The Trump administration has begun a minority revolution in the United States.
It came to power without the support of the majority of American voters. It has transformed the political balance of the Supreme Court by appointing Brett Kavanaugh, whom a majority of Americans oppose.
The president has belittled this majority opposition by accusing anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators of being stooges of financier George Soros. The administration is undermining the media, which a majority of Americans trust, by labeling its reporting “fake news.”
On the foreign policy front, the president has soft-pedaled national security concerns about Russia, even though 60 percent of Americans believe that the Kremlin meddled in the last presidential election.
The Trump administration is now attempting to consolidate this minority revolution through undemocratic means. It is doubling down on the Republican Party’s previous efforts at voter suppression by purging voter rolls and engaging in racial gerrymandering. It is transforming the federal courts at all levels by pushing through appointments as quickly as possible in case Congress changes hands. And it is dismantling as much of the regulatory state as it can — in favor of big business — and shifting as much of the nation’s wealth to the rich before the majority can regain the political helm.
It’s not difficult to predict the future of this strategy. That’s because this agenda has already been successfully implemented.
In Hungary.
All of the principal features of the Trump revolution have already been pushed through in this small, central European country. Current Prime Minister Viktor Orban, like Donald Trump, was once a liberal. But he saw opportunity on the right side of the political spectrum and redefined himself accordingly.
Unlike Trump, Orban has always been a politician. He served as Hungary’s prime minister from 1998 to 2002, which served as his apprenticeship. The voters didn’t highly rate his performance and fired him after one term.
But Orban regained power in 2010 — with considerably more support than Trump has ever achieved — and has held onto it ever since. He has tried to concentrate as much power as possible into his own hands. Knowing that the judiciary represents an obstacle to that self-empowerment, Orban has forcibly remade the institution, running afoul of European Union norms and eliciting EU warnings. Trump and the Republican Party have no such external institution to flout in their transformation of the federal judiciary.
Orban has lashed out against another pillar of democracy: the free press. He has been stridently anti-immigrant. He has praised Vladimir Putin and openly patterned his illiberal democracy on the Russian model. He has accused the opposition of being stooges of George Soros.
No surprise, then, that Orban became the first foreign leader to endorse Trump’s run for the presidency.
It’s not far-fetched to imagine that Trump — or at least Trump’s advisers — have looked to Orban’s dismantling of the liberal state for inspiration. That’s what happened with Poland. In 2011, Polish politician Jaroslaw Kaczynski declared that one day he would make sure that “we will have Budapest in Warsaw.” Kaczynski’s party, Law and Justice, won in 2015 and has proceeded to do just that.
And now Trump is attempting to create Budapest in Washington.
Trump and Orban are not just pursuing similar revolutions separately. Unlike the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, Trump has cultivated warm ties with Orban. The State Department hasn’t criticized any of Orban’s anti-democratic moves. A. Wess Mitchell, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, visited Hungary last May to discuss closer cooperation on security issues.
The Hungarian government, to offset all the criticism it gets from Brussels, touts the Trump administration’s support of “our support for persecuted Christians, our economic achievements, and approach to illegal migration.”
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former top ideologist who called Orban “Trump before Trump,” has also visited Hungary and secured Orban’s support for his own anti-EU project.
Trump and Orban are lynchpins of a new Alt-Right International — along with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy and potentially Brazil — that wants to rewind all efforts at international cooperation to address human rights, migration, corruption and transparency. They can also count on the support of right-wing populist fellow travelers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Shinzo Abe’s Japan, Narendra Modi’s India, and Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines.
Trump would love to have the electoral mandate that Orban currently enjoys. But even without that majority support, Trump will still follow the Hungarian blueprint: consolidate political power, tilt the economic playing field toward his rich backers, undermine the press, capture the judiciary, and declare war on “politically correct” culture.
Welcome to Budapest on the Potomac.
