MSNBC Panel Melts Down Over Hungarian PM Speaking To Conservatives

MSNBC Panel Melts Down Over Hungarian PM Speaking To Conservatives

Harold Hutchison on August 5, 2022

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect a statement from Republican National Committee (RNC) spokesperson Nicole Morales.

MSNBC host Joy Reid and a panel on her show obsessed over Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban Thursday evening in the wake of Orban’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“It’s obviously more convenient in some sense to Orban-ize the party rather than Putin-ize it,” Reid said, noting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made Russian President Vladimir Putin “objectionable.”

“Anything Joy Reid thinks about the Republican Party is as irrelevant as her show,” Republican National Committee spokesperson Nicole Morales told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement.

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“Orban talked in 2018 about the access of the willing,” Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian foreign policy analyst, said. “Orban, Trump, Salvini in Italy, the fascists in France and VOX in Spain. There’s a real ideology of common values, antiimmigration, trying to use the powers and tools of democracy to try to destroy it from within.”

Jebreal went on to claim that Orban inspired a July 29 attack that killed an immigrant from Nigeria in Italy. Other panel members attacked Orban as a racist.

“Let me tell you something Viktor Orban got right today,” former Republican Rep. David Jolly told Reid. “He said the press in the United States will report that a racist leader addressed American conservatives, and he was right because he is racist, his policies are racist.”

“The same movement that embraced Viktor Orban is the one that is giving currency and fuel to Ron DeSantis, to Donald Trump and to other leaders in today’s Republican Party,” Jolly said.

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A Princeton professor claimed that Orban’s border security policies were later adopted by the Trump administration.

“Orban built a wall before Trump built a wall,” Kim Lane Scheppele said. “He pushed people back across that wall. He separated kids and parents. The thing that he did actually in 2015 was exactly what Trump went on to do later. So, he has been exactly a model for Republican efforts to deal with the border.”

Scheppele also claimed that there were multiple ties between the circles of Orban and former President Donald Trump.

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“There are lots of ties between the Trump circle and the Orban circle,” Scheppele said. “Steve Bannon is one of them. He not only called Orban Trump before Trump, he created both of them in lots of ways. Even before that, Orban’s big electoral victory in 2010 was engineered by a pair of Republican masterminds. There are a lot of connections.”

DeSantis did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.