California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis warned attendees at a Democratic fundraiser that there's a lot to be learned by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's positive namecheck of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at last week's presidential debate. One of those things is that he helped inspire Project 2025, a right-wing playbook developed by many of Trump's former officials who served in his first term.
That and how to win elections in the aftermath of both the insurrection after the 2020 election and the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade two years later, were on the agenda at the Emilys List San Francisco luncheon at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in the Financial District on September 13, which also featured Mayor London Breed, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan (who serves under Governor Tim Walz, running mate to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris), and other Democratic women. Emilys List is a political action committee founded in 1985 to help elect Democratic women who support abortion rights to public office.
Kounalakis was ambassador to Hungary, the former Warsaw Pact nation, from 2010 to 2013, before she became the first woman lieutenant governor of California. She is running to succeed Governor Gavin Newsom in 2026 when he is termed out, as are a number of women, including lesbian state Senator Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), who formerly served as president pro tem of the legislative body.
Kounalakis pointed to Trump's difficulty adjusting to a presidential race with Vice President Harris atop the ticket instead of President Joe Biden, who dropped his reelection effort in July and endorsed Harris. Emilys List endorsed Harris the day she entered the presidential race.
"As he is sinking down and falling apart, he starts grasping for straws and, somehow out of the air, he pulls his No. 1 validator — Viktor Orbán?" Kounalakis said of Trump, to laughter from attendees.
Indeed, during the debate with Harris Trump said of Orbán, "he's a tough person, smart prime minister of Hungary," and "Look, Viktor Orban said it: He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president."
Orbán, who first served as prime minister from 1998-2002 and has been in the role for a second stint since 2010, has curtailed freedom of the press, weakened the independence of the judiciary, and undermined elections, according to Freedom House's 2024 Freedom in the World report. He's also an opponent of LGBTQ rights and has restricted access to abortion. Though Hungary is a NATO member, he made a surprise visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, as part of his pledge to "Make Europe Great Again," according to the Associated Press.
Kounalakis said that during her tenure as ambassador she "spent a lot of time with Viktor Orbán and, as it turns out, because I was in Budapest [the capital] last summer, relations with that country are so frayed that the current ambassador has not in two years even met Viktor Orbán. He won't meet with him."
David Pressman, Biden's ambassador to Hungary, is gay, and is a boogeyman to Hungary's right-wing, the New York Times reported, which has accused him of meddling in the country's internal affairs.
"He's there, his husband and their children, this beautiful family, and he is regularly subjected to the most horrible allegations — in fact, I don't even want to repeat them but you can imagine — just terrible, terrible personal attacks," Kounalakis said. "I grew very, very fond of the Hungarian people during my years there and it is so sad to see what has happened to that country."
Project 2025
Project 2025 is a right-wing initiative to consolidate power in the executive branch of the federal government should Trump win the 2024 presidential election and return for a second term. The project seeks to impart government policy with conservative Christian viewpoints and reclassify civil service workers as political appointees loyal to the president. Federal agencies like the FBI and the Justice Department would no longer be independent under the plan. Critics charge the proposal is autocratic and its implementation would undermine the separation of powers and the separation of church and state.
Kounalakis tied Orbán's ideology and personal corruption to Trump's. In May, a civil jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. The case stemmed from Trump's falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal with porn star Stormy Daniels that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign.
"Viktor Orbán rolled in with a plan, and that plan is to roll back democracy, strip away checks and balances, consolidate power in his hands, reach into the private sector and basically take over the economy and all of the access to commercial success for himself, his family, his daughter, her husband, his college roommate — they basically own the country — and do it at the expense of the people who they vilify, whether it's the LGBTQ community, whether it's the Jewish community, whether it's the Roma community, and frankly whether it's rolling back rights of women," Kounalakis said.
"It's incredibly sad and the fact that it's basically the plan that he came in with as the precursor to the [Project] 2025 plan. It's the same guys who took this playbook of patriarchal autocracy and wrote this 2025 plan. That is not going to happen in the United States of America," she added.
Trump has said he knows nothing about Project 2025, despite his formal officials being involved. The anti-LGBTQ Heritage Foundation and many other conservative organizations have led the effort in developing the document.
Other speakers
A fellow Californian, Breed spoke earlier in the program about the stakes in the election for reproductive freedom. Trump did not commit to vetoing a national ban on abortion, after his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance said he would.
"We will never, ever, ever take our reproductive freedom for granted," the mayor said. "Even in San Francisco we have Prop O on the ballot to make sure no matter what happens in this race we make it clear where we stand as a city — that we're not going back."
Proposition O, on the city's November ballot, would establish a fund that could receive private donations in case federal Title X funding for birth control is cut. It also requires that crisis pregnancy centers inform visitors that they don't provide comprehensive reproductive care, and that they inform visitors where they can access such services.
Crisis pregnancy centers are ostensibly health clinics, but work to discourage people from accessing abortion.
"Even here in San Francisco we have crisis pregnancy centers that provide false information and they don't provide reproductive care, comprehensive reproductive care," Breed said. "They're putting up illusions."
Breed was followed by Lujan Grisham, the New Mexico governor. She said protecting abortion access was the main focus of her successful reelection campaign in 2022.
"I ran on a single issue in a Catholic state," she said. "What do you think that issue was? I did no mail, no calls, no radio, and no TV that wasn't about abortion. All of it. And let me tell you it made a lot of people in my state very uncomfortable, including, not Emilys List, but a lot of consultants because I was the first candidate, as I understand it, in America, to do a single issue. ... Truth is this is an issue that has always resonated with women and their families because it is about equality, it is about saving women's lives."
Money she set aside in a 2022 executive order is being used to build an abortion clinic for people traveling from neighboring states where it is illegal, the Dallas Morning News reported.
"We just hit the ground running — a $10 million primary care, reproductive care clinic — and, I'm going to build more," she said. "We are putting up billboards and advertising in states like Texas that if you're a provider, how would you like to provide that care in a state that recognizes your right to provide patient care with no government interference. You want the right to do that? Then move to New Mexico."
She said that 71% of the abortion care services New Mexico provides are for Texan women.
"Another 7%-8% are women from Oklahoma and other states," she continued. "Just to put it in perspective how desperate they are."
Minnesota's Flanagan, who is Native American, provided a first-hand perspective of working with Walz. With a slim majority of Democratic control in both houses of the Legislature, the state was able to get an abortion rights bill through, along with other progressive policies, such as a child tax credit, and universal school meals.
She contrasted Walz with past Democratic administrations.
"When we had a Democratic trifecta [in 2013] folks were playing not to lose instead of playing to win," she said. "So a decade later ... we decided to run as hard and as fast as we could because we didn't make it a secret what we were going to do, that we were going to protect access to abortion, we were going to pass things like paid medical leave. ... The secret is just do the work, just do the damn thing you tell people you're going to do."
Flanagan was joined on stage by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a lesbian and Republican-turned-Democrat who won the role of top prosecutor of the Grand Canyon State by only 280 votes in 2022.
Arizona, which Biden won in 2020, was one of the states where Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump allies mounted a pressure campaign asking the state's house speaker Rusty Bowers to toss the election results, as Bowers testified before Congress' January 6 committee.
"American democracy runs through the state of Arizona," Mayes said. "For those of you who are invested in Arizona, thank you, thank you, thank you."
Mayes said that she joined other attorneys general in speaking with Harris about the fentanyl crisis.
"She used to be the attorney general of California," she said. "So honestly, the two people in the room who knew the most about that issue were me and Kamala Harris, and she was ready for that meeting and so I believe her when she says to America 'I will attack this fentanyl crisis, I will deal with the border,' unlike Donald Trump."
Mayes said she successfully fended off attempts, after the Supreme Court decision invalidating Roe, to implement an 1864 state ban on abortion — long enough at least for the Legislature to pass its own modern legislation.
"It was horrifying," she said about the June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and the subsequent revelation of the old state ban. "Doctors on a nightly basis in emergency rooms had conversations in Arizona with their lawyers. Can you imagine?"
The final member of the panel was Congressmember Andrea Salinas (D-Oregon), who said discussions with Latina women brought out that women need pregnancy health care across the board.
"The Latina community is definitely not a monolith. I was raised Catholic but I have a family where my sister experienced an abortion, needed an abortion, when she was younger, but we had those conversations and we asked Latinas 'what is that you want in addition to abortion?'" Salinas said. "They wanted care, they wanted preconception care, prenatal care, safe labor and delivery care, they wanted postpartum care, and they weren't getting it."
LGBTQ Agenda is an online column that appears weekly. Got a tip on queer news? Contact John Ferrannini at [email protected]
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