Fealty To Trump Could Determine Your Social Security Check. That’s How They Do It In Hungary

This sounds wild but it’s not, unfortunately. Pay attention. This isn’t coming from some rock bottom conspiracy theorist but from a high credible and respected political historian, Heather Cox Richardson. If you can’t imagine that a news story like this could miss being reported in the mainstream media, then you have not been paying attention. A great many under or unreported stories are flying under the radar. That’s what we do around here, is find them and shine a light on them.

On Friday, journalist Casey Michel, who specializes in the study of kleptocracy, pointed out that reporters had missed an important meeting last week. Michel noted that while reporters covered  Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s visit to former president Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, they paid far less attention to the visit Orbán paid to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Heritage Foundation on Friday, March 8. There, Orbán spoke privately to an audience that included the president of the organization, Kevin Roberts, and, according to a state media printout, “renowned U.S. right-wing politicians, analysts and public personalities.”

Michel noted that it was “nothing short of shocking” that Orbán declined to meet with administration officials and instead went to Washington, D.C., to meet with a right-wing think tank. With Roberts’s appointment as head of Heritage in 2021, the conservative organization swung to the position that its role is “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

And what does institutionalizing Trumpism mean? Hang onto your hats. CPAC and Hungary are like ham and eggs these days. Orban comes to CPAC here, right-wingers like Tucker Carlson go to CPAC over there. Orban has boasted that Hungary is “the place where we didn’t just talk about defeating the progressives and liberals and causing a conservative Christian political turn, but we actually did it.” Evidently, Kevin Roberts had a discussion with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times and verified that Orbán’s statement was “all true” and “should be celebrated.” In a different interview, Garcia-Navarro noted, Roberts had called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”

Isn’t that wonderful to know? So now the question becomes, why isn’t this headline news everywhere? Because the Republican nominee for president entertaining this dictator in his home gives a whole new meaning to “conversative.” Conservatism is apparently dead in this country, but out of its ashes has arisen fascism, using the conservative label.

And here is where it gets worse.

Last year, Michel notes, Heritage joined the Hungarian Danube Institute in a formal partnership. The Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as Michel says, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel notes, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.”

The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the plan Heritage has led, along with dozens of other right-wing organizations, to map out a future right-wing presidency. In Hungary, Orbán has undermined democracy, gutting the civil service and filling it with loyalists; attacking immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals; taking over businesses for friends and family, and moving the country away from the rules-based international order supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

And here’s where you and I come in.

On Friday, journalist Daniel Miller noted that purging the civil service is a hallmark of dictators, whose loyalists then take over media, education, courts, and the military. In a powerful essay today, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that with the government firmly in the hands of a dictator’s loyalists, “things like water or schools or Social Security checks” depend on your declaration of loyalty, and there is no recourse. “You cannot escape to the bar or the bowling alley, since everything you say is monitored,” and “[e]ven courageous people restrain themselves to protect their children.”

Think about this now. Your computer could be monitored or even seized and it will be known what you read and watch and therefore what you think. And I’ll tell you something else: the FBI started subscribing to our PZ newsletter a few years ago. I don’t know if they read all the political blogs and didn’t really think about it. Frankly, I was flattered that we were big enough to get on their radar. But if the FBI is aware of us, then you know that any lists of blogs, bloggers, whatever, are in the government’s possession already and Trump could potentially use that information to deprive us of our checks. And maybe kick us off the internet as well. So we could literally starve, the people who write this blog, because we’re “enemies of der Fuhrer.” It’s been done before, you think it won’t be done again? This is what Heritage Foundation stands for in this day and age.

Securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely,” hints at religious rule but ultimately focuses on standing against “government control of the economy.” The idea that regulation of business and taxes hampered economic liberty was actually one of the founding ideas of Heritage in the 1980s.

In the U.S. that ideology has since 1981 moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

And, as that concentration of wealth and power among a small group of people reveals, the real plan behind Project 2025 is the rule of a small minority of extremists over the vast majority of Americans.

The plan asserts “the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch”—that is, it calls for a very powerful leader—to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”

Civil rights, gone. Social Security, Medicare, gone. And not as we have been told, that if it ever phased out it would phase out gradually but those of us on these programs would not be affected. No, we’re talking gone. At least if you’re on the wrong list.

This is the most personally terrifying blog I’ve ever written. I sincerely hope I don’t live to see the worst case scenario, and that is the orange-tinted madman getting back in power. Kevin Roberts was quoted as saying, “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

So they’re gaming the takeover of the government as we speak. And you better believe it, Trump will be a dictator on Day One, just as he promised. And every day thereafter.