Bryan Leib, Senior Fellow for the Budapest-based think tank Center for Fundamental Rights, is no fan of David Pressman. He has constantly criticized the former US Ambassador to Hungary while he was serving in his post between 2022 and 2025.
And Leib’s misgivings of Ambassador Pressman, whom he likes to refer to as Activist Pressman, did not stop with his leaving office.
On Wednesday, 23 July, Pressman published an opinion piece for The New York Times with the title ‘I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here’, in which he is comparing the second Trump administration’s supposed attempt to grab authoritarian power to that of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
The Former Ambassador certainly will not get any points for originality on his essay. As we have reported in an earlier article, articles with the same thesis have been published in various big-name mainstream media outlets since President Trump’s first victory in 2016.
As we pointed out, the news site Vox even has its own specialist on the subject: journalist Zack Beauchamp has written two of the same articles about President Trump and PM Orbán, one in 2018 and one in 2025. In the meantime, in 2022, he also squeezed one out about the comparison between PM Orbán and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as well…
Ambassador Pressman shared a link to his opinion piece on X with the caption ‘Democracies collapse not just through force, but through the naïve self-confidence of elites. What should alarm us isn’t that strongmen follow similar playbooks, but that our elites do too.’
Bryan Leib has reposted this message along with a caption of his own, writing ‘Anything Ambassador Pressman says about Hungary or Orbán is just partisan spin. He was loathed in Hungary for the same antics then as now. No one cares what he thinks except the anti-Trump NYT.’
He has also called out Pressman for opting to only allow replies from people he follows or has tagged in his post. Leib wrote to the former Ambassador ‘Turn your replies on David. Stop being a coward.’
This is not the first time Leib has called into question the courage of Ambassador Pressman.
In June of this year, he issued an open invitation to Pressman to a debate about Hungary’s state of affairs and PM Orbán’s governance. Hungarian political influencer Stefi Déri has also posted about the challenge, giving it wider reach. However, Ambassador Pressman has yet to respond.
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Author: Márton Losonczi
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