Trump’s love for Viktor Orbán hints at what another Trump term will look like | Jan-Werner Müller

The ex-president recently hosted the Hungarian kleptocrat, whom he's called a strong man' and a real boss', at Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump has not only run the Republican primaries like an incumbent, but on occasion, he gets to play-act the role of president right at home. On Friday, he hosted Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister,, for a quasi-state visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate, described by discerning critics as the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by third-world kleptocrats".

Orban has spent the past 14 years making his country into a kleptocratic autocracy right in the middle of the European Union. Obviously, Trump does not need general guidance from Orban; he is already endowed with authoritarian instincts. But, for all the obvious differences between Orban's small European nation and the US, Orban's rule holds concrete lessons which the American right is ready to adopt. Given the excitement with which Trump acolytes have been promoting Orban - and their frequent pilgrimages to Budapest as the capital of national conservatism" - Hungary offers a preview of a second Trump term.

Jan-Werner Muller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist