The MAGA Intellectual Who Prophesized a Queen Melania
· The Atlantic
One evening last fall, J. D. Vance threw open the doors of his home, a Queen Anne–style mansion on the campus of the U.S. Naval Observatory, to Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. Over drinks in Vance’s study, the vice president asked Orbán for an update on life in Europe. Specifically, he wanted to know how quickly Christian faith was vanishing from the continent.
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The get-together, described to me by someone who was present, was informal. Only close aides were included, among them Orbán’s political director and Vance’s national security adviser. And then there was Gladden Pappin, a Harvard-trained, U.S.-born political theorist with round, dark-framed glasses and graying hair.
Few people have ever heard of Pappin. Until I began examining the U.S.-Hungary relationship—trying to understand why President Trump and the people around him are backing Orbán’s reelection this month as if he were a swing-state Senate candidate—I hadn’t either. So what was he doing alongside Orbán at the vice president’s residence?
The answer lies in the ties binding Orbán’s government to one of the most radical parts of Trump’s movement. Pappin belongs to a clutch of so-called post-liberal intellectuals who are small in number but whose power is magnified by their like-mindedness with Vance. Silicon Valley gave Vance the resources to run for the Senate in 2022; but this group gave him the relevance, and the ideas, to be Trump’s running mate in 2024 and his heir apparent in 2028.
Pappin, like Vance, is Catholic, which infuses his critique of liberalism. In essays and other public comments, he has objected to limits on state power that enhance individual liberty and questioned the separation of Church and state. Privately, he has advanced fantastical ideas. He once predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, at which point the pope would anoint Melania Trump, who is Catholic, to rule the United States as queen.
I heard this story from multiple people but dismissed it, at first, as implausible. Then I reached Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and previously a political-science professor. Polet told me that he was present when Pappin said this, over drinks one evening at a 2018 meeting of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which aims to nurture conservative ideas on college campuses. Although often puckish and provocative, Pappin, in Polet’s telling, became animated about this prediction, rebuffing the suggestion that it was merely something that he’d like to happen, and insisting, “This is what will happen.” The notion is derived, tenuously, from Catholic political doctrine dating to the fifth century that emphasizes the preeminence of papal authority over secular powers, according to Polet, who recalled another conference attendee calling the comment “batshit crazy” but at least consistent with a wholesale rejection of liberalism.
In response to questions about the prophesy, Pappin told me in an email that he meant it ironically, writing, “Satire is dead and Trump Derangement Syndrome killed it.” But the comment, intended ironically or not, seems to fit Pappin’s worldview. In an email from the same year, which I reviewed, he wrote “guilty as charged” about a philosophy of “quixotic monarchism,” appearing to wryly affirm his faith in a Christian monarch in place of liberal democracy. Pappin maintained to me that he was merely “poking fun” at “stereotypes of conservative Catholics.” When I asked him whether he believes in democracy, he said, “Western democracies need to return to their roots in Christian civilization in order to pull back from hyperliberal progressivism.” In a 2022 essay, he called the presidency a “quasi-monarchical office.”
Pappin followed these interests to Hungary, where government-funded think tanks catering to foreign intellectuals have sprouted along the Danube like spring poplars. American conservatives journey to Budapest and return gushing about how Orbán has curbed migration and consolidated power, ruling for the past 16 years. Pappin is unusual not only in deciding to stay, but also in effectively going to work for the Hungarian government. Since 2023, he has been the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state-owned company whose mandate is analogous to that of the policy-planning staff of the U.S. State Department. He writes memos for Orbán and travels the world forging connections with foreign governments and think tanks: west to the United States, where he sits on the Hungarian side of bilateral meetings with American officials; east to China, where he enthuses about opportunities for cooperation with the authoritarian, one-party state.
Back home in Budapest, fellow academics and foreign diplomats marvel at the doyen of Hungarian foreign policy who doesn’t speak Hungarian. But Pappin’s value is clear, and the government can hardly believe its luck—a flesh-and-blood member of the MAGA intelligentsia on its payroll. That’s part of the reason the stakes are so high in Hungary this election season, high enough that Vance will appear alongside Orbán during the final stretch of the campaign this week.
The centralization of state power by a leader who sees Christianity as inseparable from government legitimacy, once a pipe dream of people like Pappin, is now a model advanced by senior figures in the American government. Trump’s biggest boosters frequently liken him to Jesus. Vance insisted last year on the importance of a “Christian moral order,” and as a Senate candidate in 2021, he compared contemporary U.S. politics to a “late republican period,” referring to the era before Caesar’s dictatorship. He urged his ideological allies “to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Hungary shows what getting wild looks like. Orbán has restricted individual rights, curtailed media freedom, manipulated election rules, and undermined judicial independence. Meanwhile, his country has become one of the poorest and most corrupt in the European Union; it’s routine, for example, for people in Hungary to bring their own toilet paper to the hospital. The European Parliament accuses Orbán of running an “electoral autocracy.” Trump calls him “truly strong and powerful.” His victory would validate global Trumpism. A loss might put Pappin out of a job.
Pappin is a French name, and Gladden is the maiden name of Pappin’s mother. His father, a citizen of the Osage Nation, converted to Catholicism. Pappin was born in St. Louis and raised in Little Rock, where his family was friends with the Clintons. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate, attracting attention for his flamboyant attire and flamboyant intolerance. “The Gadfly” is the title of a 2003 article in The Harvard Crimson that notes his cashmere argyle sweaters and “more faculty than undergrad” sense of fashion, as well as the furious reaction he generated when he wrote a letter to the editor describing homosexuality as “not merely immoral but perverted and unnatural.” Pappin said he found “pleasure in fulfilling the stereotypical image people have of me.”
For graduate school, he returned to Harvard, where he studied theorists including Plato and Machiavelli. A more modern point of reference was the French thinker Pierre Manent, an influential euroskeptic. Classmates said that Pappin resented liberal elites but also recoiled from egalitarianism, instead craving the coronation of elites in his own image—ones sharing his commitments to Catholicism, monarchism, and medievalism. One of his classmates told me, “He did not strike me, or any of us, as someone who was likely to play a pivotal role in world affairs, but I guess our imaginations were too limited.” In both the United States and Hungary, some of the people who spoke with me insisted on anonymity because they feared reprisal, whether from Orbán’s government or Trump’s.
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Pappin finished his Ph.D. in 2012 and soon took up a position at the University of Notre Dame, home to Patrick Deneen, a political scientist who is today perhaps the most prominent of the post-liberals. To the extent that there’s an intellectual foundation for Trumpism, Pappin whacked some of its first nails into place. In 2016, he used the pseudonym Manlius Capitolinus—a consul of the Roman republic who was executed after being accused of aspiring to monarchic rule—to write for a pro-Trump hothouse called the Journal of American Greatness. One of his fellow authors, Michael Anton, was made famous by an essay called “The Flight 93 Election,” which argued that voting for Trump in 2016 would be equivalent to charging the cockpit of the hijacked 9/11 flight, because the alternative was certain death. Anton would ultimately serve as the director of policy planning in the State Department for most of last year.
Others gained more attention for publicly defending Trump, but Pappin was crucial behind the scenes. That’s how Kevin Vallier, a philosophy professor at the University of Toledo, explained it to me. In his 2023 book, All the Kingdoms of the World, Vallier argues that Pappin marshaled other so-called integralists—proponents of subordinating the political order to the authority of the Catholic Church—to line up behind Trump. In private communications over the messaging platform Slack, Pappin was the one who “introduced strategy into the discussion,” Vallier told me. “He made the case that the integralists should be trying to acquire power rather than just talking about ideas.” In response to a question about his early advocacy for Trump, Pappin told me, “President Trump singularly changed the course of American history and I have always encouraged my peers to support him, as well as to develop a new governing approach for conservatives.”
During Trump’s first term, Pappin co-founded a quarterly journal called American Affairs and sought to acquaint readers with a post-liberal future. In a 2019 essay that associates recommended to me as a précis of his political philosophy, Pappin wrote that the brand of modern conservatism aimed at limiting state power and enshrining the free market had “reached a terminus.” By that time, he was an assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas, and eventually gained tenure in 2021.
That year, Trump’s time in office reached its own terminus. Pappin’s wife is Hungarian, and he has said in interviews that he and their two children have Hungarian citizenship as a result. He visited the country in December 2020, right after Trump’s defeat. He would soon return.
The political scientist László Lengyel has argued that Hungary’s history gave rise to different species of successful Hungarians: The petty bourgeois he labeled Homo kádáricus because they thrived when János Kádár relaxed Marxist orthodoxy in the 1960s, compared with Homo sovieticus under the hard-line Stalinist leadership that preceded the failed 1956 revolution.
Now it’s possible to talk about Homo orbánicus, the species of people who have found favor during Orbán’s reign. Some of them are childhood friends of the prime minister. One is his son-in-law, among the wealthiest people in the country. Others are leaders of think tanks and institutes with close ties to the government. Since Trump came onto the scene, some Americans have joined them. Orbán was the only E.U. head of government to endorse Trump in 2016, and out of their rapport grew dense institutional networks spanning the Atlantic.
Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, might be considered a high-profile example of Homo orbánicus. His organization licenses the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, brand to the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights, which has hosted an annual CPAC Hungary since 2022. As is customary, Schlapp himself attended this year’s gathering, in March, and returned to the United States repeating Orbán’s talking points. He told me that the prime minister would be reelected because of popular anger about interrupted Russian oil supplies that typically flow through Ukraine.
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Another English-speaking member of this species is John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. O’Sullivan is the founder and president of the Danube Institute, which receives funding from Orbán’s government and stays relentlessly on message. Last year, the institute put on an event called Is Transgenderism Dying?” With nearly two weeks to go before the election on April 12, the institute hosted a summit featuring a video address by the deputy U.S. secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and in-person remarks from one of his advisers. Weeks earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had traveled to Budapest and told Orbán, “Your success is our success.” The Danube Institute event reinforced that message by giving U.S. diplomats pride of place in the program. “It’s very comforting to know that we have allies like you,” an institute employee told the Americans at the conference’s conclusion.
More powerful still is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, known as MCC. The chairman of the board of trustees is the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation). Pappin landed an MCC fellowship in 2021, the same year that Vance announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Vance had recently converted to Catholicism and, during the course of his campaign, he appeared at events alongside luminaries of the post-liberal movement. At one, hosted by the Franciscan University of Steubenville just weeks before the November 2022 election, Pappin was a speaker. In his remarks, he gestured toward Hungary’s generous benefits for families but mostly mocked liberalism. “You can travel in a little bubble of global consumer liberalism wherever you go, and that’s what makes people happy,” he said, in an apparent attempt at humor. When I asked Pappin if he has a positive vision of post-liberalism, he told me in an email, “I advocate for Western nations to return to their true sources of strength—strong families, strong borders, strong industry—as a basis for thriving in today’s intense global competition.”
Academics who moved in similar circles around this time, attending conferences of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, said that Pappin and others drew Vance into dialogue online. “There was an active recruitment effort to find people of influence,” James M. Patterson, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Tennessee, told me. Vance’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Orbán’s government had a dismal relationship with the Biden administration, and during that period, it needed all the American help it could get. This included installing an American as head of an important foreign-policy institution. Pappin was just the American for the job.
The Hungarian Institute of International Affairs currently operates from an Art Nouveau palace with extravagant stone carvings in the diplomatic quarter of Budapest. The Russian embassy is just a few doors down; the embassies of Turkey, France, and Spain are nearby. Pappin’s arrival as president, in 2023, followed a reorganization of the institute, which was carved out of the foreign ministry and brought under the control of the prime minister’s office. Employees were shocked: Who was this American with a gold Rolex, who didn’t speak Hungarian, coming in to direct their research? At the time, officials at the American embassy were also perplexed, a former institute employee told me, recalling their question, “‘Is he just a figurehead or a real decision maker?’” When it became clear that Pappin was a decision maker, many senior figures at the institute left. “He provided a personal network to the government, and this network was more important than the analysis,” the former employee said.
Zoltán Kovács, a spokesperson for Orbán, told me that Pappin was brought in to refresh the methodology and ideology of the institute, praising the American’s shrewd assessments of Hungary’s opportunities as a small nation in a multipolar world. Pappin told me that he has tripled the size of the institute, whose staff now includes more than 60 people. He traveled widely in his role. In 2023, he posted a black-and-white photo of himself in China on Facebook with the caption “Shanghai noir?” He documented a visit to Doha, where Orbán met with the emir of Qatar. “Our delegation brought Hungary’s message of cooperation on energy security, and our urgent desire for peace in Ukraine,” Pappin wrote.
He seemed most comfortable as a contrarian, and his dissent from geopolitical orthodoxy made him a natural face of Hungary’s overtures to China. Hungary was the first EU country to sign onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and it has become a major destination for Chinese investment, especially in electric-vehicle manufacturing and battery production. “We view China not as a threat but as an opportunity,” Pappin said in an interview distributed by China’s state news agency. “The real risk is de-risking.” That approach has put Hungary at odds with other Western nations, including the United States, that have sought to reduce their dependency on Beijing. As recently as last year, Pappin has continued to take high-level meetings there, including with a senior Chinese foreign-policy adviser. Pappin told me, “Like the United States under the Trump administration, Hungary relates to each country according to its own national interest, and we discuss with counterparts all over the world—as I have done in the more than thirty countries I have visited in Asia, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa.”
His most important destination has been the United States, where he always receives a warm welcome from Vance. In 2024, Pappin visited Vance’s Senate office. A year later, the meeting took place in a more august environment. “Thanks for the West Wing welcome yesterday,” Pappin wrote on Facebook last February.
This month, voters in Hungary will deliver their verdict on Orbán, and on his investments in Trumpism. Pappin is a personification of all the work poured into the relationship, which has given Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million people, outsize significance in the MAGA mindset.
Last fall, Pappin flew on Orbán’s plane when the prime minister visited Washington, D.C., according to images posted on social media. He accompanied the prime minister to the small gathering at Vance’s residence. Not many foreign leaders get to have drinks in the vice president’s study. It helps to have Pappin around.
Orbán has notched gains from the relationship. Last fall’s visit was a success; Hungary won relief from U.S. sanctions on its purchase of Russian oil. But fuel prices are still elevated, as is the cost of food and housing. Purchasing power has fallen in recent years, and business confidence is weak. Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar, is running mostly on kitchen-table issues, capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the economy. Trumpism can’t help much there.
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The president's decision to wage war against Iran, meanwhile, is doing Orbán no favors. It’s destabilizing energy markets and undermining the prime minister’s argument to voters that he and his ally in the White House are trying to settle conflicts while other Western leaders clamor for war. Some of his supporters are still buying it. A family wearing red Make America Great Again caps at a recent Orbán rally in a suburb of Budapest told me that the leaders are similar because they’re both Christian and they both want peace. Addressing the crowd, Orbán made only a passing reference to the war, saying that conflict in the Middle East underscored the need for a steady hand. In a podcast interview with a Hungarian rapper, Dopeman, the prime minister said that he had been in Washington earlier this year as Trump was preparing military options against Iran. The president solicited his input, Orbán said, though he declined to divulge the substance of his counsel.
Pappin has said very little about the self-proclaimed “president of peace” dropping bombs on Iran. The Hungarian foreign-policy chieftain has turned his focus inward, using social media to lash out at journalists and malign Magyar as a “lunatic.” The attacks feel forced; he doesn’t seem like a natural keyboard warrior. In an essay he wrote in 2011 for a Harvard political-theory workshop, which was shared with me, Pappin remarks on the distancing effect of the digital world: “The virtual presents reality to us as a show, and we always stand slightly aloof.”
The observation recalls an insight from Hannah Arendt in her essay on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its brutal repression by the Red Army. Arendt wrote of the “stability of the totalitarian mind in the midst of the fictitious world provided for it.” Perhaps in the school of MAGA, or in its satellite campus in Budapest, it’s possible to anticipate Trump dissolving Congress and Melania ruling as queen. Perhaps it’s possible to look past China’s use of surveillance, forced labor, and torture. Perhaps it’s possible to believe that Orbán presides over a gleaming model of post-liberalism, instead of a poor and repressive country resembling the socialist regimes that Europeans toppled in the last century. But then reality intervenes.