From the earliest days of Trump 1.0, as we came to appreciate in sick horror that the new president was taking hammer and tongs to the very foundations of our democracy, Hungary has stood as a cautionary tale.
As with Trump, and Putin, and most other modern-day autocrats, Orbán came to power (in fact, back to power) as Prime Minister in a legitimate election in 2010. He then proceeded to exploit and expand his powers. He stacked the judiciary, demonized dissenters, redrew electoral maps, took control of independent media. It was the sort of tyrannical spree that Trump can only dream of.
Orbán bent all the tools of government and civil society entirely to his will. Elections might happen, but Orbán’s control provided a near deadlock on the results. It was the sort of tyrannical spree that fuels Trump‘s dreams.
The concrete example of the strangulation of democracy in Hungary caused many to sound the alarm bell for the United States. As the founders well knew, democracies are fragile, and they can’t last forever. Trump’s unchecked excesses forced us to consider whether we were experiencing the beginning of the end of the U.S. democratic experiment.
Today, the intoxicating dawn after an overwhelming public uprising so forceful that even the tyrant’s tools of manipulation could not oppose it, we again look to Hungary—no longer as a cautionary but rather an inspiring tale. Led by Péter Magyar, the opposition won in a landslide.
It happened there, and it can happen here.
Take a beat or two to revel in the historic development.
But that’s enough. Because now, we need to bring lessons home to the United States and our own ruthless would-be tyrant. And here the picture becomes more complicated. Heartening but complicated.
One set of lessons is buoying. In many ways, the people of Hungary faced longer odds of prying their society back from a tyrant’s grip than we do.
First, Orbán had 16 years to consolidate power; Trump is just over a year into his second term, which was preceded by four years of democratic restoration under Biden. By the time Magyar ran against him, Orbán controlled the judiciary, the media—476 outlets under a single Fidesz-aligned foundation—the universities, the bureaucracy, the advertising markets. He’d rewritten the constitution in nine days without public input, packed the constitutional court, and gerrymandered the electoral map so thoroughly that Hungary became the first EU member to drop from “free” to “partly free” in Freedom House rankings.
Trump, in his second term, is working hard to replicate this authoritarian domination, but he is years behind where Orbán was when he finally fell.
Second, Hungary is embedded in the EU, which provides an external check on raw authoritarianism. The European Union sanctioned Hungary, withheld funds, passed Article 7 proceedings, and maintained an independent legal framework that Orbán could not fully escape. The United States has no equivalent external structure. There is no supranational body that can withhold funding from a rogue American administration or guarantee the independence of its courts. We are, in that sense, operating without a net.
Third, Orbán enjoyed the strong support of two of the three most powerful authoritarians in the world—Trump and Vladimir Putin. Trump’s public cheerleading was relentless, and we can only guess for now to what extent that was supplemented with behind-the-scenes efforts to influence the outcome. Trump sent JD Vance to Budapest the week before the election to rally Orbán’s base. The Kremlin reportedly stationed an intelligence team in Budapest to amplify Fidesz’s social media campaign.
Fourth, Orbán had to contend with an actual loyal opposition in parliament. Hungary, even in its degraded democratic state, still had a legislative check. Magyar had a platform, a seat in the European Parliament, and a place to organize. The American Congress—the body that should have checked Trump on so many of his extra-constitutional assertions of power—has been completely asleep at best, at worst, utterly complicit.
Moreover, Orbán used his near-dictatorial power to deploy a full bag of dirty tricks during the campaign. As noted, Hungarian journalist Bogáta Timár wrote Monday, “[t]he regime played dirty. Magyar was harassed and provoked constantly. His phone was tapped with military spy software. His girlfriend turned out to be a Fidesz agent. AI slop was generated about him and fed to voters on the daily. Russian agents helped create smear campaigns against him.”
Fifth, and in my view most important, the United States’s democratic roots are far, far deeper and stronger than Hungary’s. Magyar stood on a far less solid foundation. Hungary occupies a region that for the last 100 years has seen endless regime change. Virtually nobody in Eastern Europe over 40 has come of age in a consistently democratic society. Nobody in the United States hasn’t.
From primary school, we grow up pledging allegiance to liberty and justice for all. It’s taken time, but especially with the naked horrors of the immigration crackdown, Americans have begun to reject Trump’s assault on democratic rule and fidelity to the Constitution. As Trump takes us to the precipice, the American people increasingly have come to recognize the broader stakes of his authoritarian turn. The steep price of gas is surely a component of Trump’s plummeting ratings, but so are his naked attacks on constitutional rule, especially when they take place in citizens’ backyards. That is the deepest difference of all, and ultimately the most consequential.
Now on to a few considerations that should prompt sobriety, or at least persuade us that we can’t in any way ease up on the opposition to Trump. In considering the applicability of what happened in Hungary to our own circumstances, it is well to keep three points in mind.
First, with the possible exception of the ultimate vanity project of the East Wing, no project has dominated Trump’s focus—and that of the strategic leaders of MAGA like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon—more than the plan to acquire, piece by piece, the means to steal a close election.
From the indictment in Fulton County, to the demands to the states to turn over voter data, to the ridiculous executive order on elections, to the notorious SAVE Act that Trump calls his number one legislative priority, Republicans are in the process of assembling unfair or illegal advantages in advance—to be called into action depending on when and how they’re needed in the wake of an election. Everything Trump tried to bluster and bully his way to in the wake of his loss in 2020—such as the shakedown of the Georgia Secretary of State because he “just needs 11,780 votes”—he is now seeking to put in the Republicans’ asset column in advance, exploiting his current power in new and dishonest ways. The idea is to have the cards up their sleeve already when it’s time to play them. Maricopa County razor thin? Deploy the data to claim ineligible voters swung it. Fulton County nip and tuck? Comb through the boxes of seized material for the basis of a fraud claim.
The lesson and the caveat are identical: by far the most effective way to overcome these many efforts is a decisive outcome at the polls that leaves no room for the nitpicking and sowing of chaos that Trump exploited everywhere after the 2020 election. And here Magyar’s blueprint for victory is phenomenal—but in the hyper-polarized political environment of the United States, a blowout may be difficult to replicate.
Second, and relatedly, the enormity of the victory forced Orbán to concede. It immediately disabled any of the corrupt tools he was prepared to deploy. He had no maneuvering room and could do nothing but offer what looked like a gracious concession. With Trump, there is no guarantee that such a concession would come, even in the face of overwhelming defeat.
As elections lawyer extraordinaire Marc Elias points out, Orbán walked to a microphone within three hours and said, in effect, the voters have spoken—he accepted that elections are real. Trump has spent six years, at enormous personal and institutional cost, teaching his followers that they are not, unless he wins. Without election denialism, there is no Trumpism. Which means that even if Trump gets trounced in the midterms, or if he somehow manages to mount an unconstitutional presidential bid in 2028, there will be no gracious concession speech on the banks of the Potomac. Absent a huge margin of victory—and perhaps even with one—we should expect the full apparatus of subversion. The Trump faithful have been preparing for this undermining of democratic rule for too long to just go home. A far more likely prospect is that the battle not end on election night.
The riposte here is that Elias, and armies of literally thousands of lawyers, are also fully engaged in ground exercises in preparation for the Republicans’ brass-knuckles tactics. With truth on their side, you have to like their chances.
Third, and this is the critical point—one that applies with equal force in Hungary—the exultation of victory has to give way to the sobriety of governing.
History offers a warning that Hungary’s own past makes vivid. Putin, too, spent years in the wilderness before returning. The opposition that ousts an autocrat often inherits an economic catastrophe deliberately left behind. Orbán leaves Hungary with the slowest-growing economy in the region and the most corrupt country in the EU—a fiscal mess some analysts suspect he is happy to bequeath while he plots his comeback. Magyar has a super majority and a mandate. But as with Trump in exile, Orbán remains a formidable force. And the election did not vitiate his control of large parts of the bureaucracy, judiciary, and media.
All that means that the new majority must bring the same resolve and unity to governance as it did to ousting Orbán. That’s always a taller order.
This falls in the category, I realize, of we should have such problems, but we will need to have the same discipline when the day arrives that Trump is stripped of his power to eviscerate constitutional rule. The burgeoning opposition to Trump will need to see his ouster as the starting point in a new struggle—to govern, and to prevent the opposition, most of which won’t be going anywhere, from regaining the same sort of foothold that drove Trump to his two improbable victories.
None of that should diminish what happened Sunday night on the banks of the Danube—on both the Buda side and the Pest side, because the crowd was so enormous it lapped over. Young Hungarians standing where their grandparents once chanted against Soviet occupation, now chanting: “Europe, Europe, Europe.” Not to mention “Russians, go home”—the same words their grandparents used in 1956 when Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest to crush a democratic revolution.
Writing in The Atlantic Sunday night, with her characteristic trenchancy, Anne Applebaum put her finger on the most important thing that Orbán’s landslide defeat destroys: the assumption of inevitability. The MAGA movement, like Orban’s authoritarian project, has always depended on the belief that liberalism is effete and washed up, and that the tide of history is with illiberal populism. Orbán’s loss shatters that story.
It happened there, and it can happen here.
On June 26, 1963, John F. Kennedy stood in West Berlin, surrounded by a city divided by a wall, and told a crowd of hundreds of thousands that freedom is indivisible — that an attack on liberty anywhere is a threat to liberty everywhere. It was a signal moment in the post-World War II battle between democracy and authoritarianism.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” he said. I am a Berliner.
Sunday night, watching the crowds along the Danube reclaim their country from a man who spent 16 years with his boot on their neck, it strikes me that this week, at least, we can all echo Kennedy:
“Mindannyian magyarok vagyunk.”
We are all Hungarians.
Talk to you later.
Wow Harry. You were in the zone for this one. Thank you for expressing jubilation, caution, and preparation for the current and future days. I found your formatting elegant.
I'm cross-posting and posting everywhere.
A big part of the Republican's work since the 1980's has bee laying groundwork - packing the lower courts, local and state elections, tweaking laws. Democrats have had a slow start in too many of these arenas, but there is still - and always - time to do the same. Elect people to all levels of government and power - from your city, county and state; school boards, town councils, sheriffs, judges - who believe in the promise of the constitution and our Democracy. These are our safety nets.