The American ambassador to Budapest hit out at Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Tuesday for siding with Donald Trump in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Speaking at an Independence Day reception in Budapest, Ambassador David Pressman said Orbán “continues to remind us, daily, of who he would like to win that election, who he would vote for if he were an American, which he is not.”
“We have no other ally or partner — not a single one — that similarly, overtly and tirelessly, campaigns for a specific candidate in an election in the United States of America, seemingly convinced that, no matter what, it only helps Hungary, or at least helps him personally,” he added.
Orbán was the first EU leader to endorse Trump when he ran for office in 2016, and has since been one of the Republican’s biggest cheerleaders. He urged Trump in 2023 to “keep on fighting” amid his legal woes and told controversial American TV host Tucker Carlson that Trump is “the man who can save the Western world.”
Trump, in turn, hosted Orbán at the White House in 2019 and returned the favor by endorsing the Hungarian leader when he ran for reelection in 2022, going so far as to call him an excellent “leader of Turkey” last year.
But the “important and enduring” alliance between Hungary and the U.S. should be based on ties between their peoples, not “the frequency of your prime minister’s political endorsements on social media or the amount of Hungarian taxpayer money spent on political messaging supporting candidates for elected office in the United States,” Pressman added on Tuesday.
U.S. President Joe Biden appointed Pressman envoy to Hungary in 2022. A former human rights lawyer, Pressman has eschewed diplomatic norms and has been a fierce critic of Orbán and his government, lashing the prime minister as a leader who “embraces” Russian President Vladimir Putin over NATO and promotes “unhinged anti-American messaging.”
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