He’s their role model This piece by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points memo is a must read if you hope to understand where the right is going — with or without Trump: The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds. Hungarian officials appear at GOP events; CPAC has a Budapest event. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán met with Donald Trump last month, and earned a dilatory shoutout from the Republican candidate at the RNC, where Trump called Hungary a “strong country, run by very powerful, tough leaders — a tough guy.” But if the strength is the draw, then how did Orbán become a strongman? What is it about Orbán that right-wingers are supporting when they say that they like what he’s done in Hungary? TPM spoke with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Hungarian MP who recently wrote a book, Tainted Democracy, about Orbán’s rise to power and the crackdown that followed. Szelényi was once a member of Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, in the early 1990s, before leaving as the party grew more conservative, and eventually founding her own opposition party in 2012. She knew Orban during his entry into politics in the early 1990s, and has followed his ascent as a political actor in Hungary. Szelényi told TPM that Orbán, during his rise, shared a key focus with the modern American right: significant, structural changes to politics and the functioning of government to accrue, and retain, power. In her telling of the rise of Orbánism, that manifests as a…