Tucker Carlson sat down with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for a 30-minute interview, asking him questions about the war in Ukraine, American politics, and the state of the Western world. The video was uploaded to X on Tuesday, following a speech on similar topics Tucker delivered last week.
Perhaps the key takeaway from the interview was Orban’s statement that if he was put in charge, his number one method for solving the Ukraine War and reaching peace would be to “call back Trump.” Trump had the best foreign policy of any American president in his lifetime, he said, and if Trump was president during the outbreak of the conflict the war would never have started. Later, Trump clipped that segment of the interview and uploaded it to his Instagram page with the caption, “Thank you Viktor Orban!”
Orban said the whole war is in the hands of America, as Ukrainians are too poor to really decide the outcome. If Ukraine had no more money flowing in, the war would be over. The real factor in foreign policy is therefore the intention of the United States, which if Trump was president would be the opposite of what it is now.
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Tucker began the interview by asking Orban about the Biden administration’s position that Putin should be deposed, which Orban said was the product of a “misunderstanding” of Russians. Orban continued that Russia as a topic is a “very difficult thing” to comprehend. As he put it, while Westerners think freedom is the centering question of political life, for Russians the question is national unity – or how to prevent the country from dissolving.
Orban criticized mainstream Washington policy concerning the Ukraine War, saying the establishment is playing with fire in a conflict that is not as threatening to them as it is to Hungarians who share a border with Ukraine. Additionally, Orban said some 150,000 Hungarians living in Ukraine have been sending men into the war effort, another reason why the war is closer to home for Hungary.
When asked by Tucker what would happen if the Ukrainian supply of troops began to dwindle, Orban replied that it was “the most risky question,” because if a Western nation began providing boots-on-the-ground troops to Ukraine we would immediately enter World War Three.
Ep. 20 Hungary shares a border with Ukraine. We traveled to Budapest to speak with the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. pic.twitter.com/LOzpMrQNIz
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 29, 2023
The discussion progressed into philosophical territory when Tucker asked why Hungary and its government are so demonized by the Western ruling class. Orban replied that the main dividing line in Western politics is no longer a matter of opinion but one of “anthropological character,” saying that one side thinks in egocentric terms while the other side thinks family, country, and God are more important than the Self. This focus on the “we,” what “links ourselves together,” is very “out of fashion” in the West today, he said.
Orban went on to say that in the West, politics is “led by intellectuals” who are driven by an “ideological point of view,” which has “exclusivity.” He said this ideological exclusivity explains why they are so intolerant to national, Christian approaches to the world, and why, ironically, countries like Hungary permit a higher degree of pluralism than the hegemonic discourse of Western media and academia.
“We have to be clear here that this is not the voice of America,” Orban reaffirmed, “it is the voice of the administration […] Not all Americans have the same approach as the government.” However, he called the current American policy toward Hungary “absurd,” bringing up how the Biden administration is revoking a treaty with Hungary, but not Russia, that allowed people working between the two countries to avoid having to pay taxes to both governments, also known as a “double tax.”
This is not the first time Tucker interviewed Orban. Watch the original 2021 interview here:
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