WASHINGTON ― After modeling anti-democratic, pro-corruption changes at home on Viktor Orbán’s “reforms” in Hungary, President Donald Trump and his allies now have available to them important lessons from his drubbing Sunday in time for the November midterm elections.

Orbán, for instance, was sunk by the same affordability concerns now dogging Trump and his fellow Republicans. His attempts to blame foreign interference for Hungarians’ struggles fell flat. Yet, rather than use the autocratic ruler’s landslide loss after 16 years in office as a learning opportunity, key Trump allies are showing little sign of self-reflection.

“The fight continues. We are heading to the U.K. in July,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a top Trump White House adviser during his first term and now a senior official of the CPAC conference, which in recent years has held multiple events in Hungary in support of Orbán and his policies, including one in late March.

Schlapp echoed other Trump supporters in pointing to a familiar villain: Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros, who had to relocate most of the programs of the Central European University he founded from Budapest to Vienna because of harassment under Orbán.

“I would check the influx of Soros money into the Hungary presidential race,” she said.

Mike Davis, a former Republican Senate aide-turned-devoted Trump apologist, said Sunday’s election result says only that Hungarian voters made a poor choice.

“Orbán protected Hungary from the Islamist invasion and conquest. Now Hungary is cooked, like the rest of Europe,” he said.

Trump himself has not said or posted a word about Orbán’s thrashing at the hands of prime minister-elect Peter Magyar, a week after he dispatched Vice President JD Vance to campaign for Orbán, and just days after he effectively offered Hungarians a bribe of massive U.S. aid if they reelected his ally.

Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party, ran against the rampant corruption in Hungary that Orbán has institutionalized over four terms in power and which has produced a dismal economy that has lagged neighboring countries that were similarly satellite states of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Magyar promised to move Hungary back toward western Europe and away from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who, like Trump, openly backed Orbán.

Voters decisively approved of that message, with Magyar’s Tisza party winning 52% of the ballots cast compared to 39% for Orbán’s Fidesz party, with smaller parties getting the rest. The margin appears large enough to give Tisza a 2-1 supermajority in the parliament, enough to undo the numerous changes Orbán had rammed through to preserve his power.

“I expected an opposition victory, but not with this turnout and landslide, and I didn’t expect a two-thirds majority. It seems like just about everyone was fed up after 16 years,” said Johan Norberg, a researcher at the Cato Institute who has studied Orbán’s “state capture” of independent institutions in Hungary and the resulting corruption.

Four thousand miles to the west, far-right conservatives in the United States have been holding Orbán up as a hero for years. As Trump began his run to reclaim the White House after losing his 2020 reelection bid and the failure of his coup attempt, the head of the Heritage Foundation called Orbán’s rule a template for conservatives around the world.

“Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model,” said Kevin Roberts, whose group wrote the infamous Project 2025 that called for increasing the power of the president and politicizing the civil service through a laundry list of actions.

And since taking office, Trump has followed Orbán’s playbook closely, attacking the federal judiciary, the universities, the news media ― all while bringing in unprecedented corruption and under the guise of Christian nationalism.

Al Cardenas, who once chaired CPAC when Republicans had more traditional leadership, said he doubts his party will choose to learn anything useful from Orbán’s loss because to do so would anger Trump’s followers.

“They are stuck with an unbending base they created,” he said.

Some of those remaining mainline Republicans did voice support for Magyar as a victory for democracy.

“The freedom-loving people of Hungary have voted decisively in favor of democracy and the rule of law,” wrote Alabama’s Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I congratulate them and Peter Magyar, the next prime minister of Hungary. They’ve rejected the malign influence of Vladimir Putin, the world’s most malicious dictator, and decided their own future.”

And Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, former Republican leader of that chamber, wrote an entire op-ed for Fox News cheering Orbán’s defeat.

“Orbán’s champions on this side of the Atlantic may well consider his illiberal court-packing, crony capitalism or restriction of free speech an acceptable price for their desired social utopia,” McConnell wrote.

Norberg said he’s hopeful that more pro-democracy Republicans will be empowered to speak out now.

“I think there’s a segment of the GOP that are committed ‘post-liberals’ and will want to imitate Orbán’s methods no matter what,” he said. “But I think this will energize those parts of the party that were never on board but have been too afraid to speak out. Not least because the party has become something of a cult of success. Electoral losses automatically make something less inspiring.”

Those voices, though, are for now also facing a clearly hostile leadership in Trump’s executive branch. By late afternoon Monday, neither Trump nor his State Department had publicly congratulated Magyar, who will soon lead a nation that is a member of both the European Union and NATO.

“The lesson is evil [and] cannot survive in perpetuity. But they will more likely turn a deaf ear,” said Ty Cobb, who served in first-term Trump’s White House Counsel’s office. He added that he fears the coming midterms might not be the blow-out against Trump that voters delivered in Hungary against Orbán.

“Orbán’s loss was overwhelming. That makes his departure easier to ensure,” Cobb said. “A close election here for the House majority may not be enough to rid us of Trump and his fascist destructive madness.”

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