Trump Wants a Europe in His (and Orbán’s) Image
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The Week in Sharp Relief
Trump Wants a Europe in His (and Orbán’s) Image
By Jude Jones, editor-in-chief
The Trump administration has made its resent for modern Europe no secret. Even before European leaders coalesced in opposition to the US president’s thwarted bid to annex Greenland and molest continental sovereignty, a December National Security Strategy report warned of a Europe facing “civilisational erasure” and pondered whether the continent has become too weak to remain a reliable ally.
At the Munich Security Conference 2026 – where U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance last year parroted such apocalyptic tones – this geopolitical eschatology was swapped (largely) for a collaborative pragmatism. Marco Rubio, Trump’s Floridian secretary of state, urged for European military autarky, which was the leitmotif of the three-day-long affair, but affirmed, in contradiction to recent Trumpist tantrums: “We believe that Europe must survive. Ultimately, our destiny is – and always will be – intertwined with [Europe’s].”
But what does an America “intertwined” with Europe – as Rubio later put it, “spiritually connected” to it – look like? The answer came a couple of days later, when Rubio gave a joint speech with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to round off his speaking engagements.
Orbán is Europe’s leading anti-LGBTQ+ leader. In power since 2010 – which makes him the longest-serving leader in the EU – he has spent his 16 years in power dismantling the architecture of Hungarian democracy, siphoning millions in state bonds to family members and allies and turning his home country into one of Europe’s most regressive on LGBTQ+ liberties. It is not hard to understand why Trump has often considered the “Viktator” a personal role model.
“Your success is our success,” Rubio told Orbán, who had spent much of his time at the conference shouting about a Brussels-led anti-Budapest conspiracy and the importance of closer ties to Russia. If the US really wants to “revitalise an old friendship” with Europe, as Rubio claimed, then it is a Europe which looks much like the one Hungary has crafted at home: illiberal, oligarchical and morally traditionalist.
The surprises here should be limited. Trump has spent much of his second term steamrolling LGBTQ+ rights and the constitutional framework for American democracy. He has turned cities such as Minneapolis into anarchist police states as his ICE agents shoot civilians in the street and execute others behind closed doors, with 32 people dying in its custody last year.
He has also campaigned for and funded moral conservatism abroad. The MAGA-aligned Heritage Foundation has offered financial support to far-right European think tanks such as France’s Western Arc and Britain’s Free Speech Union. Laura Cunliffe, a Trump acolyte and member of the influential America First Policy Institute, moonlights as the executive director of Family Watch International, a Christian lobbying group that campaigns for harsher anti-homosexuality laws in Africa. Even the Epstein files brought renewed attention to former advisor Steve Bannon’s attempts to build closer ties between American bodies and European far-right parties such as France’s National Rally and Germany’s AfD.
Trump wants European allyship, but he wants it on his terms with like-minded leaders. He wants allyship with an Orbánist Europe, one which believes that Western “civilisation” is under existential threat, one which believes in anti-federalism, homophobia and financial patronage. Luckily for Europe, Orbán’s rule may soon be coming to an end – he is facing re-election this year and is currently trailing behind the more moderate and pro-EU Tisza party.
Unluckily for Europe, many countries which have yet to revel in the joys of an Orbánist regime – the UK, France, et al. – seem careening closer and closer. “The culture wars of MAGA in the US are not ours,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proclaimed elsewhere in Munich. Even he sounded hardly convinced of himself.
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