Christopher F. Rufo, the activist and author, spent six weeks in the spring of 2023 in Hungary, just as he and other conservative trustees were mounting a hostile takeover of New College of Florida, the state’s honors college. Rufo was there as a visiting fellow at a think tank closely aligned with the country’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán. ... Like Trump, Orbán inveighs against educated elites and political correctness, said Eve Darian-Smith, chair of global and international studies at the University of California at Irvine. Trump’s rhetoric, she said, “could be out of the mouth of Orbán.”

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