Recent buzz about the possibility of Trump selecting Budapest to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine has brought Hungary back into the public consciousness. During the Biden years, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was relegated to something of a footnote and regarded with distaste by the reigning administration. Now, Hungary has moved from adversary to ally in record time—a welcome reset that offers a window into Trump’s recalibrated foreign policy.
As early as the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Biden branded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a “thug” and lumped Poland and Hungary together as “totalitarian regimes”—incendiary language that prior U.S. presidents avoided, even when the two countries were under actual totalitarian control of the Communist Party.
It was hardly surprising, then, that in 2021 President Biden chose a gay, married LGBTQ activist with two adopted children as ambassador to Hungary—a country whose constitution defines marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman, bans adoption by same-sex couples, and enforces some of Europe’s toughest child-protection laws. U.S. Ambassador David Pressman ignited tensions by denouncing Hungary’s conservative stance on marriage and its 2021 Child Protection Act, which forbids gender propaganda in K-12 schools.