Tag Archives: Viktor Orbán

The Handbasket: State Department set to launch ‘Office of Remigration’

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The concept of remigration has explicitly neo-Nazi roots and has been popularized in Europe.

Secretary Marco Rubio’s State Department published a reorganization chart Thursday morning showing massive cuts to diplomatic offices and functions, plus a few new additions. Rubio’s department also reportedly sent the plan to Congress concurrently. What hasn’t been previously reported is the extensive 136-page document Congress received that includes the more granular details of what the reimagined department would look like— including an “Office of Remigration,” a far-right, anti-immigrant buzzword made popular in Europe for ridding the country of migrants.

Arguably the most alarming piece of the report comes in the section for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). The report states that PRM will be “substantially reorganized” and that a number of new offices will be created as part of the absorption of USAID. There will be three new offices under the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Migration Matters, “to shift focus towards supporting the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status.” 

One such office will be the Office of Remigration (REM), which will “provide a policy platform for interagency coordination with DHS and other agencies on removals/repatriations, and for intra-agency policy work to advance the President’s immigration agenda.” There will also be offices of International Migration/Repatriation and Refugee Processing.

Coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) surprised one State Department employee I spoke to who said the people they’ve known to work in PRM are “pretty much the opposite” of those who work for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

While these plans align with Trump’s open objective of expelling as many migrants from the United States as possible, the use of the word “remigration” is particularly striking as it’s widely used by far-right extremists in Europe. 

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“All of it is pretty awful with some pieces that definitely violate existing law and treaties,” a person who works closely with the State Department told The Handbasket. “But institutionalizing neo-Nazi theory as an office in the State Department is the most blatantly horrifying.”

State Department set to launch ‘Office of Remigration’

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/state-department-office-of-remigration

Alternet: More than revenge: Here’s why Trump is really targeting his own former officials | Opinion

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During President Donald Trump’s first three months in office, his administration has targeted dozens of former officials who criticized him or opposed his agenda.

In April 2025, Trump directed the Department of Justice to investigate two men who served in his first administration, Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, because they spoke out against his policies and corrected his false claims about the 2020 election that he lost.

Further, Trump revoked the security clearances for advisers and retired generals who publicly criticized him during the 2024 election campaign.

On their face, such moves appear to be a coordinated campaign of personal retribution. But as political science scholars who study the origins of elected strongmen, we believe Trump’s use of the Justice Department to attack former officials who stood up to him isn’t just about revenge. It also deters current officials from defying Trump.

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But to carry out a power grab, incumbent leaders also need allies who will stay silent or, better yet, endorse their attempts to consolidate control.

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Recall that Trump only left office in January 2021 because key Republican officials defied his attempts to overturn an election he lost.

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In authoritarian contexts, loyalty is not an intrinsic quality. Authoritarian leaders do not necessarily select those with whom they have long work experience that leads to mutual trust.

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Instead, the challenge for authoritarian leaders is finding people to do their bidding. And the best people for this job are those who never would have earned their position in politics without the leader’s influence.

Unqualified appointees who can’t ascend to political power based on their merits have little choice but to stick with the leader. These people appear loyal, but only because their careers are tied to the leader staying in power.

www.alternet.org
More than revenge: Here’s why Trump is really targeting his own former officials | Opinion

https://www.alternet.org/trump-revenge-2672110754

The Atlantic: The Hungarian Model

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MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. 

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What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

Orbán’s Hungary Could Be America’s Future – The Atlantic

Guardian: Greenland’s new PM rejects Trump’s latest threat: ‘We do not belong to anyone else’

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Newly sworn in Jens-Frederik Nielsen says ‘Trump says that the United States is getting Greenland. Let me be clear: the United States won’t get that’

The US will not get Greenland, its new prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has said in response to Donald Trump’s latest statements that he wants to take control of the vast Arctic country.

“President Trump says that the United States is getting Greenland. Let me be clear: the United States won’t get that. We do not belong to anyone else. We determine our own future,” Nielsen said.

During an interview with NBC on Saturday, the US president said: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%” and argued that while there’s a “good possibility that we could do it without military force … I don’t take anything off the table.”

Trump said he “absolutely” had had real conversations about annexing the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

Greenland’s new PM rejects Trump’s latest threat: ‘We do not belong to anyone else’
Newly sworn in Jens-Frederik Nielsen says ‘Trump says that the United States is getting Greenland. Let me be clear: the United States won’t get that’

Greenland’s new PM rejects Trump’s latest threat: ‘We do not belong to anyone else’ | Greenland | The Guardian