Immediately upon taking office in January 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14169, entitled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.” This Executive Order imposed a 90-day freeze on nearly all US foreign aid programs. A week later Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a stop-work directive on foreign assistance. The website for USAID went offline shortly after this. In July, USAID finally shut its doors, and the logo was symbolically removed from the building that once held its offices.
USAID was established in 1961 with the aim of countering Soviet influence in foreign countries through humanitarian assistance. The idea behind the program was that, if humanitarian aid could be extended to countries in need, the soft power of the United States would increase relative to the Soviet Union’s. By the time USAID closed its doors in July 2025, the institutions had strayed far from its original mission. Increasingly, the organisation seemed to have been taken over by political activists who were using it to spread progressive liberal ideology throughout the world.
When the Trump administration was in the process of shutting down USAID, they presented some memorable examples of what money flowing from the organisation was being spent on, like the $1.5 million going to promote DEI in Serbian workplaces. This sort of “woke diplomacy” was unlikely to bolster American soft power abroad. Rather, it damaged the international reputation of the United States, making the country seem decadent and strange to foreigners, and ultimately opened the field of cultural soft power influence to countries like Russia and China, who would frame their own outreach to these countries as either culturally traditional or neutral.
The Trump administration was right to recognise how damaging this sort of “woke diplomacy” was. But despite the almost comical excesses that the administration highlighted when it moved to close down USAID, there was method in the agency’s madness. USAID was the beating heart of the progressive liberal empire that many in Washington, DC wanted to spread across the world. The absurd musicals and comic books were merely the tip of a very large iceberg. The goal of these strange projects was to foster progressive liberal political networks in countries across the world. The United States would then use the tools it had available to promote these networks and ensure that they rose to power.
As the USAID octopus has pulled its tentacles back from the global scene, the networks have nevertheless remained. These networks are certainly sustained by funding, but they are made up of people and inevitably these people have tried to find alternative sources of funding and alternative ways of wielding power. With a major election in Hungary coming up in April, Budapest has become ground zero for the post-USAID global progressive movement. It thus serves as an example for how these networks will try to maneuver in a world where USAID is no longer there to provide logistical support and a financial backstop.
The financing of the Hungarian opposition party Tisza is somewhat murky. Reports suggest that the party had €7–8 million in revenue in 2025, or roughly $8.1–9.3 million. Tisza claims that this money comes from small donations and merchandise sales, but this seems unrealistic. Let us compare this to the United States. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the Trump campaign raised around $133.5 million from small donors. The United States has a population of 345 million people while Hungary has a population of around 9.6 million. If the Tisza party is telling the truth that it raised all its revenue from small donors it would mean it raised around $0.74 per Hungarian. Compare this to Trump in 2024 who raised around $0.39 per American in small donations.
Needless to say, salaries in the United States are significantly higher than salaries in Hungary. The average Hungarian salary is just over $2,200 per month while the average American salary is around $5,200 per month. This means that, if we were to believe Tisza’s claim that its funding comes from small donations, we would have to assume that each small Hungarian donor is willing to donate 4.5 times more of their salary to the Tisza campaign than Trump voters were willing to donate to the Trump campaign. This is before even considering that the average Hungarian is simply not as invested in politics as the average American. While politics is highly contentious in Hungary, Hungarian culture is inherently less political than American culture. What is more, political campaigns are not financed in this way because the state provides direct subsidies to any party that fields sufficient candidates.
Recently Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that the Tisza party was being funded by Ukrainians. While Orbán has not yet provided evidence, he insisted that it did exist, stating that “this is not just an assumption, not just a guess, not just a suspicion, but is laid down in a written report that was presented to the national security committee.” A few days after Orbán made this accusation the counter-terror police in Hungary seized two Ukrainian vehicles in Hungary that contained $40 million and €35 million in cash and nine kilograms of gold. Evidence that Tisza is being funded from Ukraine has not emerged publicly, but it may emerge as the election draws closer.
There are other major irregularities taking place in the current Hungarian election. Take the example of social media. In Hungary, X is not much used due to the complexity of the Hungarian language. Most Hungarians, even younger ones, use Facebook as their social media platform of choice. Hungary has a population of 9.6 million and around 6.5 million Facebook users. When we look at the Facebook campaign, we see some quite extreme irregularities around the opposition candidate Péter Magyar’s engagements. Magyar has a total of 830,000 followers, significantly lower than Orbán’s 1.5 million followers, and yet he gets substantially more engagement. The average number of likes that Magyar has been able to generate at the time of writing was 40,140 per post while Orbán is only able to generate 14,430.
To check how unusual Magyar’s engagements are, we have calculated the average likes per post as a percentage of a person’s followers and compared Magyar to three prominent Hungarian politicians with relatively large Facebook followings: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (1.5 million followers), Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó (510,000 followers), and Political Director of the Prime Minister’s Office Balázs Orbán (108,000 followers). In the chart below we show how many likes-per-follower each politician gets. As we can see, likes-per-follower is consistent across the political spectrum: most Hungarian politicians get around 0.01 likes per follower. But Magyar can get five times this—around 0.05 likes per follower. It is difficult to see how this could be organic.
This data strongly suggests that Facebook is putting its thumb on the scale in the Hungarian election. This would not be without precedent. In the summer of 2022, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Facebook had censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election. Zuckerberg claimed that this was due to a warning that the company received from the FBI and indicated that he was not happy with the pressure that was applied to his company to meddle in elections. It would be interesting to know what Facebook thinks of the fact that the Hungarian opposition candidate is getting five times more engagement than the average Hungarian politician.
Finally, there is the polling. Since the beginning of 2025 it has been obvious that there was something strange going on in the Hungarian election polls. Polls run by opposition-aligned pollsters show drastically different results to polls run by government-aligned pollsters. One recent opposition poll, for example, showed the Tisza party leading Orbán’s Fidesz party by 11 points. A government-aligned poll released a few days later showed Fidesz leading by 5 points. A spread of 16 points between two polls is not a normal discrepancy. It even suggests that one of the polls might be fraudulent.
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Statistical analysis shows that the opposition-aligned polls are less reliable than the government-aligned polls. The opposition-aligned polls bounce all over the place and rarely agree with one another, while the government-aligned polls are much more consistent. This suggests that the opposition-aligned polls might be being adjusted to provide “boosts” to the opposition when there is a bad news week for them. A government-aligned journalist called Dániel Deák claims that he has gotten hold of the original poll results from one of the leading opposition pollsters and that these show results radically different from those published.
Overall, the Hungarian election campaign shows the shape of the post-USAID global progressive movement. It appears that they can tap alternative funding sources – although if claims by the Hungarian Prime Minister turn out to be true, these funding sources will prove much more dubious than USAID. They also appear able to get support from social media companies like Facebook to boost their campaign and there is strong evidence that a new strategy moving forward will be the aggressive manipulation of polling.
Is this enough to keep the momentum of the global progressive movement driving forward? Probably not. Looked at objectively it seems like the spasms of a corpse. The Hungarian election will be a testing ground for how violent these spasms prove to be.
