the news, the headline story was that the United States ambassador leads the Pride march in Pécs, which is of course absurd, and was surrounded by children, and we even saw him interact with the children. And it was said in a way that they didn’t have to finish the sentence. The message was clear.
There has been this growing relationship between the right in the United States and in Hungary, which is one of the reasons Viktor Orban has become more well known in America than he might have otherwise been. CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) has held multiple conferences in Hungary. We’ve seen thinkers on the right, like the president of the Heritage Foundation, media personalities like Tucker Carlson, incoming Vice President JD Vance, express admiration for Orban. What have you observed about that relationship while you’ve been ambassador? As the American ambassador, I want to be a little careful about speaking about American politics. But what I will say is that Orban’s government has broadcast to communities, including political communities in the United States, that they are a country that is standing up for family values, that they are a country that’s fighting woke ideology, that they’re a country that’s fighting migration. Their tagline is: no migration, no gender, no war — things that resonate in political constituencies in the United States but also elsewhere in Europe and around the world. But what that does is it obfuscates something else that is happening. And what else is happening is a very dangerous system of rewards and punishment that has been set up in Hungary, where the government has effectively taken control of two things, money and the media, and then uses those two things to punish individuals who ask questions or express views that are dissonant with the government’s policy. And they use their control of the media to render those individuals radioactive. And so, the admiration for the Hungarian government that is sometimes expressed on the basis of some of the social issues or hot-button political issues, including in U.S. politics, I often wonder if those individuals actually understand the nature of what this government is standing for in its relationship, both with Russia and with China, but also the system of kleptocracy that has taken hold and is eroding democratic institutions here.
Orban has really shifted many things. As you said, he’s a champion of traditional, quote-unquote “family values.” He’s cracked down on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He’s embraced anti-immigrant positions. Vance has talked admiringly about how Orban changed higher education in Hungary. Can you talk me through how Orban did that? What the Hungarian government did was effectively take what were public universities and public assets and transfer them to private hands. They set up something called public-private foundations, transferred all the assets of that university to the public-private foundation and then appointed a board of trustees for that foundation that was Fidesz party loyalists to a tenure for life. So what it did effectively was take what were public resources and put them under the infinite control of a single political party.
