“If Americans don’t take this chance now in November, I do think it’s going to be extremely, extremely difficult in 2028 to get Trump’s and MAGA’s hands out of power.”
Péter Dósa spent sixteen years watching his own country disappear into what its prime minister proudly called an illiberal state — and this April, from exile in Barcelona, he watched Hungarians vote it out in a single afternoon. He’s the founder of the Hungary Report, read in over 110 countries, and he’s back on the show for the second time to make sense of what’s happened since: a government trying to rebuild, at breakneck speed, everything the last one spent sixteen years tearing down.
One of Orbán’s oldest friends was a plumber from his home village. He’s now one of the richest men in Hungary. “I’m sorry,” Péter told me, “but it wasn’t because he was great at fixing toilets.” That man is still in the country, still acting unbothered, even as a new national asset recovery office opens investigations into exactly how men like him got so rich. Orbán himself has already warned his own loyalists to keep track of who’s running it — in case, he says, he ever gets back in.
We recorded this the same week Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, and the rest of the press pool went dark rather than profit from it. Péter’s own country lost its most trusted newsroom in 2020, when the paper Index was quietly taken over and almost the entire staff resigned rather than stay. Hungarians noticed. This year, given the choice of where to send one percent of their taxes, more of them chose independent media than almost anything else on the list.
“Democracy is not something you just keep in a box and look at,” Péter said, near the end. “It’s more like a flower in a garden. We really have to keep tending to it. We have to fight for it.” He means that as a warning as much as a hope — for a country that nearly lost its garden altogether, and for one that still has a few weeks left to decide whether it will.
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Credits:
Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson
Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs
Music: Ilya Kuznetsov
