As the former Hungarian prime minister’s influence network faces uncertainty at home, the Budapest-based think tank has built a formal U.S. presence tied to former Heritage Foundation figures, MAGA-aligned intellectuals, and Christian nationalist investment circles.
As former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political machine confronts political decline at home, one of its main international vehicles for courting MAGA activists and the American far right has quietly set up shop in the United States.
The Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank closely associated with Orbán’s political project and funded by his government, now has a U.S. counterpart: the Danube Institute of the United States. The organization has not announced its American launch, but it already has a website that sketches out the project.
The site describes the new group as a 501(c)(3) public charity aimed to bring together “American conservatives with Europe and beyond.” The board gives that mission a clearer shape: it includes figures tied to the Hungarian institute, former Heritage Foundation staffers, and intellectual voices influential in the MAGA movement.
The new institute has made transatlantic conservatism one of its main areas of work. In its own words, its “American mission” is “connecting US donors, churches, and allies to the Europeans who are holding the line for Western civilization.” The organization is already soliciting donations through its website.
The paper trail behind the new U.S. entity runs through several states. Danube Institute of the United States has been registered in Virginia since April 2025 as a nonstock corporation, using a mailing address in Alexandria. The IRS recognized it as a tax-exempt public charity, with that status effective as of April 2025, later IRS records place it in Austin, Texas.
On its website, however, the group gives a public location in Gray, Tennessee, the same one used by American Values Investments, a Christian-values investment firm run by Danube USA trustee Carter LeCraw.
Homepage of Danube Institute USA. (Source: Danube Institute USA website).
Virginia corporate records list John O’Sullivan as one of the corporation’s directors. O’Sullivan, a British journalist, is the founder and president of the Danube Institute in Budapest. He previously served as a special adviser and speechwriter to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and was Director of Studies at the Heritage Foundation, the organization behind the authoritarian Project 2025, from 1979 to 1983.
The corporate director list also names István Kiss, executive director of the Hungary-based institute, and Christopher DeMuth, a lawyer and public policy expert who served in the Reagan and Nixon administrations. DeMuth was a Distinguished Fellow in American Thought at the Heritage Foundation from 2023 to 2025, but left after Heritage President Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s interview with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
John Fonte appears in the records as well. Fonte is listed as a senior fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture at Hudson Institute. In 2019, during Trump’s first administration, he was nominated and confirmed by the Senate to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he remained until 2021.
Danube’s Vance Connection
Patrick J. Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, is on the board as well. Deneen is an advocate of “post-liberalism,” a political vision he has developed in his books Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change. He has argued that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive tyranny” that should be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.” He has also called for a “peaceful” revolution to replace liberalism with a “postliberal order” rooted in conservative and religious values rather than the protection of individual rights. His work has resonated in the MAGA movement, including with Vice President JD Vance, who has cited Deneen as a major intellectual influence.
The nonstock corporation records also list Carter LeCraw, founder of American Values Investments. In a March 2026 interview with the Orbán-aligned outlet Hungarian Conservative, LeCraw described his firm’s approach as rooted in the belief that “the Bible is the foundation of Western civilization.” The firm presents investing as a way not only to generate returns, but also to advance conservative Christian principles, using faith-based criteria and penalizing companies that score highly on LGBTQ+ diversity.
A couple of weeks before the Hungarian general election, after taking part in a Danube Institute event in Budapest, LeCraw praised the then-Hungarian prime minister’s leadership, saying that “it is hard to imagine someone matching Viktor Orbán in standing up for Christian values.” He also advocated bringing Chick-fil-A, the Christian-rooted U.S. fast food chain long criticized over its anti-LGBTQ+ stances, to Budapest.
LeCraw is the connection between the Hungarian institute and the State of Tennessee. In April 2023, István Kiss, the Danube Institute’s executive director, was invited to speak before the Tennessee state Senate. Introducing Kiss on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. Rusty Crowe described LeCraw as “a friend” and credited him with helping establish the connection with Kiss and the Orbán government. Crowe also portrayed the Budapest-based institute as “much like our Heritage Foundation here in this country.”
That same year, Crowe sponsored a resolution commending the Danube Institute’s work, which the Tennessee Senate adopted in February.
Carter LeCraw, Republican Sen. Rusty Crowe and István Kiss at the Tennessee Senate, 2023. (Source: Youtube).
In his remarks, Kiss presented the visit as the start of a broader relationship, arguing there were “great opportunities to work together between Hungary and Tennessee because both states share deep bonds stemming” from their “Judeo-Christian values.” He then pointed to the Danube Institute’s existing U.S. relationships, saying it “has some form of cooperation with, for example, the Heritage Foundation.”
Those ties included a 2022 cooperation agreement with the Heritage Foundation. The partnership allowed four researchers from Heritage to visit Budapest and work with the institute as visiting researchers, and further allowed for the organization of joint events.
Kiss said he hoped the visit would help “forge similar cooperations with American think tanks, academia, and, potentially, as an overflow, in perhaps agriculture and commerce as well.” He also highlighted the Budapest-based organization’s “scholarship programs with American universities,” citing Pepperdine University in California and the Institute for Politics in Washington.
The Virginia records also list Cabell Hobbs as treasurer of the Danube Institute of the United States and as principal officer of the Texas-based public charity. The nonprofit shares an Austin address with RightSide Compliance, a political compliance firm whose Public Information Report identifies Hobbs as president.
Screenshot of a post by the Danube Institute celebrating a Tennessee joint resolution “commending” its work. (Source: X).
Beyond its registration date, it is unclear when the U.S. project began to take shape. The only date on the website that offers some context appears in the site’s privacy statement, which says it was last updated on June 2, 2026. That would place Danube Institute USA’s public launch at a moment of political and financial uncertainty for the Hungarian state-backed network that has promoted Orbánism abroad.
Following Orbán’s defeat in the April national election and Péter Magyar’s victory, the funding that has long sustained the Danube Institute and other arms of the Orbán regime’s international propaganda, including CPAC Hungary, the Center for Fundamental Rights, and the Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), is now under scrutiny.
Orbán’s “Electoral Autocracy”
Under Orbán, these Hungarian groups helped export the same agenda Fidesz promoted at home: “family values,” anti-abortion politics and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. During his tenure, the European Parliament described Hungary as an “electoral autocracy.”
While Magyar has not publicly singled out the Danube Institute, he has targeted the broader state-backed ecosystem around Orbán. After his electoral win, he criticized the public funding of Fidesz-aligned institutions, saying the state “should never have financed them in the first place”.
Although, for now, the future of the Danube Institute in Budapest remains uncertain, other organizations withnin Orbán’s state-backed network are already facing a more immediate reckoning. The Hungarian government has ordered the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Foundation, one of the flagship institutions of the Fidesz era, to be dissolved by July 31.
The financial picture around Danube Institute USA remains undisclosed. So far, the only visible funding mechanism for the American organization is its donation page, which runs through Zeffy.
Donation page for Danube Institute USA, hosted on Zeffy. (Source: Zeffy website).
Its Hungarian counterpart has been funded by the Hungarian state through the Batthyány Foundation. During Orbán’s tenure, it operated as a think tank promoting Fidesz’s anti-rights and anti-woman agenda while building ties with international allies.
The Heritage Foundation is listed on the Danube Institute USA website as one of its “key partners.” Since 2023, Heritage and Danube have jointly hosted the Geopolitical Summit in Budapest, an annual gathering that brings together far-right intellectuals with speakers from universities, private companies, international NGOs, and American think tanks. The most recent edition, held in September 2025, featured James Jay Carafano, senior counselor to the president of Heritage, and Eugene Kontorovich, then a senior research fellow at the foundation.
Map showing “some” of the “key partners” identified by Danube Institute USA on its website. (Source: Danube Institute USA).
Paying Foreign Allies to Sell Orbánism Abroad
In recent years, Budapest has hosted dozens of foreign conservative activists, mostly Americans, who regularly appear as speakers at far-right and conservative events. The Danube Institute paid many of them as research fellows. In some cases, their work involved promoting the Hungarian government in foreign media and portraying Orbán’s policies as a model for the conservative movement in the U.S.
According to the Hungarian investigative outlet Átlátszó, the total value of research fellows’ contracts reached 76.76 million Hungarian forints (HUF) in 2022, approximately $245,740; 179 million HUF in 2023, approximately $585,000; and 284.6 million HUF in 2024, approximately $929,000. The dollar amounts were calculated using current exchange rates.
Danube Institute USA’s website highlights some of those fellows, including several Americans. Among them is Rod Dreher, who was paid $105,000 a year by the Danube Institute, according to a Hungarian press report. Dreher is still listed on the Institute’s website as a visiting fellow and director of its Network Project, but he returned to the U.S. after Orbán’s April election defeat.
JD Vance, Viktor Orbán, and Rod Dreher in a picture dated November 2025 and published by The Atlantic. (Source: Instagram).
“Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat in April, and the unsettling atmosphere of vengeance that has overtaken Hungary since Péter Magyar became prime minister, likely means the end of the Danube Institute, the government-funded think tank where I worked,” Dreher wrote in a June op-ed.
The American conservative writer was a valuable figure for the Hungarian institution, particularly because of his ties to the Trump administration. Dreher has been described as an early friend and advisor to U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
Other former fellows also came from the Project 2025-aligned policy world. They include Arthur Milikh, former fellow from Heritage and former executive director at the Claremont Institute. He is now the Senior Bureau Official for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the U.S. State Department. Nathan Levine and Christopher Rufo, both former Heritage visiting fellows, also spent time at the Danube Institute.
As financial support for Orbán-backed institutions weakens in Hungary, the institute is putting down roots in the U.S. The Trump administration, a long time ally of the Fidesz leader, is exploring a grantmaking strategy to financially support far-right and MAGA-aligned organizations in Europe. Although there is currently no information about the potential beneficiaries, Washington could still help keep Orbánsm alive.
Related GPAHE reporting:
Trump Is the Heritage Foundation’s Instrument to Bring Orbánism to the US
The Americans Shaping Europe’s Far-Right Ecosystem
American Anti-Immigrant Organizations Are Building a Network Across Europe
Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán is setting his sights on Latin America
Heritage’s European Offensive: Exporting America’s Christian Nationalist Project
Trump’s Political Playbook Follows Hungary’s Authoritarian Path Project 2025’s Goal All Along
