In a televised discussion with his jack-of-all-trades Sean Hannity — okay, fine, “interview” — Donald Trump said something revealing about Hungarian reactionary Viktor Orbán. “They say he’s a strong man,” Trump mused. “Sometimes you need a strong man.”

Trump’s love for Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” is well-documented. But the reasoning he chose is uncomfortably candid.

American liberal intellectuals have long feared Orbán’s regime because it represents a plausible staging post on the road from democracy to autocracy. Orbán is hardly a dictator. What he has done is use state power to erect nearly insurmountable obstacles for his opposition. Orbán’s party has ruthlessly manipulated elections to give itself a massive advantage. He has turned the state into a control machine for his party, doled out favors to corporations that support him, and punished critics. Using similar methods, Orbán has ensured that the major media outlets are all owned by his allies, creating a vast and largely unchallenged propaganda apparatus.

The American conservative line on Orbán’s government, chillingly, is that it is not autocratic at all. Elections are still being held, and if Orbán is a little rough with his enemies, is that any different from what American liberals have done here, with their control of media, culture, and schools? “Whatever his corruption, Viktor Orbán could lose the next election if the divided opposition remains united,” Ross Douthat argued, “But where can you go to vote for a different ruling ideology in the interlocking American establishment, all its schools and professional associations, its consolidated media and tech powers?”

Their justifications for Orbánism are the clearest sign that they will accept or even welcome Trump in a second term, as he uses state power to intimidate the opposition. He has many methods at his disposal, from deploying troops against peaceful protesters, to pardoning violent paramilitary shock troops, to retaliating against the owners of independent media (something Trump actually did in his first term).

But the conservative rationalizations for Orbánism at least deny that Orbánism is authoritarian. Trump doesn’t even bother to go along with the pretense. The standard conservative line is that Orbán is good, but it’s a smear campaign to call him a strongman. Trump says he’s good because He is a strong man.

The reason Trump is not participating is that he does not subscribe to the idea that democracy is important and he cannot understand it.

Trump does not mentally categorize regimes as democratic or undemocratic. Instead, he categorizes them as rulers who strong or weak. He admires dictators because they are strong. If he could criticize a dictator, it would be for showing weakness in the face of dissidents. (Trump in 1989: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost ruined it. They were mean then, they were terrible, but they crushed it with force. That shows how powerful force is. Our country is now seen as weak.”)

Trump has held this belief in various guises for decades. He applies it to every administration, regardless of its ideological character. American conservatives admire Orbán because they see him as an ally in the culture war, but Trump is just as happy to praise murderous dictators who run Marxist-Leninist regimes.

Republicans are especially committed to ignoring the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and explaining away what they can’t ignore. Trump continues to make their job harder by blurting out his real beliefs.