These are not mere kind words, but the product of deep ties cultivated between Europe’s far right and Trump’s Republican Party.

Chief among them is Orbán, 61, who has become an unlikely darling of Trump and other Republicans, who have welcomed him and courted his policy advice.

“Orbán is the model” for Trump’s team, said Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale and author of the new book “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.” “They bring him in, they meet him,” Stanley said, saying Orbán’s most attractive quality is the 14 years “he managed to stay in power,” making him the world’s most successful leader. oldest in the European Union.

Orbán did this, according to researcherspassing laws restricting judicial independence; stacking government agencies and institutions with party loyalists; and creating a pro-government media landscape by threatening fines or suspensions for “unbalanced” or “amoral” reporting.

His grip on power has become such that the European Parliament describes his regime as an “elective autocracy”. And from that platform, he has portrayed refugees as a threat to Christian culture – describing migrants as “poison” and Muslims as “invaders” – and passed so-called anti-pedophile laws that have actually confused this crime with LGBTQI+ issues.

It’s a platform that he says he exports more and more to the Republicans.

“We have entered into the agenda-writing system of President Donald Trump’s team, and we are deeply involved in it,” he said at a conference in July. Trump, for his part, described Orbán in January as a “very great leader” and “a very strong man.”

When the Hungarian visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in March, President Joe Biden accused his Hungarian counterpart of “seeking dictatorship.”

NBC News asked Team Trump for their comments on these criticisms, as well as their ties to far-right parties in Europe.

The far-right label is rejected by Orbán’s Hungarian party, Fidesz.

“If the left wants to present us as being far right when it comes to illegal immigration, the only thing I can say is: we are far right when it comes to illegal immigration, in the sense that the left is largely wrong because it promotes anarchy,” he added. borders, said Fidesz MP László.

It’s not just about platitudes between leaders.

An Orbán-linked think tank called the Danube Institute developed links with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded the Project 2025 policy roadmap. Trump disavowed the 900-page plan to reorganize swaths of politics and society along far-right lines, despite the participation of some of his former collaborators in its writing.

Nonetheless, in public, Trump has supported mass deportations, said he would use the legal system to punish his political opponents, and threatened to deploy the military and National Guard against leftists he describes as “the enemy.” interior”.

Trump and his team have denied being a fascist, and he described himself last month as “the opposite of a Nazi.”

The prospect of a new alliance between these transatlantic political partners is deeply alarming for independent experts, activists and political opponents.

During Trump’s first term, heavyweights such as German leader Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron presented themselves as rational, dominant counterweights to the president’s most norm-breaking outbursts. Today, Merkel is long gone and Macron is seriously weakened.

The new political topography of Europe has shifted to the right: Wilders calls for the “de-Islamization” of the Netherlands, the Austrian Freedom Party wants to promote the “remigration” of Austrian nationals with immigrant backgrounds and the The Brothers of Italy party uses the fascist, motto of the time of Benito Mussolini: “God, family, homeland”.

Even as party leader Meloni softened her image internationally by forging ties with Biden and the EU, she oversaw a controversial program at home to treat migrants in Albania, her opposition said abortion and has supported anti-surrogacy laws that critics say are discriminatory. same-sex couples.

Now, Trump’s election means that Orbán will be much less isolated and could even become the political bloc’s conduit to Trump.

“There is a learning process that the Trump movement is doing with these people,” said Stanley, the Yale professor. “Their use of Orbán is very, very effective and very clever.”

Alexander Smith reported from London and Carlo Angerer from Munich, Germany.