IT’S NO SECRET that Viktor Orbán’s hardline populist regime is the model for the conservative  movement’s Project 2025: conservatives openly tout this, including the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin D. Roberts, and in recent years, the hardline bromance has become a MEGA-MAGA populist lovefest. MEGA, of course, refers to the adopted slogan of Orbán’s brainchild radical right alliance, Patriots for Europe: Make Europe Great Again.  

The relationship between Orbán and other Hungarian leaders and US Christian nationalists began before Project 2025 was born. It’s been actively pushed by Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, as well as MAGA cheerleaders Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, among other prominent far-right media voices. It has deepened as Orbán’s star has risen, including his  current presidency of the European Union Council. That relationship includes two-way exchanges of funding, academic lectures, paid fellowships, training, and policy advice shared between US and Hungarian officials, notably conservative Christian leaders. In recent years, French, Polish, Spanish, and other European wanna-be autocrats have also made their way across the pond, while US Republican aspirants including GOP vice-presidential candidate JD Vance and others have discovered a new love of Budapest.

“Make America great again, make Europe great again!” Orbán declared in English at CPAC Hungary: “Go Donald Trump! Go European sovereigntists!”

The autocrat’s playbook

The American far-right admires Orbán’s success in taking control of Hungary. Roberts openly states that Project 2025 has grabbed from Hungary’s take-no-prisoners strategy for its US playbook while, according to Orbán himself, his government has had “deep involvement” in writing the Trump team’s policy proposals, a revelation he made in a July 2024 speech in  Hungary.(i) Two years earlier, at the first Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary – an  offshoot of the annual US CPAC meeting, Orbán announced, “We have perfected the recipe here, and we want to give it out to the rest of the world’s conservative parties for free.”(ii) That recipe—how to construct an illiberal state—has yielded Project 2025 (see How Do You Build An Illiberal State?) 

Roberts was all ears. So were a majority of ex-Trump officials who make up Project 2025’s authors and contributors. A recent line-by-line comparison of Project 2025 and the official Trump campaign platform, Agenda 47, found 270 Project 2025 proposals that “match Trump’s past policies and current campaign promises,” according to a CBS News analysis, some matching verbatim Trump’s recorded words and his administration’s actions.(iii)

What’s in the recipe? 

Elected in 2010, Orbán moved quickly to eliminate rival political parties, take control of universities, muzzle the press, and restrict civil liberties—classic early steps of autocracy. He soon captured the courts, and weaponized gerrymandering of voting districts to guarantee continuing electoral victories. Like his ally Vladimir Putin in Russia, who Orbán deeply admires and supports, he has also built what critics call a Hungarian kleptocracy by taking control of valuable state factories and assets and giving properties and favors to wealthy cronies. They provide Orbán with the financial means and political muscle to maintain power.

At the EU, he’s expressed disdain for NATO and is openly pro-Putin, siding with Russia in its war against Ukraine. That pro-Russia view is shared by other members of Orbán’s Patriots for Europe EU bloc. It’s also shared by former Trump officials leading Project 2025, including Russell Vought, who previously served as Trump’s head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, which helped to withhold aid to Ukraine.(iv) Vought is rumored to be in line for a Trump cabinet pick if the GOP wins in November.(v)

Europe’s anti-woke agenda 

US populists took notes as Orbán waged an “anti-woke” war on gender, while advancing a pro life Catholic agenda, and successfully weaponized immigration and transgender issues as polarizing wedge issues that played to Hungary’s conservative Catholic base. He also opposed multiculturalism and DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that address racial inequality. That’s another reason Donald Trump copied that strategy, and it’s also reflected in Project 2025. Orbán has happily compared himself to Trump, too: the two men have developed  a mutual admiration society.  

Before Trump campaigned to build a southern border wall, Orbán did it first, all but sealing off Hungary’s border with Serbia and Croatia during the height of Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015. Orbán hasn’t stopped demonizing foreigners, equating Muslim immigrants with terrorism. In 2022, he claimed Hungarians did not want to become “peoples of mixed race,” and cast the immigration battle as being over the future of European and Western civilization.vi Trump has  echoed similar hateful rhetoric, aiming it at Muslims, Mexicans, and others from what he called “shithole countries.”(vii)

Viktor Orbán is “a noncontroversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s  going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and … he’s a great  leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

—Donald Trump on why he admires Hungary’s autocratic leader 

Hungary’s US lobby

Orbán has stated that he would love to see a Project 2025-type agenda be developed for the EU—a Euro far-right dream. He’s also put money behind the anti-woke, anti-gender war, directing it to US and European allies. Away from the media spotlight, Hungarian institutions linked to Orbán have injected dark money to advance and influence US domestic and foreign policy, some directly funding Christian conservative activists and groups allied to Project 2025.

Since 2010, Orbán’s government has paid Hungarian lobbyists at least $4.4 million, according to a 2024 CNN review of lobby disclosures, and they met with a wide range of US Congressional officials, while helping Hungarian officials gain a spotlight in the US right-wing media, including interviews on Steve Bannon’s War Room. Lobbyists include David Reaboi, an American with Hungarian roots who has lived in Hungary and worked for US right-wing think tanks including the Center for Security Policy, and for Andrew Breitbart, of far-right Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon took over after Breitbart’s death.(viii) 

US Dark Money  

The money has also flowed from the far-right US toward Europe. A three-year investigation by openDemocracy researchers found that US Christian right groups had invested $50 million of dark money—hard to trace—to back European right-wing parties, campaigns, and causes. They are part of “a powerful, well-funded global alliance of ultra-conservatives and far-right political actors” pushing a pro-life, pro-“family” agenda, united behind a banner of defending “Christian  Europe.” The influence of that money on European’s political parties “is formidable,” found openDemocracy.(ix) 

Other dark money sources have popped up, including the Action Institute, which has a Christian social agenda and close ties to the Vatican in Rome and to critics of Pope Francis; the latter include Opus Dei members. Another US think tank, Dignitatis Humanae Institute, counts Steve Bannon as a patron and has funneled money to European right allies. openDemocracy also found a new source of dark money funding: a Madrid-based group, CitizenGo, designed to act as a conservative-type Change.org for US, Russian, and other arch-conservatives who want to influence national European elections while avoiding strict campaign finance limits.(x) 

Away from the media spotlight, Hungarian institutions linked to Orbán have injected dark money to influence US domestic and foreign policy. 

The Russian connection

While Orbán’s bromance with the US far-right has gotten a lion’s share of recent media ink, new  revelations in early September have also put a fresh spotlight on Vladimir Putin and Russia’s dark money ties to MAGAland. On September 5, the US Department of Justice accused two US employees of the Russian state media company, Russia Today (RT), of covertly providing $10 million to a Tennessee-based content company – revealed to be Tenet Media -- to publish pro Russia stories and disinformation. Tenet paid big money to six high-level US MAGA influencers close to Trump’s circle who denied any awareness of being on Moscow’s payroll. You Tube personality Lauren Chen, who was indicted along with her husband Liam Donovan, is also a Turning Point USA contributor, while TPUSA is a Project 2025 advisory group member. The incident has raised fresh speculation about the depth of Russia’s dark money influence on the  US Christian far-right. Turning to Project 2025, it also begs the question of how much Putin’s  agenda – via his ally Orbán – has infused the right-wing’s vision of illiberalism. 

Selling Hungary to MAGA 

In 2022, Kevin Roberts made a visit to Hungary, and soon, the Heritage Foundation inked a cooperative agreement with an Orbán-linked Hungarian think-tank, The Danube Institute, funded by the Hungarian government. Danube is a project of the Hungarian Batthyány Lajos Foundation (BLA) and run by John O’Sullivan, a Brit in his 70s and former journalist said to admire former UK strongwoman Margaret Thatcher.(xi) In 2022 and 2023, the BLA paid at least three US conservative activists to support their anti-gender activism. They include the Catholic activist Christopher Rufo at the Claremont Institute, credited as a lead architect of the US right’s war on DEI; Claremont Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl; and the right-wing writer Michael O’Shea. The assignment? To promote conservative viewpoints on migration, gender identity and LGBTQIA+  issues, critical race theory—and Hungary’s relations in Europe.(xii) 

The Danube Institute also paid Rod Dreher, an American conservative Catholic activist who lives in Budapest, to write pro-Hungary articles in the US press.(xiii) He is a well-known conservative intellectual and close ally of JD Vance who now directs the Danube’s offshoot Network Project. Dreher did a four-month stint at the Danube in 2021 to learn “to what extent politics can be a bulwark against cultural disintegration.” The following July, one of his articles in The American Conservative titled “American Orbanism,” explored why US conservatives love Hungary’s strongman leader so much.(xiv) 

The vision: “Christian Democracy” 

One big reason is Orbán’s public embrace of Christianity — despite his being a Calvinist who used to be an anti-Communist agnostic. Orbán, like Trump, has faced his share of skepticism by critics who view his late embrace of Christianity as political opportunism.(xv) But militant US Catholic activists like Dreher and Vance don’t care so much; they’ve embraced the Orbán doctrine of family values and “Christian democracy” — the new buzzword for theocratic illiberalism. Project 2025 reflects that agenda.

Christian democracy” is the new buzzword for theocratic illiberalism.

Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) is another Orbán-funded private educational institute that trains young pro-Orbán elites, and has developed ties with US conservative institutes. MCC is led by Orbán’s political director, Balazs Orban (no relation), who chairs its board of trustees. It also has spinoff right-wing think tanks and media outlets, including MCC Brussels, which is focused on the EU, among other targets. The MCC has backed Orbán’s pro Putin, anti-NATO, anti-EU position in the Ukraine war, and led campaigns to undermine EU action on climate change, as well as on farmer strikes.(xvi) Balazs Orban proclaims himself best buds with JD Vance, and publicly cheered his selection by Trump to be vice-president.

There are other European ties that link Project 2025 leadership to the Opus Dei branch of the Catholic church, including powerful Catholic activists like Leonard Leo. In 2022, Leo channeled a $1.6 billion gift from Chicago industrialist Barre Seid to a Leo-managed nonprofit, Marble Freedom Trust, to bankroll Project 2025. The trust is not required to disclose its donors. Leo has since provided millions to many of Project 2025’s 100+ advisory groups and leaders to help advance an extremist judicial and political agenda. This activity set the ground for Project 2025.  (see Project 2025’s Opus Dei Ties in Europe and the US).

When did the transatlantic lovefest begin? 

Project 2025’s agenda did not fall from the sky: it harkens back to the first conservative “Mandate for Leadership” presidential transition plan in the 1990s, when the Christian Conservative movement really took shape and expanded its outreach globally. In 1997, right wing World Congress of Families officials were brokering meetings between Reagan officials and Russian leaders, pushing an anti-gay agenda.(xxii) At the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage, Luis Tellez, used his Opus Dei connections across Europe and took the lead to lobby European and other global officials. So did Christian right colleagues at C-FAM, and later, the anti-gay Alliance Defending Freedom. All are Project 2025 advisory groups who now play a key role in pushing its agenda abroad, as well as domestically. 

Among legal nonprofits, two are leading the judicial activism that underpins Project 2025. Vought leads the Center for Renewing America and is a key architect of Project 2025’s still secret fourth pillar, a “180-Day Playbook” of “day one” instructions to implement the myriad policy proposals in the big blueprint within the first six months of the next GOP administration. Vought also served as the former vice-president at Heritage Action, the 504(c)3 lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, while his center’s mission is “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”(xxiii) Ex-Trump senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, head of the legal think tank, America First Legal Foundation, is also playing a key role with his team to develop the playbook, according to Vought.  

Their radical plans were made a bit more public in mid-August, when Vought was secretly recorded on videotape gushing about Project 2025 to two men posing as journalists who were actually members of the British Centre for Climate Reporting. Vought revealed his team had already drafted hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos for “day one” implementation by Trump if he wins in November. He also claimed Trump had been well aware of Project 2025 and was “very supportive of what we do.”(xxiv) 

Hungary, declares Bannon, is “an inspiration to the world” while Orbán is “one of my heroes in the world today, in addition to President Trump.” (xxv) 

America First was among the first Project 2025 advisory groups, but recently withdrew its name from that list, due to what Miller cited as “toxic” scrutiny of Project 2025 by the media. Both groups have filed hundreds of amicus briefs to advance conservative positions on cases, to, as Vought stated, “rehabilitate Christian nationalism,” that are paving the road for Project 2025. They’ve also rubbed shoulders with Orbán and Hungarian officials at CPAC meetings, where Orbán remains everybody’s darling.(xxvi) 

Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon has led the public courtship with European populists, and went so far as to try to organize a pan-European EU right-wing alliance himself, The Movement, that failed when Orbán and other Euro populists rejected an American-led network. Bannon now champions Orbán’s Patriots for Europe alliance. So does Tucker Carlson, the bombastic US right wing radio personality who made two trips to Hungary, then returned to spreading the fawning  gospel of Orbán to MAGA audiences.

‘The Hungarian model’ 

In fall 2021, Tucker Carlson’s cheerleading broadcasts from Budapest prompted GOP heavyweight Jeff Sessions to visit Hungary, followed by Mike Pence. In 2022, Heritage president Kevin Roberts went over to meet Orbán and study how Fidesz had implemented its takeover of Hungary. Heritage signed a “cooperative agreement” with the Orban-linked Danube Institute — opening the door for Hungarian officials to advise a tight-knit group of Trump’s circles. In early 2023, Project 2025 was born.

By then, Project 2025’s co-director Spencer Chretien had also crossed the pond to study how to apply the “Hungarian model” of illiberalism to remake America. Along with Paul Dans, he focused on building and training a Christian conservative loyalist arm of recruits—the second and third pillars of Project 2025’s blueprint. They knew they already had some control over a key autocracy lever: the judiciary, due to Leonard Leo’s dark money and steady focus on placing  conservatives on the Supreme Court, as well as lower courts. They also had powerful willing allies, including Trump, who has found a ready army among Christian evangelists. Never mind that Trump isn’t a deep Christian; to true believers, he’s King Cyrus, a flawed sinner who can still deliver the White House for Christ.

For their part, Orbán and other European far-right populists have increased their visits to the US, and been feted as guest speakers at US CPAC and offshoot CPAC Hungary meetings, organized by the right-wing Hungarian Center for Fundamental Rights, and at the Heritage Foundation. Both Le Pens, Marine and her niece Marion Maréchal, have been top draws at CPAC. At the 2023 CPAC Hungary, many of the speakers advanced pro-Russian views, including speaker Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvilil.(xxvii) Then there’s Spanish Vox party strongman Santiago “Santi” Abascal, a rising Euro star at 47 who has hosted summits with his close allies Marine Le Pen, Orbán, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. At the third CPAC Hungary this past May, Orbán delivered the keynote, cheered by his far-right allies, including Spain’s Abascal,  Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, and Portugal’s Andre Ventura of the rightist party Chegal, another aspirant populist.(xxviii) Donald Trump beamed in a video greeting, while Kevin Roberts was a guest speaker. By now, Roberts is well known in Hungary, while the Heritage Foundation’s logo is prominently displayed on the front page of the Danube Institute’s website.

CPAC Hungary could have doubled as a Trump rally, dotted with familiar MAGA slogans such as “drain the swamp” and anti-“woke” messages. 

The gathering could have doubled as a Trump rally, dotted with familiar MAGA slogans such as “drain the swamp” and anti-“woke” messages like “Woke-Zero,” a play on Coke advertising. Project 2025 was a subject of excited discussion. There, Orbán declared in English, “Make America great again, make Europe great again! Go Donald Trump! Go European sovereigntists!” 

European institutions have also expanded their invitation to the Americans to talk about Project 2025, including Project 2025 author Roger Severino, vice-president at Heritage Foundation, also linked to Opus Dei. He led the US Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights under Trump. A staunch Catholic, Severino is the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the HHS, which he proposed turning into a pro-life “Department of Life.”  

Militant Catholics 

Severino’s proposals to restrict abortion to the extent Congress will allow, ban some forms of  birth control, and even restrict IVF, have led to huge outcry from millions of Americans. His wife  Carrie Severino is a former clerk for SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas and manages the Concord  Fund (formerly Judicial Crisis Network), another revolving-door dark money funnel for Leo to cronies. Leo’s flush Marble Freedom Trust provided almost $30 million to Concord in 2022;  Concord then paid millions to CR Advisors – Leo’s for-profit consulting service – lining Leo’s  pockets. (see ‘Follow The Dark Money’ report and list of Project 2025 advisory groups for more details).  

Roger Severino has been taking his message abroad, too. In May, Severino was a guest speaker at the Vox/ ECR-sponsored “Europa Viva 24” right-wing conference in Madrid, representing Heritage and Project 2025, and spreading the Christian pro-life gospel.(xxix) Orban, Meloni and Ventura were there, along with Argentina’s far-right autocrat Javier Millei—an all-star populist cast. 

In February, the Danube Institute also organized an event where Heritage Senior Advisor Troup Hemenway talked about the plan, then in May, Project 2025 co-Director Spencer Chretien was hosted by the Center for Fundamental Rights, organizer of CPAC Hungary, to do the same.(xxx) The networking has only increased as the November US elections loom. 

What’s ahead? 

Last year and this year, Roberts and Heritage hosted Orbán government and Hungarian embassy officials who lobbied US Congressmen to vote against the Biden administration’s planned military aid to Ukraine. Orbán followed that by holding private meetings with Putin, met twice with Trump, and met with Roberts and the Heritage team. His promise? To deliver a Middle East solution to the Ukraine war as an election gift to Trump. Furious EU officials warned that Orbán did not speak for the EU, and moved to boycott him. As EU and US pro-democracy groups warn, the big winner will be Putin in Russia, who may feel emboldened to expand Russia’s empire  dreams and invade other European neighbors, backed by Orbán and Patriots for Europe.  

Europe’s far-right populists also feel encouraged by the deepening solidarity of their new US Christian nationalist besties like Kevin Roberts, who told a happy CPAC Hungary audience: “[G]lobal forces are intent on imposing on you a woke ideology that would lay to waste what you’ve bravely fought to maintain for the past 1300 years: your culture and your civilization […]  But you are standing in the way. I’m here to tell you and [Prime Minister] Orbán, ‘Thank you.’”(xxxi)