I was sitting in a retro cafe in Budapest in a neighborhood just a few blocks from the magnificent Danube. I saw the back of a woman talking to a waiter. She looked strangely familiar. I turned to my wife and said, “I think that woman is Kari Lake, you know, that conservative politician from Arizona.” It was. A moment later she was sitting at the table next to us. “Steve, don’t engage with her,” Marsha chided me. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to form my own opinion from personal experience, I introduced myself. “Hi, Steve from Maine. What brings you to Budapest?, I asked. Lake was in town for the CPAC meeting, the Conservative Political Action Conference, one of the biggest gatherings of conservatives in the world. “Thanks, Steve, for your patriotism,” she said.

The CPAC event is hosted by Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister. Orban is the European Union’s “bad boy.” He panders to Russia’s Putin, takes hundreds of millions of dollars from the EU, all while criticizing the organization, as if it was a major job responsibility. He regularly chastises, George Soros, the liberal Jewish Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist. It should be noted that a younger Orban once attended university in London, thanks to a scholarship from George Soros. Orban has the unapologetic habit of biting the hand that feeds him.

Orban recently met with Trump in Florida while President Biden was meeting with NATO leaders in Washington, D.C. Let’s be clear, Orban is an anti-democratic, pro-Putin thug. He revised Hungary’s constitution to disadvantage his political opposition. He has handcuffed the Hungarian judiciary. When companies succeed in Hungary, Orban sends “his men” to those companies to make offers the Hungarian entrepreneurs can’t refuse. If they do, he finds fabricated tax oversights as reason to take-over the companies. I was once in an upscale hotel in Balatonfured, a lovely town that sits on Hungary’s beautiful Lake Balaton. At the tiny bar there, I struck up a conversation with the hotel manager. “How did your summer season go?,” I asked. “We had a stressful summer,” he responded. “How so?” I asked. “Well, Viktor Orban’s family stayed here for a few days and we were worried that they would like the place so much that they would make us an offer we couldn’t refuse. The owner of the hotel was stressed out of his mind for a few days about this.”

Orban is against immigrants, people of color, and homosexuals. He has implemented tax breaks for people in heterosexual marriages, and pays them for having larger families. He is against a free press. Hungary, a beautiful country, with one of the world’s great capitals in Budapest, is being suffocated by Orban’s self-serving leadership.

Sound familiar? The newly released Republican manifesto, “Project 2025,” is a collection of conservative and right wing policy promises which, in many ways, replicates what Orban has done in Hungary. Trump, it is clear, wants to transform the U.S. into a controlled and undemocratic place like Hungary. Orban and his family are firmly and unrelentingly entrenched in Hungary. Trump envisions the same for us. Americans must be vigilant, or we risk becoming the Hungary between the two oceans.