'Don’t dupe yourselves': Diplomat issues dire warning to those appeasing Trump

23 July

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Former Hungarian ambassador David Pressman tells the New York Times that it’s not about how much Trump looks and acts like Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban. The two are identical in their desire to rule their nations through strongman tactics. It’s about how American elites and institutions are willing to collapse their democracy to allow it.

“The real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence,” Pressman writes.

The faces of Hungary’s sole independent judicial body "got plastered in Hungarian papers, branded as traitors and foreign agents, just because they had raised concerns about the rule of law in Hungary," said Pressman. But the response from other powerful judges? Silence.

And then there’s the Hungarian private sector, which said nothing when the state awarded billions in public contracts to Orban’s son-in-law, a former plumber named Lorinc Meszaros. And when Mr. Orban’s close associates told a multinational retailer to give the prime minister’s family a cut of its business, Pressman said other multinational companies kept silent.

When Orban banned gay Pride parades young, gay Hungarians bravely marched on to spite him. But Hungary’s elites, like so many corporate logos that once decorated floats on Fifth Avenue, were nowhere to be found.

Hungarian law firms similarly opted to become “instruments of a strongman rather than custodians of the rule of law,” Pressman said, just like America’s self-identified legal defenders who remain partners at Trump-captured institutions, earning millions “while skirting their moral and civic responsibility to take a stand.”

“During my time in Hungary, I saw Hungarian mayors tell themselves that they were pursuing a savvy strategy by appeasing Mr. Orban even as he effectively stripped them of their revenues and authority,” said Pressman. “Investors and executives bought into this narrative, even as their businesses and entire sectors fell prey to economic policies intended to enrich Mr. Orban’s family and friends.”

Hungarian judges also bought into it, even as “Orban’s machine slowly swallowed their profession.”

“Some saw capitulation in simple terms: as the only way to preserve their access to resources and keep the people who worked for them employed,” Pressman writes. “‘We’ll eventually get through this,’” they surely told themselves, “‘but first, we must go along.’”

“So they made deals that Orban engineered: peace with the strongman, in exchange for subjugation and humiliation. Going along is what did them in,” Pressman said. “… The lesson of Hungary is this: We cannot claim to care about democracy only when it costs nothing. President Trump, like Mr. Orban, no doubt believes that everyone can be bought. America’s elites are proving him right.”

Trump gets sued, sure, but lawsuits work inside a legal system that people like Trump and Orban want to subvert. What does a court decision matter when a president ignores the order and dares the judges to sic the bailiff on them, said Pressman.

“Lawsuits … do little to counter our own elites’ very Hungarian acquiescence,” Pressman said, and he warned the “stewards of our nation’s great cultural and commercial institutions: ... don't dupe yourselves.”

“The illusion that you are smarter than the strongman, that you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that — an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters.

Read the full report at this New York Times link.

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