Donald Trump’s efforts to redraw the congressional map for the 2026 midterm elections are already underway. His strategy mirrors that of his closest European ally, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who used similar tactics in his early years as Hungary’s leader to achieve long-term political power that has transformed that country into an “electoral autocracy,” according to the European Parliament. Elections are held, but they have little ability to impact the scope of Orbán’s power.
Trump’s goal is to secure Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives by any means necessary. On Wednesday, August 20, the Texas House approved new congressional maps that would give Republicans five more winnable seats. Democrats opposed the move, and even left the state in protest. But the plan eventually passed the Senate and has been sent to the governor’s desk for signing.
Trump celebrated the vote on Truth Social. He predicted that Texas would be followed by Florida and Indiana. The opposition pushed back. In California, Democratic lawmakers, led by Governor Gavin Newsom, are drafting new congressional maps to offset the changes made in Texas.
Source: Truth Social
What is little known is that Trump didn’t come up with these plans on his own. He learned his hardball tactics from Orbán, whose authoritarian example looms large over Trump’s push for gerrymandering—and much else.
After winning the 2010 elections, Orbán changed Hungary’s Constitution, reducing the number of parliamentary seats from 386 to 199. Ahead of the 2014 elections, his government gerrymandered the country: opposition voters were packed into large urban districts, while Orbán’s party, Fidesz, had its supporters spread across many smaller rural districts.
This redistribution profoundly affected the election outcomes. Despite winning only 53 percent of the national vote in 2022, Fidesz secured 83 percent of the districts.
The Hungarian prime minister “implemented a gerrymander to his country’s election districts that has guaranteed him majoritarian power for more than a decade,” wrote Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor recently.
For years, international organizations, opposition leaders, and media outlets have raised concerns about the fairness of Hungary’s elections. An international monitoring mission deployed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) concluded that the 2022 parliamentary elections were “professionally managed but marred by the absence of a level playing field.”
“The extensive government advertising campaigns and biased news coverage in the public and many private media provided a pervasive campaign platform for the ruling party,” the mission found. It also warned that media opportunities “for other parties were significantly limited by the constitutional prohibition on paid political advertisement and scarce allocation of the free airtime by only a few media.”
Trump has openly expressed his admiration for Orbán, even referring to the Hungarian leader as his “twin brother” in a private meeting. Orbán’s playbook—consolidating power through gerrymandering, restricting immigration, limiting LGBTQ+ rights, and curbing press freedom—has become a guiding model for the U.S. president’s second term.
Trump is not alone in his admiration for Orbán; his closest allies share his admiration. The Heritage Foundation, behind the authoritarian Project 2025, that Trump is now enacting, calls Hungary “the model” for conservative “statecraft.” Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, said that everyone “should learn from it,” and positioned his organization as a “major advocate of it on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The Heritage Foundation openly endorses Orbán’s Christian nationalist agenda and presents it as a model for the U.S. This anti-democratic, anti-civil rights, and anti-human rights framework has already begun to take shape under the Trump administration (Read GPAHE’s report on the Heritage Foundation as an instrument for bringing Orbánism to the U.S. here).
As GPAHE has documented, the connections between the Heritage Foundation and Orbán’s regime run very deep, and they continue to strengthen. On September 15-16, 2025, the Heritage Foundation will host the 5th Geopolitical Summit in Budapest in collaboration with the Danube Institute, a think tank funded by Hungary’s government.
A tweet from the president of the Heritage Foundation after meeting with Orbán. Source: X
Immigrants in the Crosshairs
Both Trump and Orbán have targeted migrants. In the U.S., Trump’s administration swiftly moved to tighten harsh immigration rules. From his first days in the Oval Office, Trump promoted an executive order claiming an invasion by “millions of illegal aliens.”
According to Human Rights Watch, Trump’s policies go further by explicitly denying the right to seek asylum. These measures include canceling humanitarian parole programs and terminating Temporary Protected Status for people from Afghanistan, Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal and Cameroon. This puts hundreds of thousands of people “at risk of being returned to the same dangerous conditions they fled.”
In 2015, Hungary registered an unprecedented number of asylum seekers, 177,135 people, while the number of people crossing the border irregularly peaked at 441,515 persons. Most were fleeing horrific wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, traveling through Hungary, hoping to reach Germany and other northern European countries.
In response, Orbán closed the border with Serbia and Croatia and built a fence. “They are over-running us,” he said. Soon after, Hungary’s parliament granted the army more powers. The military was deployed to assist the police in controlling the border using rubber bullets, tear gas, and pyrotechnic devices.
Since then, the Hungarian government has steadily tightened pathways for migration. New laws have made applying for asylum nearly impossible. Support for some Ukrainian refugees was cut after officials claimed their regions were not war zones. Echoing Trump’s racist rhetoric about immigrants, Orbán has dehumanized migrants, calling them “poison” and “not needed.”
“We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race”, Orbán declared in 2022. This statement exposed the explicitly racist character of his government’s migration policies. European institutions condemned them, and the European Court of Justice fined the country €200 million for violating EU asylum laws.
A tweet from Orbán after meeting with Trump and Elon Musk in Mar-a-Lago. Source: X
Going After the Judges
In April, the FBI detained Judge Hanah Dugan and charged her in federal court with allegedly helping an undocumented migrant avoid arrest. Trump and his allies have repeatedly attacked judges nationwide who rule against his executive orders. These attacks on judicial independence align with the goals of Project 2025, which aim to centralize power in the executive branch.
Even before Project 2025, Orbán had implemented a strategy to influence the judiciary in Hungary. His government altered the selection process for Constitutional Court justices to ensure a majority of loyal appointees. Additionally, he lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, forcing nearly 300 judges to retire immediately. These judges had been appointed by previous governments and were willing to rule against the Orbán regime.
These actions strongly echo Project 2025. Kim Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, spent years in Hungary researching the Constitutional Court. In an interview with NPR, she said that Project 2025 “sounds so much like what Orbán did.” She pointed to Orbán’s strategy of “concentrating all the key powers” in the office of the prime minister and weaponizing the national budget to deprive his opponents of “the financial oxygen they need to survive.”
Christian Nationalist Policies
The Hungarian prime minister has implemented measures that serve as ideological beacons for the American Christian nationalists and conservatives, such as denying transgender identities and excluding same-sex couples from marriage. Most recently, Orbán attempted to ban Budapest LGBTQ+ Pride parade, a rare move on his part that actually backfired, increasing attendance from 35,000 in 2024 to 300,000 in 2025, according to organizers.
The so-called “fethal heartbeat” concept has also become central to abortion laws promoted by conservative politicians and antigender organizations all over the world. Orbán’s government requires women seeking an abortion to listen to the “heartbeat” before proceeding with an abortion.
Abortion remains legal in Hungary for up to 12 weeks. However, the tightening of regulations has pushed dozens of Hungarian women to travel to other EU countries for the procedure.
As part of its broader assault on women’s rights, Orbán’s regime banned gender studies university programs. The government removed Master’s and PhD degrees in gender studies from the list of accredited degrees, arguing that these programs have “no business in universities” because they represent “an ideology, not a science.”
Controlling Education
Hungary’s prime minister has paved the way for other authoritarian leaders in his campaign against academic autonomy. The European Parliament now considers Hungary the only EU member state where academic freedom is effectively violated.
This assessment is supported by measures such as the banning of gender studies, as noted in the 2024 Academic Freedom Monitor, which states that the government “has maintained its efforts to bring schools and universities under close supervision.”
The interference extends to school curricula and the control of educational institutions by placing loyalists at the head of the universities. The regime has even shut down institutions that do not align with its policies. The Central European University (CEU) fell victim to this approach due to its ties to the progressive philanthropist George Soros and his Open Society Foundation.
Across the U.S., the White House has undertaken a similar ideological offensive against Ivy League universities, including Columbia and Harvard, accusing them of promoting left-wing indoctrination and antisemitism.
The Trump administration has used federal funding to pressure universities into abandoning their Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs. It also has sought to influence college admissions and prevent international students from enrolling.
JD Vance outlined his support of the playbook in 2021. At the National Conservatism Conference, he declared that “universities are the enemy.” The current vice president argued that, to advance their far-right agenda, they should “aggressively attack the universities.”
In Hungary, Orbán led the way. In Washington, the Trump administration followed.
