President Donald Trump is meeting with Hungary’s far-right prime minister — another example of the president not being shy about engaging with foreign leaders not warmly embraced by the West.It's far more than that. Dictator Orban has made the judiciary of Hungary subservient to his whims. He has used the power of the state to neuter his opposition and destroy press freedoms.
Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban both have espoused hard-line anti-migration rhetoric. Orban says he hopes he and Trump can coordinate that stance into a global alliance.
Trump is, in point of fact, is jealous of Orban. The American ambassador to Hungary, a long-time friend of Trump, said this: “I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.”
That's it in a nutshell: Trump hates our democracy. He seeks to undermine it at every turn.
The Republican Party is now the Trump party. Those who still call themselves "Republicans" will, some day, wake up and see what damage Trump has wrought in their name.
One can only hope they wake up before the American experiment is killed off by Trump's greed and his lust for power.
5 comments:
We're boned.
Pretty much, I fear. Orban's "illiberal democracy" is just another term for an authoritarian/fascist state.
“Les fausses opinions ressemblent à la fausse monnaie qui est frappée d'abord par de grands coupables et dépensée ensuite par d'honnêtes gens qui perpétuent le crime sans savoir ce qu'ils font.”
“False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.”
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“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite.”
“Every nation gets the government it deserves.”
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Both by Joseph de Maistre. Given that roughly 35-45% of the U.S. population back Donnie at any given time, and sometimes over 50%, I would say he wasn’t far wrong. Then we have H.L. Mencken:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools.
Hungary and Poland are both warnings for us, in that they are both still nominally democracies, but practically authoritarian states.
If we want a different outcome here, we need to take it seriously enough to deliberately avoid letting what happened to them happen to us, and make no mistake, we're already moving in that direction.
-Doug in Oakland
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