Trump shrugs off concerns about Hungary’s hard-right leader during White House visit
By Anne Gearan Anne Gearan White House reporter Email Bio Follow May 13 at 7:51 PM President Trump delighted Monday in welcoming Hungary’s hard-right leader to the White House, an invitation the two most recent U.S. presidents — one a Democrat and one a Republican — had purposefully not extended.
Trump said the two would discuss trade and shared NATO concerns, but he did not publicly mention Hungary’s slide into authoritarianism, its human rights and free speech abuses or growing anti-Semitism. In office for nine years this time and once before for four, Orban has morphed from a crusading anti-Soviet reformer embraced by President Bill Clinton to an increasingly autocratic figure who has erected a fence along his country’s southern border to keep out migrants and asylum seekers.
A senior administration official told reporters Friday that Cornstein’s remark may have been “taken out of context” but did not offer detail on what the ambassador meant. A bipartisan letter Friday from four members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rued “Hungary’s downward democratic trajectory and the implications for U.S. interests in Central Europe.”“We remain profoundly concerned about the close relationship between this NATO partner and Moscow,” the letter said.
“The point of this meeting is simply just to reinforce the strategic relationship between allies, NATO allies of U.S. and Hungary,” one official said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the session, “not necessarily just thrash out every issue on the bilateral agenda, which we have been doing constantly for the last two years.”
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