Donald Trump Calls Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ‘Leader Of Turkey’ In Speech

During a campaign speech in New Hampshire, Donald Trump appeared to have confused two world leaders on Monday.

“There’s a man, Viktor Orbán, did anyone ever hear of him?” Trump asked the crowd. “He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey.”

Turkey’s president is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while Orbán is the prime minister of Hungary. 

Trump would later correct this mistake after addressing members of his audience.

“But Victor Orbán, he’s the head of Hungary and he runs a tough, let me tell you, he runs it properly, he runs it strong, with crime and with everything else he runs it strong and he doesn’t let terrorists into his country,” he said.

Trump has previously praised Orbán before and hosted him at the White House in 2019.

Orbán was the first leader to endorse Trump for president in 2016 and again in 2020. Orbán was also a guest speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2022.

Orbán and his right-wing populist party, Fidesz, have been accused of turning the Hungarian government into a kleptocracy and autocracy, and shifting his government away from “liberal democracy.”

Orbán has also rolled back LGBTQ rights in Hungary and has pursued closer ties with Russia and China.

Trump has repeatedly confused President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama at campaign events in recent weeks. At the same time, he is trying to make Biden’s “cognitive decline” a campaign issue.

Trump recently fell off of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, leading him to call the publication “irrelevant.”