From ‘stink bugs’ to ‘enemies of the people’: how Viktor Orbán blazed a trail for Trump’s media assaults

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During his state of the nation address earlier this year, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, outlined a chilling vision of the country’s future. Signalling a new level of aggression in his campaign against the truth if he is returned to power in elections on 12 April, Orbán vowed to purge the country of “bought journalists” and “fake civil society organisations”.

Media repression isn’t just a Hungarian problem. According to the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, a leading democracy monitor, it is the most commonly used weapon in the authoritarian arsenal. Strikingly, its latest report finds that US democracy is now at its worst level since the 1960s, marked by a sharp decline in media freedom.

In February, Donald Trump endorsed Orbán for re-election. Likening Orbán to himself, Trump hailed the prime minister as “a truly strong and powerful leader” who has delivered “phenomenal results”. But the US president has done more than praise Orbán – he has taken a page from the Hungarian’s authoritarian playbook by restricting media freedom.

Trump is following the Orbán model of media repression at home. A report I co-authored for the Rule of Law Lab at NYU School of Law and the Hungarian watchdog Mérték Media Monitor makes the parallels clear as it documents Orbán’s systematic attacks on independent media over his 16-year tenure.

Both Orbán and Trump are hostile to independent journalists, routinely using dehumanising language to refer to them. In Hungary, Orbán has described independent media outlets as “fake news factories” and journalists – alongside judges, rival politicians and what he calls “bogus civil society” organisations – as “stink bugs”, who need to be eradicated. Trump has similarly attacked critical outlets by calling them purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”. He has misogynistically hurled epithets such as “piggy”, “ugly” and “stupid” at female reporters.

Both leaders deny news outlets access, effectively blocking independent reporting. Orbán’s government routinely excludes independent journalists from government events, press conferences, parliament and other public institutions. In the run-up to next Sunday’s elections, independent reporters have been forcibly removed while covering public campaign events supportive of the ruling party.

The Trump administration barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. After a court ruled that the administration’s restrictions on reporters’ access to the Pentagon were unlawful, it closed media offices in the building in an apparent attempt to circumvent the ruling.

Where exclusion fails to silence, both men have taken to using lawfare against independent media. Last month, after a report by the Hungarian investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi alleged that the country’s foreign minister routinely shared details of confidential EU meetings with his Russian counterpart – claims the minister rejected – the Hungarian government filed a criminal complaint accusing Panyi of espionage.

In 2024 the Hungarian government launched an investigation into the leading independent media outlet Átlátszó under the Sovereignty Protection Act, which targets entities allegedly serving “foreign interests”. The investigation was launched despite the fact that the European Commission had opened an infringement procedure against the Orbán government on the grounds that the act violated European Union law.

Orbán’s allies have filed numerous costly lawsuits, known as Slapps (strategic litigation against public participation), against independent media outlets to drain them of their resources. In 2024 the prime minister sued several independent media outlets for defamation after they cited an Austrian newspaper interview in which the CEO of the supermarket chain Spar criticised his government.

Trump has also handed out Slapps on a staggering scale, filing multibillion-dollar lawsuits against ABC News, the Des Moines Register and the Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, CBS News and its parent, Paramount, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC.

In his second term, instances of arrests or detention of journalists, sometimes violent and many at the hands of law enforcement, have increased. The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post journalist, seizing electronic devices under the guise of an investigation into the leaking of government information. And earlier this year federal agents arrested the former CNN journalist Don Lemon on flimsy charges tied to his coverage of a Minnesota protest. Many see these moves as blatant attempts to silence independent media.

Neither Trump nor Orbán has been content with simply targeting journalists. They have aimed their sights on regulatory bodies, too. On taking office in 2010, Orbán swiftly enacted new media laws to stuff Hungary’s media regulatory authority with loyalists. Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of the media regulatory body’s subjugation was its decision to strip the country’s leading independent radio station, Klubrádió, of its broadcasting licence, which in February the EU court ruled was a violation of EU law.

In 2018 the authority stood by as the government decreed the merger of more than 470 pro-government media outlets into the Central European Press and Media Foundation (Kesma), bypassing competition regulations. The authority also oversaw the state-owned public service media’s conversion into the government’s propaganda tool. Between 2010 and 2025, Hungary’s rank in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index plunged from 23rd to 68th out of 180 countries, making it one of the worst-ranked media environments in the EU.

Today, Orbán’s Fidesz party is estimated to exert direct or indirect control over roughly 80% of Hungary’s media, according to Reporters Without Borders.

While the US has not reached this level of media capture, Trump is implementing a similar strategy via Brendan Carr, his handpicked chair for the historically independent Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Carr has publicly confirmed that the FCC, formally speaking, “isn’t independent”, approved media mergers that critics say would consolidate ownership in the hands of Trump political allies while waiving the FCC’s own rules on broadcast ownership caps, and issued regulatory threats that have induced television outlets into what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience”.

Although US media remain more independent in the aggregate than their Hungarian counterparts, the Trump administration is moving with alarming speed to consolidate its influence. Unlike Hungary, which faces regional oversight as an EU member state, the US lacks any such tempering force. Left unchecked, Trump’s campaign of media repression could soon outdo its Hungarian model.

Yet even in Hungary, independent outlets have managed to survive against the odds, sustained by civic trust and innovative funding models. As Hungarians head to the polls next Sunday, Americans and Europeans who value a free press must watch closely. If the enemies of media freedom are learning from one another, its advocates must do the same.