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Hungary Just Showed How to Kick Out a Strongman

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.

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........

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