In March 2024, Donald Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. After years of receiving praise and pilgrimages from the American right, the autocrat had begun appearing at conservative events in the U.S. Instead of visiting the White House to see then-President Joe Biden, Orbán spoke at the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 — before heading to Florida. “He’s a non-controversial figure," Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago upon Orbán's arrival, "because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”
Trump loves that.
Orbán's Hungarian regime has often been characterized as modern authoritarianism or a "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," one in which power is accumulated by the ruling party over time through creative quasi-legal means. He focused on transforming institutions by changing election laws, allowing him to create legislative supermajorities while winning a mere plurality of the vote. He packed the courts with loyalists, found friendly oligarchs to buy up independent media and took over universities — or forced them to close down. He hammered on culture war issues of immigration, nationalism and family values.
Observers have seen these methods as the way to perpetuate a soft-authoritarianism, enacted smoothly without the violence that authoritarian governments have traditionally employed to quell opposition and consolidate power. The right-wing intelligentsia has seemed to see this as a kind of respectable fascism — without all the 20th century unpleasantness with which the term is associated.
I doubt that Donald Trump has studied Orbán's strategy. He doesn't study anything. Since his temperament is dictatorial by nature, much of his agenda is naturally autocratic. But people around Trump have certainly scrutinized Orbán's methods, and they seem to have convinced Trump to import the Hungarian model to the U.S.
Over the past five months, the Trump administration has moved quickly, using "shock and awe" to stun the opposition and enact as much of their agenda as they can, as fast as they can. As Hungarian political scientist Peter Kreko told NPR, "I think Trump went further in two months than Orbán could in 15 years. In the United States, it reminds me of a constitutional coup, where everything happens very rapidly."
The American right knows that Trump hasn't got that kind of time, and it's entirely possible that, once he's gone, the MAGA coalition will break apart. It is, after all, as much a cult of personality as it is a political movement.
For his part, it appears Trump has no interest in "soft authoritarianism" or merely marginalizing his opposition. We have heard testimony from people in his first term who had to talk him down from shooting protesters and deploying the military in the streets of American cities. This time around, Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration's draconian deportation plan, has found a way to let Trump be Trump — to use the massive police power at, and sometimes beyond, his disposal to force his opposition to its knees.
Trump has effectively turned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency into a secret police force that abducts people off the streets and transports them to unknown locales, including at least one foreign black site prison. These kidnappings have been targeted in areas run by the president's political opponents and rely on openly confrontational tactics designed to produce a backlash in order to justify militarizing American cities. And if that's not enough to make his point, this weekend Trump is staging a military parade through the streets of Washington.
This week, his hand-picked U.S. Attorney (and former personal lawyer and assistant) in New Jersey indicted a sitting congresswoman for allegedly "impeding law enforcement" when she was attempting to conduct oversight at an immigration detention center. Yesterday, California's senior senator, Alex Padilla, was tackled, pushed face-first to the ground and handcuffed for attempting to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a press conference following her chilling declaration that the federal government would not be removing the National Guard and the Marines from Los Angeles.
"We are not going away," Noem said. "We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on the country and what they have tried to insert into the city."
Noem's explanation for the crackdown defied logic. Despite Padilla announcing who he was, and despite the fact that Noem has testified before his Senate committee, she claimed nobody knew who he was and that she thought she was being threatened. Republican members of Congress, as well as right-wing media personalities and members of the administration, quickly took to parroting Noem.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson actually called for Padilla's censure while Republican Senate Majority leader John Thune said he's "gathering information." Maine Sen. Susan Collins found it "disturbing" and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski said it was "shocking on every level." Padilla told MSNBC that a couple of other Republican colleagues had texted him personally but haven't spoken out publicly. A few other GOP colleagues are condemning him for being inappropriate.
“If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question," Padilla said afterwards, "you can only imagine what they’re doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers.”
What's happening in Los Angeles — and now, in the rest of the country — is clearly not about protests. It's not even simply about immigration and mass deportations. That would be horrible enough. Now, members of the opposition — duly elected Democratic politicians — are being brought to heel, arrested and roughed up. The administration has been so effective at flooding the zone, and we are becoming so anesthetized to its threats and violence, that we have seemingly moved on from this fact: The President of the United States publicly called for the arrest of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
This isn't Viktor Orbán's modern autocracy, all clean and shiny. It's something worse: good old-fashioned 20th-century fascism, as dirty and ugly as it ever was.
