A leader who voters rejected several years ago returns to power, largely thanks to discontent with the incumbent party’s economic performance. Almost immediately upon taking office, the leader launches a blitzkrieg designed to strengthen his personal grip on power. He claims unprecedented power over the budget, fires the leaders of government oversight agencies, and places vast policymaking power in the hands of an unelected wealthy ally. The opposition, divided and disorganized after electoral defeat, struggles to formulate an effective response as democracy begins to buckle.

The country I am describing is, of course, Hungary in 2010.

That year, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán returned to power after his defeat in 2002. He then launched an ambitious plan for turning a vibrant democracy into an authoritarian state, moving so swiftly to remove all formal checks on his power that few Hungarians truly understood how much power he was accruing. Judges and watchdogs were replaced with pliant cronies; his top allies took command of policymaking apparatus while developing tools for controlling the press.

The power Orbán had accrued in those early days made it possible for him to systematically and secretively erode the fairness of Hungarian elections in the coming years. By the time he was up for reelection in 2014, the opposition barely had a chance. In hindsight, the first year may have been the entire ballgame — even if no one quite knew it at the time.

I’ve spent the past week speaking with Hungarians and experts on Hungary, asking them to reflect on what happened then and offer advice to Americans today. For these observers, events in the US feel like déjà vu. One Hungarian, speaking anonymously for fear of career ramifications, warned Americans that they may see democracy slip away if they don’t act now.

“There’s no time for waiting and watching,” they said. “They can do so much — so much — counting on the fact that everyone is paralyzed.”

Yet my Hungarian sources also sounded a note of hope. When they look at Donald Trump, they see a leader with far less power than Orbán had in 2010. And when they look at the United States, they see a country with many more resources to resist an autocratic takeover than they had 15 years ago.

Orbán’s 2010 takeover depended crucially on his legislative dominance. His Fidesz party had a majority large enough to amend the Hungarian constitution at will. With that much power, it was easy for him to seize full control over the government in record time.

By contrast, Trump’s House majority is one of the narrowest in history. And in the Senate, the filibuster severely limits what Republicans can pass. The legislative balance of power situation forces Trump to rely on executive orders of dubious legality, creating a number of different ways to check his abuse of power (like lawsuits) that wouldn’t have worked in Hungary of 2010.

But democracy will not defend itself. If Americans don’t learn Hungary’s lessons — don’t appreciate that we are facing an extinction-level threat to democracy — we will surely live to regret it.

How Trump is following in Orbán’s footsteps

Orbán was first elected to be Hungary’s prime minister in 1998, serving until his conservative Fidesz party lost its majority in the 2002 elections. While he governed as a (mostly) normal center-right leader, it appears that defeat radicalized him.

He spent the next eight years developing extensive and detailed plans for consolidating power once returned to high office. The planning included hiring law firms to develop a policy blueprint for seizing control of the government once he was elected — a more detailed, aggressive version of Project 2025.

The 2010 election provided a perfect opportunity for him to turn these ideas into reality. The Hungarian economy was in shambles after the 2008 financial crisis — so bad, in fact, that it required an emergency $25 billion from the International Monetary Fund and others to avoid fiscal ruin — and the current prime minister was embroiled in scandal.

Much in the way that Trump and Elon Musk have seized control of an obscure but........

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