Trump Stunned as Shocking Defeat Sends Chilling Warning

Professor Kim Lane Shepley. I mean, her CV is outrageous, amazing. Professor of Sociology International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public International Affairs. And in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, she spent several years living in Hungary and Russia doing field work on the creation of new constitutions after the revolutions of 1989. She is an expert on authoritarian regimes. She's an expert on all things Hungary. And so after the win of Pader Péter Magyar last week, defeating Viktor Orban as Viktor Orban sought his fifth consecutive term as prime minister, I had to bring Kim here to answer my questions, which we didn't even get to all of them, which means we get the benefit and the privilege of being able to hang out with her even more. But I just want you to really listen to the background. There's a depth of detail that Kim provides that is so profound, but it is also so inspiring because we have so much to learn in a good way from the win of Péter Magyar and as it can translate to us winning here and defeating Maga and Trump in the upcoming years. Take a listen. Joining me now is Professor Kim Lane Shepley. Kim, it is an honor to be able to have this conversation with you. I have been dying to be able to have this conversation with you, and especially coming on the heels of the blockbuster win by Pater Péter Magyar last week. So thank you for coming here and answering all of my burning questions. I really appreciate it. I'm so glad that you're on the case with this, because those of us who work on Hungary, it's been a little specialized until now, so this is great. Well, it kind of underscores something that I talk about a lot here at Katie Fang News and in other places, which is I find it to be a level of arrogance, frankly, on the part of Americans that we don't spend enough time paying attention to international news because I feel like we should learn. We should take lessons from history in other countries and in present-day experiences. So, of course, Victor Orabon's name has always come up, especially during Trump-Maga kind of tenure. And we were watching the... come of that race last week incredibly carefully as Viktor Orban was seeking his fifth consecutive term as Prime Minister of Hungary and the explosion of excitement and joy that came from Majaar's win was understandable and I'm not here to reign on that parade but I do think it's worth especially as I have you as a resource, Kim, to ask, I would think some important questions, at least they are to me. So if you would humor me, I would really appreciate it. Happy to do whatever. Thanks. Okay. So my first question straight out of the gate is this. Is it reasonable for us in the United States to look at what just happened last week with the defeat of Viktor Orban and to think that we can replicate that here in the United States? Yeah, well, there's some things I think we can clearly replicate here and some things that are a little bit harder, right? So the first thing, I think, is that, you know, in all of these cases where you've got autocrats that are running the show, what they do is they put everybody in fear. People are afraid that if they speak up, they're going to be singled out, so they hide, they retreat to private life. And one of the things that Peter Mandar's campaign did was that he had these rallies.

And people would show up at the rallies and they look around and they see who else would show up at the rallies. And suddenly they realized that they weren't alone. And his campaign said, this is not a country where we should live in fear. He traveled without security. He would show up at these rallies and he would say the most important thing is not to be afraid. Okay. And that's something, you know, here I think there are a lot of people keeping their heads down because critics, you know, you pop your head up above the barricades and the Trump folks will take aim at it. So lots of people, lots of leaders, especially the elites, right, have retreated into studied nonchalance, you know, or sort of doing something else. And so. So what Peter Maguire did was to kind of mobilize this anti-fear campaign. That was one thing I think we can copy here, right? The second thing is that, you know, we know that autocrats will have their supporters for various reasons. And in order to be able to defeat an autocrat, you have to mobilize the entire pro-democratic forces. And that will be a kind of coalition that may not agree on anything other than... getting rid of the autocrat or undoing the lockdown of, you know, state offices in the hands, in very few hands. So Péter Magyar comes out of Viktor Orban's political party. You know, his kind of, if you had to identify him on a left-ride spectrum, he'd be kind of center-right, which is actually where a lot of the Hungarian population is. But what he said was, we're not going to do essentially a left-right campaign. We're going to do a democracy autocracy campaign. It's a different political spectrum. And so he stayed away from the hot button issues of both left and right. He said nothing about immigration. He said nothing about gay rights. He said nothing about, you know, a whole range of issues that usually are the ones that the left mobilizes around in Hungary or for that matter that the right mobilizes around. So what he said, his first pitch was to say the Viktor Orban government is massively corrupt. Okay, and the corruption had been, you know, their wonderful investigative journalists in Hungary, despite the fact that the whole media landscape has been really taken up by, you know, Viktor Orban. These investigative journalists had come out with one story after another, exposing Viktor Orban's incredible corruption. And Peter Maudier said, you know, we're enough of this corrupt regime. And then he linked it to daily life. And he said, and what's the cost of that corruption? is that state funds are going into private pockets rather than going into the health service, transportation, education, and maintaining standards of living for the population as a whole. You know, Hungary had gone from being, you know, one of the not too bad countries in Eastern Europe, economically speaking, to being the poorest country in the EU during Viktor Orban's reign. And Maduro link those things, right? It's the corruption that's causing. the deconstruction of public services and causing us to have this insecure economy and that was something everybody left to right could agree on and he stayed on message doing that for two years okay so so much to unpack gosh i have so much to ask you number one

Did it take Pedro Magjar to make this happen, though, right? Like, how much was it the magnetism, the charisma, whatever we want, whatever word we want to use, Kim, of this particular candidate? Because I have some concern. that he didn't lean into some of the more progressive ideas to be able to get this win across the finish line. I respect the idea that it wasn't left versus right per se and it was democracy versus autocracy. But Kim, I could close my eyes and substitute in the name Trump for Viktor Orban and know that what you're talking about, the corruption in real time and the suffering of the people that are not getting a financial benefit under this administration, right? You could close your eyes. and you could kind of switch them out apples to apples. I'm so curious, your assessment, having studied these governmental systems having lived there, how much of it was Péter Magyar himself versus maybe him championing these ideas? Yeah, well, it didn't hurt that he actually is a very skilled political strategist. And he's also handsome, and he's also charismatic, and he is someone who can speak spontaneously without notes and really and sensible things. So all of it mattered that you had a figure like that, right? The interesting thing is that nobody knew Peter Mandir was that figure before he became that figure. Okay. You know, he had been literally unknown before he popped out of the Viktor Orban machine in February of 2024. And the reason for kind of popping out of the Viktor Orban machine was also something that perhaps we can identify with a little bit in the U.S. The government there, you know, had promised a kind of Christian conservative, you know, that returning Hungary to Christian Europe had been... Western civilization ideas, as JD Vance called them. Exactly. I mean, that's the reason why JD Vance likes to hang out in Budaphas, right? I mean, so it's exactly it's Western civilization, it's Christian ideals. And it turns out that the government had a pedophilia scandal on its hands. Now, not because Viktor Orban did it or not because anyone in the inner circles did it, but because there were these state-run orphanages in which there were kids who had been abused, sexually abused for years. And finally, one of those pedophilia scandals was broken. The offenders were convicted. They were sent to jail. And the principal of one of these schools turned out to be a friend of Viktor Orban's friends, sort of in Viktor Orban's circle. And he was lobbying to get a pardon. And the justice minister, probably at Viktor Orban's direction, but we don't know that for sure, decided to recommend the pardon and the president of the country pardoned the guy who covered up the pedophilia scandal. Oh, horrible. And this completely destroyed the credibility of the Viktor Orban government. It was a huge scandal. And to contain it, Viktor Orban fired the justice minister, and he fired the president, the only two women in his government. Okay. Now, the justice minister was at that time in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. And the person from whom she was getting the divorce was Peter Péter Magyar. Okay? You can't make this stuff up. All anybody knew about it was that he was Judith Varga's husband. And she had come out with all kinds of allegations and accusations against him. He didn't look like a savory character. But when his wife, ex-wife, now ex-wife, was fired, he...

pops out of the woodwork and he says, how dare Viktor Orban hide behind women's skirts? I mean, it's a bit of a macho first thing to say, right? This is, but still, you know, he says, yeah, that, you know, he said my wife was not responsible for this. This is really coming from Viktor Orban. It's coming from their corruption. And then he comes out and he gives this, you know, long interview on, well, the opposition by this time doesn't control TV. There's no TV stations, no radio stations. What they've done is they've created a YouTube channel. This may sound familiar. I have a YouTube channel. And Peter Mauder goes on the YouTube channel and he says, I know all about the corruption inside Viktor Orban's government. Moreover, I taped some conversations with my wife during our divorce, and she actually mentions some of these corrupt incidents, so he comes with these tapes. Okay, so is this really where you're going to get your Superman in politics? I mean, it didn't look like the most obvious beginning, but the reason for telling you that, A, is that the drama is sort of fascinating by itself, right? Yeah, it is. Second of all, the connection with the, you know, the decline in the moral standing of the... government because of the pedophilia scandal was also part of it. But suddenly people are looking at Peter Maillard and he's well spoken and he really goes all in on Viktor Orban's corrupt regime, how they don't believe any of the values they're forwarding. Yeah. Yeah. And so he starts to get crowds. He starts to speak. He gets some crowds. He just gets bigger in crowds. He speaks more. He starts to develop this line that it's because of the corruption that you the people who deserve some government protection are getting nothing. Okay, and so over a couple of months, this snowballs a bit. He decides kind of late to start to run a party for the European Parliament elections, which are that June. So again, nobody had heard of him before February 2024. I mean, some people had, but not the public, right? And then by June, he's going to run a party in the European elections. So it's too late to register a party. He looks around for some defunct parties. He finds this one called Tisa. Tisa's the name of Hungary's... major river and for nationalists it's a very important river because it's the only river that runs entirely within the borders of the medieval hungarian kingdom the danube is the cosmopolitan river because it runs through austria it runs through germany right so but the tisa is the hungarian river so he goes to the people who sort of who

you know, organized this party that never took off and said, can I borrow your party? Borrowes the label, inhabits the label, cobbles together a party list. And in June of 2024, he gets one-third of the votes in a Hungarian election. Okay, now, the European elections have proportional representation. The rules can't be rigged. So suddenly he's got this delegation that he gets to the European Parliament. And first he says, you know, my job is here in Hungary, you know, taking down the government of Viktor Orban, I will not take up my seat in the European Parliament. Then he comes back a week later and he says, well, actually, second thought, I'm going to take up my seat. Because in the meantime, what people had told him was, you know, if you're a member of the European Parliament, you get parliamentary immunity. So we have a little immunity piece of this too. The parallels are profound. Keep on going, Kim. I'm so fascinated. I mean, the story is just unbelievable, right? So then he stays in the European Parliament. I don't think he ever shows up. But, you know, he's campaigning. And then he realizes that the Hungarian election system is totally rigged. Courtesy of Viktor Orban, correct? Courtesy of Viktor Orban. Yeah. Viktor Orban had, you know, Viktor Orban was elected fair and square in 2010. But by 2014, already the landscape had so massively shifted that it was impossible for anyone else to win. And a lot of that was gerrymandering. Because he had four consecutive terms as the prime minister. Exactly, exactly. So 14, 18, 22, all rigged elections. Okay. Now, in order to win in Hungary, you had to figure out how did they rig it and how can I unrig it. Okay. And the clue, there was gerrymandering. There was gerrymandering there. I mean, just so many tricks. I've written a long article about this. Too much to go into. But gerrymandering is part of it. And gerrymandering with hugely unequal district sizes. So Viktor Orban's districts in the rural areas would have like 30,000 voters. And the urban areas, which could be expected to vote for any opposition candidate, had 90,000 voters. Okay, so think of the number of votes it takes to win those districts. What Peter Mordiur figured out was that a vote in the countryside was worth multiple times any vote in the cities. And he knew that he'd get the cities no matter what, because they would vote for anybody but Viktor Orban. So he spends two years going around to every village in the country, you know, tiny villages. He also has this campaign where he decides to walk across big parts of Hungary, going to all these rural areas. Like literal grassroots. Literal grassroots. Yeah. Exactly. So he walks. And by the way, he borrowed from his wife, the Justice Minister. She always traveled with a whole film crew and the fans to blow her hair dramatically. I mean, she had perfected how to do the kind of public campaign. You know, she's the justice minister. She does law. She was in New York City once with her camera crew. And her camera crew takes the still of her crossing some street in Midtown Manhattan. And the caption was Lex and the city.

Right. I mean, they're pretty social media savvy. Exactly. So he borrows her, like, campaign team and her, like, camera crew and whatever. And they follow him as he goes through all the villages. They follow him as he goes through all the villages, right? And all of this is broadcast on social media. This is broadcast on YouTube. This is, none of this is going through, you know, any of the state run TV, which is all of it, right? Yeah. So he gets to meet people in these villages. And he says to them, you know, the biggest problem, there was one point when there was a whole toilet paper meme thing going on. Because he said, what everybody knew is that the hospitals in Hungary don't have toilet paper. Okay, now that was true back when I lived there in the 90s. So like they've never had toilet paper, I think, in anyone's memory. But. Yeah, I know. You have to bring, if you have a friend in the hospital, a family member. You have to bring toilet paper. You have to bring toilet paper. You have to bring food. I mean, there's just the hospitals are really under-provision. And these are government-run hospitals? Government-run, the National Health Service, yeah. That's massively underfunded. Exactly. So Peter Maudier, with his camera crew, would go into the hospitals and show you the peeling paint and the lack of toilet paper. I mentioned that because toilet paper became kind of a meme. You know, and if you can't even provide that. But then you had these anti-corruption campaigners that were showing the palatial estate that Viktor Orban's father was building. And then there was this point. Again, this was like a meme campaign. And I'm saying all this because... We can learn all these lessons, right? I mean, I'm literally taking notes right now. I'm sure people that are watching and listening are taking notes too, but keep on going. Exactly. So this is a meme campaign. So there were these anti-corruption campaigners, not Maudier, but these investigative journalists. who took a drone over Viktor Orban's father's estate, which was next door to the grand estate of Viktor Orban's best friend from high school, who was a blue-collar worker, who's become the richest guy in the country. Everybody calls that guy Viktor Orban's walking wallet, because that's where Viktor Orban stashes his cash. Like Viktor Orban doesn't own anything in his own name. It's all. Like his straw man. He's like a straw man. Exactly. If you try to track his resources, you won't find anything, but it's in the names of his family and his friends. Anyway, there are these two estates. it's adjacent to each other and this drone goes up and sees that there is a gaggle of zebras on one or another of these properties hard to tell which one i see the Viktor Orban riding the zebras or pulling the zebra drawn carriage exactly exactly so suddenly the zebra became the symbol of Viktor Orban's corruption right so it's like zebras and toilet paper like he has the zebra and he can't even provide you with toilet paper You could not script this. Exactly. I mean, it was so brilliant, right? And so then people were showing up at Montere Raleys wearing zebra costumes and black and white striped t-shirts and the zebra became the meme. Which is very jail uniform too, by the way, but keep on go. Very jail uniform, too. Exactly, exactly. There was a good reason why this caught on, you know.

And so these zebra memes kept popping up everywhere. And actually toward the end of the campaign, people kept popping up with zebra memes at the Viktor Orban rallies. Right? But were they, was there crackdowns though at that type of stuff? Actually, no, not so much. I mean, Viktor Orban was stunned because no one had done that in his presence. So he didn't really even have- Because nobody dared to do it in his presence kind of thing? Yeah, nobody dared, right? So his rallies didn't have the kind of security that would just shut that down. Wow. Plus it would have looked awful because, again, he's got the state TV following him everywhere, right? By the time you get into the campaign, you got to worry about exactly how it is you deal with your opponents. Kim, I just want to briefly interrupt because the one thing that I kind of want to, maybe you'll ease my concerns about this is I have heard you and other say that Péter Magyar is kind of center-right, right? And that I also read so many pieces about how Péter Magyar didn't think, and you just confirmed it. He didn't need to kind of court the progressive vote, right, the quote-unquote left vote, because they were going to want to get rid of Viktor Orban no matter what, right? It was kind of like, we don't, we don't, anything's better than Viktor Orban. Exactly. Exactly. Is there a concern at all from what you understand now present day? We get rid of Viktor Orban. We end up with Peter Péter Magyar, but he is still, quote, center right. It kind of reminds me of a, I guess, like a Tucker Carlson kind of a la, Athena, springing from the brain of Zeus, right? So it's a Tucker Carlson who is a Trump light, right? As in, like, you have somebody who came from the Trump camp, but. the overton window has shifted so far that it's going to come back and it has an appeal because it's not so crazy maga but it's still not what we still not what we want or maybe it's what we had before from the republicans and it still wasn't palatable but it's still better anything's better than trump is there a concern in hungary that that might be the case with major now yeah so at the beginning you know the left which was also feeling kind of diss because peter mordaer wasn't having any rallies in budapest he just ignored them And, you know, and so all these other parties are thinking, well, do we even run candidates? Because they also knew the way Viktor Orban system ran is that if you had more than one opposition candidate, you'd all lose because, I can explain why, but, you know, you needed one candidate. Yeah. So the left was at first saying, okay, well, first we get rid of Viktor Orban, then we'll have to get rid of Maguire. I'm wondering, yeah. That's a two-phase revolution. And by the end, I must say. the left and, I mean, the left's very tiny in Hungary. That's why they, they probably can't win a national election. They can win the mayor of Budapest, but, you know, outside of Budapest. So they have to unite behind the Viktor Orban opponent, which was. Exactly. Exactly. And by the end, actually, you know, my friends on the sort of progressive left in Hungary were actually pretty enthusiastic. And part of it was that they said, This is really our only way. And he's saying all the right things now. Now, he wasn't, you know, he was not taking positions on hot button issues, right? I mean, by hot button, I mean, like, one of the biggest things was that Viktor Orban has had this really anti, this really homophobic, you know, campaign. Oh, it's egregious, yeah. It's very much anti-LGBQ. Exactly. And he, you know, he, I think Viktor Orban actually invented.

the weaponization of the idea of gender ideology. Yeah, exactly. I feel like they took a page out of his playbook. Right. And I should just say one of the things you may not know about me was when I was living in Hungary in the 1990s and working mostly at the Constitutional Court, I also started the first gender studies department at Central European University. That's disruptive. Okay. Right. And not only did Central European University get thrown out of the country by Viktor Orban, but all the gender studies departments got canceled, right? Viktor Orban had been, you know, one of his key issues was, you know, we know what sex is and it's male and female and it's determined at birth and like that's it. And so Viktor Orban last year had tried to ban the pride parade, which has happened every year since the 90s. And then he said, and if anyone shows up, we will know who you are because they've got this huge, you know, Chinese surveillance technology that they use for facial recognition. And so, you know, and they said, we'll know who you are. And actually, that happened, like that was last summer, after the fear campaign, the anti-fear campaign of Mordyar started making people realize, well, maybe we shouldn't be afraid. And what happened was the largest demonstration in Hungarian history. We saw it. But Peter Maudira did not go. Yeah, but he did not go. He refused to comment. He just ignored it. Okay. See, that's the type of stuff that makes me a little nervous, right? Right. Okay. But here's the thing. Like, so Peter Maudier wins and we'll get to like, I want to just say, okay, let me just fast forward. Sure, sure. His victory night's speech was pretty amazing. And one of the things he said was, this is a country in which people should be able to love whomever they want to. Okay. after the polls closed. Okay. Okay. He didn't say it during the campaign. So this is now making people feel like he's learned something by campaigning. Right. Unifying that hatred and intolerance is just not where he wants to be. But he's going to prioritize. essentially restoring democratic institutions and ensuring that the people who crashed them don't come back. Yeah, let's talk about that because this is something I also wanted to know. One of the promises of the success of Péter Magyar's win is the number of seats that were won to be able to secure the move forward of reversing Viktor Orban, because we talk about that here in the United States. I always talk about Democrats have to have a plan from day one. When we take over and we control the levers of power again imminently, we have to have a plan. How does Péter Magyar's new administration roll back, reverse, get rid of all of the harms that have been institutionalized? by Viktor Orban thus far? Yeah, so Viktor Orban locked himself into place by law, okay? Viktor Orban's a lawyer, Maldor's a lawyer, they're all lawyers. Okay, by the way, Vladimir Putin's a lawyer and the guys in Poland were all lawyers. I mean, in Eastern Europe, it all comes from the lawyers, okay? So that's another story and that's, you know, I can write a lot about that. But so Viktor Orban was a lawyer. So what he did was to engineer this system.

Viktor Orban took over, captured the courts, captured, oh my goodness, everything from the audit office to the central bank, to the competition authority, the procurement authorities, the election commission. Everything is captured. That's the reason why Trump has aspired to be like Viktor Orban. Exactly. And a lot of the project 2025 stuff follows the Viktor Orban playbook, right? And so this is the one place where they don't, though, because in Hungary, Viktor Orban, locked a lot of those people into their jobs with very long terms of office. And so Péter Magyar can do whatever, can pass whatever laws in the parliament. But there's a holdover president affiliated with Viktor Orban's party who can veto the laws. There's a PAC court that will declare whatever they do unconstitutional. So the two-thirds isn't enough. They're going to have to figure out how to get rid of the people. And I might say in the U.S. when and if we get to that point, we will still have a Supreme Court that we know even more after the New York Times revelations over the weekend is on a role to support, you know, the red team instead of the blue team. Well, that was a very sobering. denouement to this conversation. You know, Kim, we got to, I have to have you back because there's so much more that I want to unpack, but you're just such an invaluable reason. I don't know if you get to, I'm totally geeking out because I love this conversation because I do feel like this just underscores my message, which is we can learn so much from the mechanisms, including. how the autocrat was successful, right? Like, it's the guidebook on what not to do, but this is how we hedge against and protect against it. And it's so, it's such a, it's, even that is a resource too, right? That Viktor Orban playbook, you flip to the page on lack of judicial independence and stuff, and you're like, okay, he did it this way. Well, then we need to put the safeguards in the best that we can. to be able to do that here. Exactly. I mean, so the way that Viktor Orban built the dictatorship is a negative model and the way one there's going to undo it, I think will give us some assistance. But what it tells us is that you have to win elections. And you have to win them so big that Viktor Orban conceded. Nobody expected it. It was remarkable how fast that was, too. Yeah, but he could see the numbers. There was nowhere to go, right? And these massive victories mean that even rigged elections can flip to the other side, right? So, but you have to win them really big. And then you start on another road, which is then you have to start undoing stuff. And that's a different struggle. And we can talk more about that some other time when we see, you know, whether and how Peter Mordia is able to do that. As we track him. Yeah, exactly. So once you go down this autocratic road, it's not a quick fix to get back, right? But it's worth it to get back. We all remember what life was like when we lived in a democracy, right? And so that's what we got to hang on to and that's what we got to keep.

you know, to think about how we get back there. Professor Kim Lane, Sheppily, I've said it multiple times during this conversation with you. You are a treasure. You are an invaluable resource for all things. And I am so grateful that you have given us the privilege of your time. I am totally going to take you up on the offer to continue to have this conversation as we watch what happens in Hungary next. But there's also still some more that I would love to talk to you about. Because, again, I do think, you know, past as prologue, and we really need to be paying attention to these things. But thank you so much for your time for today's conversation. I'm truly grateful for you. Yeah, and Katie, thanks for doing all that you do because you're working on so many fronts to make things better. And I just am in awe of everything you do. So Katie, thank you. Katie Fang here. We launched the Katie Fang News Channel in partnership with the Midas Touch Network so we could bring you the latest in legal and political news. Straight, no chaser. So if you're a fellow truth teller, hit that subscribe button and share the word about this channel so we can build a high information America together.