Is This His Guidebook?

I have to wonder where is Trump getting all his evil ideas? It from Putin whispering in his ear? Or is it from other dictators? Because I don’t think Trump is smart enough to think of it on his own.

America’s Future Is Hungary

MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

The Atlantic

By Anne Applebaum

May 2025

Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Gee does all this sound familiar? Is this where we are heading? To the bottom of the dung heap?

Hungary was taken over by a “strongman” who took over like Trump did but Viktor Orbán did it in 2010 when he started his second term. Since then he has wrecked the political system, bullied the media, and appointed his cronies to the courts. Hmm… sounds like Trump’s playbook doesn’t it?

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

Getting chills up your spine yet?

This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies. Orbán talks a lot about blocking immigration, for example, but at one point his government issued visas to any non-EU citizen who bought 300,000 euros’ worth of government bonds from mysterious and mostly offshore companies.

He rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Forget Mein Kampf! This is the new Twenty-First Century version complete with social media.

Hungary’s transformation into an ‘electoral autocracy’ has parallels to Trump’s second term

AP News

By  JUSTIN SPIKE and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

February 15, 2025

Hours before President Donald Trump was sworn in to begin his second term, promising a “golden age” for America, the leader of a Central European country was describing the years ahead in strikingly similar terms.

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said Trump’s return would usher in Hungary’s own “golden age” and mark the “collapse” of liberal democracy.

The messaging overlap was no surprise.

Orbán’s strongman style has long served as an inspiration for U.S. conservatives, who have looked at Hungary as a possible model for a right-wing America with less immigration, fewer regulations and the removal of democratic constraints they see as unwieldy or inconvenient.

So is Trump taking instructions from Putin and Orbán? It is almost like a conspiracy of dictators coaching one another!

Orbán has formed a close bond with Trump and has made multiple visits to the president’s Florida resort. This week, the prime minister praised Trump’s unilateral outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine. During one of last year’s U.S. presidential debates, Trump praised Orbán as “a strong man. He’s a tough person.”

I don’t know about you but I don’t get a warm-fuzzy feeling about this!

Orbán used state power to crush rivals, remake the judiciary and game elections to make it much harder to oust his party. He has cracked down on LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, the media and civic organizations.

Just this week Trump issued elections reforms by executive order! The Brennan Center writes…

A coalition of voting rights organizations filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge President Trump’s unlawful executive order on voting that attempts to seize the power to set voter registration rules from Congress and the states, and doing so in a way that would violate federal law and the Constitution if carried out by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Key provisions of Trump’s order could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, particularly voters of color, women voters, naturalized citizens, voters with disabilities, voters with low incomes, and first-time voters.

The Constitution specifies that Congress and the states can set the rules for our elections, not the President. On March 27, several of the groups also sent a letter to the EAC urging them not to take action in response to key provisions in the executive order, as doing so would violate federal law.

Late last month Trump attacked the law firms that filed cases against him in an effort to intimidate the legal system, he has threatened to impeach judges that ruled against him, VOX wrote,

Their democracy died. They have lessons for America about Trump’s power grab.

Hungarians who lived through Viktor Orbán’s 2010 power grab warn Americans: Act now, before it’s too late.

by Zack Beauchamp

Feb 5, 2025

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.

[…]

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 the thing is the Republicans in Congress are gutless… they worry about Musk throwing millions of dollars against them, they worry about Trump’s wrath instead of the Constitution and the people of our country.

We still have time but the sand is running down... they talk about the elections the other day being a wakeup call for Trump because the elections were so close. But I say it has to be a wakeup call for us! We lost, I don't care how close it was this time... we lost! The MAGA block is untied in tearing down the country, they hate LGBTQ+ people, they hate immigrants, they the government and they want to make it into a fascist nation to punish us and everyone else who is not White, evangelical Christian, and straight. And if you look at Hungary that is exactly where they are now!

So be scared and hope that the courts can stop him!!!!!