Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, is working to implement the policies of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to institutionalize Trumpism, an analyst and professor wrote on Thursday.
Roberts has been in the spotlight for his recent comments celebrating the Supreme Court's July 1 ruling on presidential immunity. He said the country is in the midst of a "Second American Revolution" against "elites" and "despotic bureaucrats."
Roberts' Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, created Project 2025, a controversial set of policies for a future Republican administration. The proposals seek to expand the powers of the presidency and fire "deep state" civil servants in the federal government to replace them with conservative loyalists.
Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, joined the growing chorus of analysts criticizing Roberts' comments and policy proposals as being authoritarian. In Letters From an American, her Substack blog, she discussed Roberts' close affiliation with the regime of Orbán, Hungary's strongman leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest ally in NATO and the European Union.
She described Orbán as openly wanting to overthrow the concept of Western democracy and replace it with what he has referred to as "illiberal democracy" or "Christian Democracy."
Richardson said bringing Orbán's policies to the United States was central to Roberts' plan of "institutionalizing Trumpism" and decentralizing or privatizing large parts of the federal government to distance it from international alliances, including the United Nations and NATO.
Orbán is a hard-line anti-immigration Euroskeptic who regularly expresses sympathy for Russia. Like Donald Trump's campaign, Orbán has described George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire, as a puppet master controlling the global political left. In 2022, Orbán's party won a decisive fourth consecutive term, running on a platform that Hungary, the EU and NATO should not be involved in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Project 2025's ambition to staff the government with conservative loyalists may be familiar to Orbán. Outside observers said Hungary's 2022 election was "marred by the absence of a level playing field" spurred by a "pervasive overlap" between state institutions and Orbán's party, including a favorable media ownership structure and changes to the voting system. In June, tens of thousands of Hungarians gathered to protest his policies and his party's suppression of political opposition.
The Heritage Foundation has long admired Orbán. In a 2022 interview with Hungarian Conservative, Roberts said, "Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model." In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into formal partnership with the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank funded by Orbán's government.
Newsweek has contacted Roberts for comment via email.
In her blog, Richardson wrote, "The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure."
She added, "Roberts's 'second American revolution,' which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution."
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