In one of her effective efforts to goad Donald Trump during their debate on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris told the viewing audience he didn’t engender the level of international respect he often claims.
“I’m going to tell you that I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States,” Harris said. “And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”
She went on to say that military leaders viewed Trump as a “disgrace” and to criticize Trump’s efforts to block Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. But, given an opportunity by the moderator to respond, Trump went back to that assertion about the world leaders.
“Let me just tell you about world leaders,” he began. “Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men — they call him a ‘strongman.’ He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him.”
If you listen to Trump with any regularity, you’ve likely heard some version of this before. Trump brings it up a lot, this claim from Orbán — who is not normally considered one of the “most respected men’ — that Trump’s strength kept the global peace. It plays to Trump’s vanity, for one thing, and Orbán is one of the few global leaders willing to overtly take Trump’s side politically.
That’s in part because Orbán likely recognizes Trump as a disruptive agent in the Western world order. It’s probably in part, too, because Trump, echoing others in the American right, reciprocates that support. But it is also clearly because Trump approves of Orbán’s autocratic tendencies.
What isn’t clear is whether Trump realizes that’s what’s meant when Orbán is described as a ‘strongman.’ It seems that he often, if not always, thinks that the term being applied is ‘strong man,’ with the emphasis on the second word, not the first. This would certainly explain why he keeps using the pejorative to describe someone he clearly likes.
When he spoke in The Bronx in May, Trump trotted out the story about Orbán and his compliment.
“Viktor Orbán, did you ever hear of him? Prime Minister of Hungary, very tough guy,” Trump said. “Known as a strongman. Oh, they hate it when I talk about him, because they say, ‘He’s a strongman; Trump loves strongmen.’ I don’t know, I like weak men, actually, I like weak men. I’d much rather have a weak man than a strong man. But he is a strong man.”
‘Weak man’ is the opposite of ‘strong man,’ not ‘strongman.’ And Trump’s phrasing suggested that he thought the criticism of Orbán was that he was somehow too strong, not that he was hostile to liberal democracy.
Speaking to right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt last month, Trump referred to Orbán as a ‘very strong guy, and a good person,’ reinforcing the idea that he just sees ‘strong’ as a compliment. Which would make sense, given that Trump himself has long used ‘strong’ as a compliment for people he likes.
Back in 2008, for example, he was on Fox News and praised that year’s Republican presidential nominee: Sen. John S. McCain, who Trump would later (infamously) disparage for having been a prisoner of war.
‘I’ve known Senator McCain for a long time,’ Trump said. ‘He’s a great guy, a great man. He’s just a very strong guy, a very strong leader, and he’s very, very smart.’
In 2003, he used the same term to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger, then seeking election as governor of California. (Schwarzenegger, too, would later be disparaged by Trump.)
‘He’s a really honorable guy,’ Trump said, ‘and, you know, what he says he’s going to do, and he’s also a strong man who’s made really some incredibly good business decisions.’
Strong man, two words. Certainly true in the case of the former bodybuilder.
As this year’s presidential campaign has heated up, Trump has repeatedly spoken about Orbán’s comments and often mentioned the strength of the man they came from.
‘Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, is a very tough guy,’ he said on Fox in early June. ‘He’s known as a strong man.’ Emphasis on ‘man.’
‘Viktor Orbán said just recently — he’s a strong man from a very interesting country,’ he told Dr. Phil McGraw a few days later. ‘And he knows Russia very well.’
‘The prime minister of Hungary, a very tough man, strong man, very — you know, somebody that I always got along with,’ he said at a North Carolina rally in August. ‘I get along with the strong ones. I don’t get along with the weak ones.’
That much is true. Speaking at Turning Point Action event in Arizona in June, Trump referred to another foreign ally, Chinese President Xi Jinping, as a ‘strong guy,’ though ‘strongman’ would certainly also apply. (He also described his ally Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) as ‘tough’ and ‘strong’ in those same remarks.) But more often than not, the ‘strong man’ Trump is praising is Viktor Orbán.
Since Orbán took power in Hungary, the nation has seen its democratic institutions weakened and Orbán’s power grow. Two years ago, the European parliament determined that Hungary no longer met the standard to be considered a full democracy but was, instead, a ‘electoral autocracy.’ An autocracy run by an autocrat. A strongman.
Trump, though, hears this as ‘strong man,’ a term of praise for someone willing to be tough. He doesn’t seem to understand that it is, instead, a pejorative term for a leader who holds and wields power without democratic constraint.
But, then, Trump might consider that a term of praise, too.