In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has proven exceptionally good at breaking things. The Department of Government Efficiency’s total demolition of USAID, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s depopulation of America’s public health agencies, the total chaos at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon — there is little doubt that the Trump team has accomplished policy vandalism at an unprecedented scale.

Amid this constant barrage, it can feel like Trump has been stunningly successful in achieving his aims. But when it comes to perhaps his administration’s most ambitious task — removing checks on Trump’s power, transforming democracy into something more like an authoritarian regime — the evidence suggests a surprisingly hopeful conclusion.

Trump is failing — at least, so far.

There is an established playbook for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state, used in countries ranging from India to Hungary. It requires a leader to:

• Remove formal limits on their own powers.
• Compromise independent power centers such as the press and courts.
• Win compliance with the new regime from social elites and the mass public.

Trump has attempted all of these things. He has taken actions, like unilaterally declaring an end to birthright citizenship, that clearly violate the Constitution. He has targeted alternative power centers, launching an investigation into a Democratic fundraising platform and threatening the press. He has imposed sanctions on prominent law firms and universities in a bid to force compliance, and he has sold it all to the public as evidence he’s getting things done.

Yet in each arena, Trump is facing effective and mounting pushback. He is routinely losing in court. He is failing to silence the media. And he is losing support among the elite as his poll numbers plummet.

This failure is, in large part, a result of his team’s errors. While their approach broadly resembled foreign authoritarians’, it was a poor copy at every level — a strategically unsound campaign, with poorly thought-out tactics that were executed incompetently.

“We should thank [our] lucky stars that Trump chose to do this in the most stupid way possible,” says Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who studies democratic backsliding.

None of this is to say that American democracy is safe. Never before has a president been so committed to breaking the constitutional order and seizing power. We do not know whether America’s democratic institutions will hold when the pressure has been mounting for years rather than months. But the events of the first 100 days give us reason to hope.

How to break a democracy

To understand what Trump is attempting — and why it’s failing — it’s helpful to understand how Viktor Orbán successfully demolished democracy in Hungary. This is not only because Orbán is perhaps the most effective modern elected autocrat, but also because there is good reason to believe that the Trump team is self-consciously borrowing elements of his strategy.

Orbán was prime minister of Hungary from 1998–2002, when he ruled as a mostly normal conservative in a country widely seen as a post-communist success story. But once out of power, he spent his time out of power developing a plan to secure total control — even consulting law firms about a legal power grab in the event that his Fidesz party won another election. When he returned to office in 2010, Orbán executed that plan flawlessly, turning Hungary from a reasonably stable and healthy democracy into the European Union’s only autocracy.

Orbán did not immediately or openly claim dictatorial powers. Instead, he made a blizzard of incremental moves — each one technical and confusing. Individually, these policies might not have seemed like a big deal. Together, they added up to a quietly comprehensive assault on democratic institutions and civil society.

Orbán’s first and most impactful moves targeted the guts of democratic society. He neutered the courts, forcing out unfriendly judges and replacing them with his cronies. He attacked the free press’ economic foundations, developing financial tools to force independent media to sell to government allies. He began the process of stacking the electoral deck by gerrymandering Hungarian electoral districts. And he did all of this quietly, through obscure legal tweaks and quiet abuses of regulatory powers that even sophisticated observers of Hungarian politics had trouble tracking.

The Trump administration has borrowed elements of the Hungarian approach. They’ve said so themselves: Key figures in the administration, ranging from Vice President JD Vance to Christopher Rufo,........

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