The Trump administration’s friendly and intensive contacts with the Orban government represent a radical departure: It watches idly as Orban dismantles his nation’s democratic institutions. For instance, the pro- government weekly Figyelo recently issued an enemies list of about 200 prominent opposition individuals. Most were local civil society advocates, but the list also included U.S. citizens, many of them scholars of economics, Judaism and nationalism at the Soros-funded Central European University (such as Leon Botstein and Allen Feldman). The government has erected contrived legal barriers in an effort to close the institution, a graduate school devoted to liberal values and based in Budapest. Meanwhile, Hungary harassed the U.S.-based Open Society Foundations until they decided to move their operations from Budapest to Berlin. Two Hungarian newspapers, Magyar Nemzet and Budapest Beacon , shut down this spring as advertisers vanished because of their opposition to the Hungarian government, leaving only one print opposition daily. The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest have remained almost entirely silent about all of this. The compliant new U.S. approach was initially discussed at a Dec. 18, 2017, meeting of the National Security Council’s policy coordinating committee led by Fiona Hill, the council’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, and Assistant Secretary Mitchell, according to two sources familiar with the proceedings. They concluded that previous efforts under the Bush administration, and especially the Obama administration, had not paid off, so it was time to try something else. Accordingly, the first high-level meeting between the two sides took place at the White House on May 15, when John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, received Jeno Megyesy, Orban’s chief adviser on the United States. (Megyesy was also the official point of contact for then-Trump aide Carter Page’s meetings in Budapest during the campaign.)