This is an adapted excerpt from the April 13 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Imagine you’re a small country, proud but little and not very rich. And at some point, you decide that it’s time to put in streetlights or upgrade them in places that need them to be fixed up.

If you’re a town or village inside that country that wants in on this project, you get told that here’s how you do it: You must hire a consulting company, which will assess your needs and attest to what kind of streetlights you should receive, and then that’s what you’ll get.

But it turns out that as the towns across the country start going through this process, they hire the same firm to help them get their streetlights, and that’s when a couple of things begin to emerge.

First, that company — the one these towns have been told to use in order to get the streetlights — is owned by a guy who’s in business with the prime minister’s son-in-law. And the business he’s in with the prime minister’s son-in-law turns out to be a company that makes streetlights.

So every little town all over your country has to hire this one guy’s company, and every time the company offers that assessment, they say “the only streetlights you can get are from the business owned by the prime minister’s son-in-law and me.”

Well, the country where this actually happened turns out to be in Europe, and the funding for the streetlights was from the European Union. 

So when investigative reporters figured out this scheme, and the EU investigated, they realized that the project to put streetlights in this poor country had instead become basically just a project to make the prime minister’s son-in-law a millionaire.

Although the company and the prime minister’s son-in-law say they did nothing wrong, the EU froze the funding in response.

So how did the prime minister react to that? Well, he decided that he would just pay his son-in-law directly from his country’s already meager government funds.

And that’s how Viktor Orbán’s son-in-law, István Tiborcz, made his first millions.

Since then, over the course of Orbán’s 16 years in power, Tiborcz has become one of the wealthiest men in the whole country, worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of that money comes from his luxury hotels.

The presidency of the EU rotates from country to country every six months, so when it rotated to Hungary a couple of years ago, that meant there would be lots of official delegations from other countries coming to Hungary to do business. 

What some of those other countries would soon find was that no matter what hotels they booked for these official visits, the Orbán government would somehow find a way to unbook them from the hotels where they wanted to stay and rebook them into one of the hotels owned by Tiborcz. 

That was uncovered by investigative reporting from two of Hungary’s independent journalism outlets, Direkt36 and VSquare.

In 2025 the Financial Times reported that Tiborcz nearly doubled his net worth to almost 500 million euros just in 2024 alone.

Ahead of the elections on Sunday in Hungary, which saw his father-in-law turfed out of power after 16 years and now facing potential prosecution for corruption and theft of public assets, Tiborcz reportedly relocated to the U.S.

Now, this story of a leader’s son-in-law profiting from his father-in-law’s power may sound familiar. Trumpism in the United States is not just a personal thing. It’s not just a big political manifestation of the authoritarian personality of Donald Trump. For Trump himself, it might be just that. But, in terms of governance — in terms of what all those other people on the right and the far right like about Trump in power and what they want to do with him in power — it is actually based on something. 

More than anything else, it’s based on the rule of Orbán.

Play

Anne Applebaum: Outcome of Hungary’s election shows there’s nothing inevitable about illiberalism 

April 14, 2026 / 12:46

When looking for inspiration for how conservatives should approach power and government, Orbán isn’t just a model of how to do that; he’s the model, according to the head of the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, which mapped out what the Trump administration would do once it got into power.

So even though Hungary is this tiny little country (its whole population is the size of New Jersey’s), the Trump movement has been obsessed with it. Vice President JD Vance recently called Orbán “one of the only true statesmen in Europe.”

Here’s what that looks like: Under Orbán’s leadership, Hungary has become, by some measures, the poorest country in the EU, and it’s tied with Bulgaria for the most corrupt country. It has the highest cumulative inflation in the whole EU, double what it is in other member states. Its salaries are less than half the average of what people get paid elsewhere in the EU, and its unemployment is the highest it’s been in 10 years. The total economic growth in the country last year was an anemic 0.4%. (The United States’ economic growth at the end of last year was basically just as bad, at 0.5%.)

So Orbán’s economic performance in office has been terrible for its citizens, but somehow his son-in-law becomes one of the wealthiest people in that part of Europe. And his close friend, a plumber, has somehow become the richest person in the whole country — rich enough that this summer the political opposition to Orbán started organizing field trips for ordinary people (they called them safaris) to go drive around the immense private zoo, full of exotic animals, that his best friend built for himself when the leader shoveled him so much money that he became a billionaire from government contracts.

We have people dressed up in inflatable frog costumes at our anti-ICE protests here in the U.S., and people in Hungary are dressed up in inflatable zebra costumes to protest their leader’s corruption.

Orbán is the model, the platonic ideal, of what Trump’s time in power is supposed to be. Trump is supposed to follow Orbán’s lead, to use the power of the state to change the rules and change everything so that he and his friends can never be removed from power — to make their regime election-proof.

With guys like that — election-proof and entrenched in power in a Western country — you can break Europe, you can break the West, you can break NATO and chop up and divide the world among the permanent strongmen, who will rule forever. That’s the dream. 

But a really loud alarm just went off and woke those guys up from that dream.

Sunday’s election proves that for strongman authoritarians like Orbán and like Trump, their ongoing rule is not inevitable. It is not a fate the country can’t escape. 

As the disciplined, nonviolent, big-tent, sustainable, growing resistance to Orbán started to coalesce, as he started to look like he was going to lose, his supposedly unbreakable base of support just collapsed.

See, no one actually likes a corrupt despot. They all support him because they think he’s going to be in power forever, so you need to stay on his good side to get anything for yourself. When it becomes clear that the despot is not going to be there forever, it falls apart. In the end, no one is a true believer in a corrupt despot, other than his henchmen and his family, and sometimes not even them. (Did I mention that Orbán’s streetlight-millionaire son-in-law has apparently fled to the U.S.?)

Far-right authoritarian parties like Trump’s, and ones that are supported by Trump, have lost in the past year in Germany, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

But Orbán’s loss was even more significant. He was defeated in a wild, huge landslide election that just swamped everything he had done to make himself and his party election-proof. The prototype on which Trump and the Republicans built their entire rule of power just crashed and burned in spectacular fashion.

Allison Detzel contributed.

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