Trump is using authoritarian tactics that were perfected by Viktor Orbán. But the Hungarian authoritarian leader’s defeat may also offer a road map for beating Trumpism.
President Donald Trump greets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 7, 2025.
(Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)
Last year, Hungary’s authoritarian Fidesz government tried to ram through Parliament a Transparency of Public Life Bill. Had it passed, the bill, modeled on Russian legislation outlawing so-called “foreign agent” organizations, would have allowed the government to criminalize any civil society organization or independent media outlet that in any way accepted, even unknowingly, foreign funds.
It proved a bridge too far. Hungarians protested in huge numbers. Behind the scenes, according to Hungarian analysts I have spoken with, even some of Viktor Orbán’s political pals balked at the legislation. Days before it was due to be rubber-stamped by the Fidesz-controlled legislature, the government abruptly pulled the bill. In hindsight, it marked the moment that Hungarians began to realize the power of an aroused, organized, and infuriated public and started to believe in the possibility that—despite the prime minister’s manipulation of the electoral system and despite his use both of state-run and oligarch-owned media as propaganda tools—Orbán could be voted out of office.
Last month, in one of the more extraordinary political developments in recent European politics, Orbán was, indeed, defeated. His opponents gained a parliamentary supermajority. Yet the dethroned Hungarian leader’s vision of an “illiberal democracy”—a fortress state within which the populist right could fight its culture wars and demonize its opponents as the enemy within all while an oligarchy looted the state and flouted the law—remains a potent one for MAGA here in the United States.
Even as Hungarians, beset by economic woes and increasingly marginalized within the European Union, overwhelmingly rejected Orbán, Trump and his henchmen are utilizing his tactics in the United States. Notably, they’re leaning into bogus claims of national security threats and “reverse discrimination” to target liberal and independent media outlets.
Witness the appalling Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision to sue The New York Times for hiring a non-white person to a real estate editor’s position instead of a white man. The lawsuit ludicrously assumes that the federal government is a better judge of editorial qualifications than the senior figures within a news organization. Moreover, for the past 18 months, the EEOC has been dialing back its enforcement of antidiscrimination laws protecting a range of discriminated-against groups, in particular the LGBTQ community, and has largely stopped pushing cases alleging discrimination against Black and brown Americans based on “disparate impact” arguments. In other words, when it comes to standing up for minorities, it is demanding a level of proof of intentional discrimination that largely sidesteps systemic issues and doesn’t consider historical barriers to full participation in the economy. But when it comes to standing up for allegedly discriminated-against whites, its threshold for action is far lower.
In January, Tanya Goldman, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women and Families, wrote, “This first year of the Trump Administration demonstrates what is at stake when a civil rights enforcement agency is weaponized to serve an anti-worker, anti-civil rights agenda. The EEOC was created to protect workers from discrimination. Today, it is being used to enable it.” In the months since, as the EEOC action against the Times shows, the trend has only accelerated.
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Of course, the authoritarian display of power against the Times isn’t occurring in a vacuum. The Pentagon is increasing its efforts to limit the independence of journalists covering the US military. This anti-democratic effort received a boost last week when a federal court of appeals allowed the Pentagon to temporarily reinstate the Pete Hegseth policy of mandating that journalists be chaperoned at all times by Pentagon minders while in the building.
One likely reason for the administration’s attacks on Pentagon reporters is that every time a government figures opens his or mouth about the Iran war, more Orwellian doublespeak spews forth, something that trained journalists should be able to identify.
To avoid having to go to Congress to request a vote authorizing a continuation of the war, Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the rest of the horsemen of this particular apocalypse are preposterously saying that the country is no longer at war and has downgraded Operation Epic Fury to Project Freedom.
In Rubio’s case, he made this clearly fictive statement while subbing for press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose maternity leave has given Trump the delicious opportunity to humiliate his underlings by making them rotate into Leavitt’s role. As acting press secretaries, they must publicly defend before the assembled media whatever Trumpian gobbledygook passes for public policy on a given day.
Meanwhile, Trump says that he may resume bombing of Iran at a more intense level than during Operation Epic Fury and that that country “has not yet paid a big enough price” for the last 47 years of theocratic rule. Yet in an era in which word definitions have become infinitely pliable, none of this means “war”—and those who argue otherwise can be slandered as being security risks and anti-American.
Now more than ever, it’s vital that the media hold the powerful to account. However, news outlets are rapidly closing—more than 130 newspapers were shuttered from late 2024 until October 2025 alone, according to the State of Local News Project—resulting in swaths of the country becoming news deserts, places that lack any local journalism and are reliant for news distribution on large corporate television and radio broadcasters or social media. At the same time, many of the surviving media outlets are now being subjected to oligarchic, Trump-friendly takeovers.
This week, CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, died at the age of 87. I don’t know what he thought of the likely takeover of his media creation by tech-billionaire and MAGA fan David Ellison, but I doubt he would have been happy about it.
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Turner envisioned a news network panoramic in scope and unafraid to talk truth to power, one in which news correspondents were willing to “sail on uncharted waters.” Instead, it is very possible that CNN will bend the knee like CBS News, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times have done. Over the past 18 months, these major media outlets have each chosen to make nice to Trump in the face of his authoritarian ambitions.
And yet, despite the money and effort being poured into creating a MAGA-friendly media ecosystem, Trump’s approval ratings continue to plunge in much the same way as did Orbán’s in the final months of his 16-year rule. Trump is now one of the most unpopular presidents in US history, and with gas prices continuing to surge, it’s hard to see how he reverses that. Come November, US voters, many of them apparently suffering from buyer’s remorse about their November 2024 votes, will have a chance to send Trump’s congressional enablers—though not, alas, Trump himself—packing. Trump saw Orbán’s rule as a model for remaking America. Instead, it is possible that the MAGA leader’s opponents will end up using the lessons from Hungary’s election as a template for how to kick a corrupt and tired oligarchy to the curb.
From illegal war on Iran to an inhumane fuel blockade of Cuba, from AI weapons to crypto corruption, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence.
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