Trump Has Taken Only Months to Accomplish the Level of Authoritarian Consolidation That Took Orbán and Modi Years
But America's aversion to tyranny gives it a much better chance of restoring its liberal democracy than their countries
Dear Readers,
Two weeks ago, I participated in a panel at the Center for New Liberalism’s annual New Liberal Action Summit. Joining me were Francis Fukuyama of American Purpose, Claire Ainsley, former policy chief for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Art Eggleton, former mayor of Toronto and Canadian MP. Moderated by CNL founder Jeremiah Johnson, we took stock of the crisis facing liberal democracy around the world and discussed how we should respond.
My charge was to assess how much trouble the United States is in, but our conversation ranged widely—covering where the liberal left went wrong, why it is losing the messaging war, and the role immigration has played in powering the populist right.
Below, you’ll find my remarks adapted as an essay.
Shikha Dalmia
Editor-in-Chief
There are two main counts on which one can assess how much trouble a democracy is in: Where it stands on the democracy-autocracy spectrum, and how quickly it got there. If we compare three backsliding democracies—Hungary, India (my native country), and the United States (my adopted country)—Hungary and India look worse on the first count, but the U.S. looks much worse on the second.
In the 2025 Freedom House rankings, Hungary and India are nearly tied at 65 and 63 respectively, rated “partly free”—a dramatic drop from 2009 when both were ranked as free. That India shares Hungary’s score is surprising. India is a mature democracy with 75 years of democratic rule, while Hungary only became democratic after being freed from the Iron Curtain in 1990.
The 2025 Freedom House scores were calculated before Donald Trump returned to office, so the United States still gets 83. We will see how much America’s score drops when the 2026 report is released. But if it dropped 10 points—hardly inconceivable—it would still rank higher than Hungary or India, suggesting that it is in less trouble than these other countries.
But speed matters.
The sad and shocking reality is that the authoritarian consolidation that took Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi eight or so years to accomplish (India’s 2009 Freedom House score was 77, Hungary’s was a whopping 90), Trump has accomplished in eight months. This is a remarkable feat given that America’s 249-year-old institutions, despite erosion and weakening over time, were still the strongest in the world when he took office.
One crude metric of an overweening president is how many executive orders he or she issues. Trump has signed approximately 220 executive orders in his first 10 months, just about 50 less than the number Obama signed over two terms. Biden issued 162 in four years.
The pattern common to all three countries is that authoritarian consolidation accelerated after their aspiring autocrats returned to power with more convincing electoral victories than the first time around.
Orbán’s Fidesz Party won a two-thirds parliamentary majority in 2010 when he returned. Modi gained seats in 2019 and secured control of both houses in his second term. Last year, Trump won the popular vote along with the Electoral College. Critically, he enjoys unified Republican control of government and the Supreme Court. So the stars aligned for a man lacking an inner moral compass to be maximally destructive.
The UnPopulist’s Executive Watch tracker, launched in February to document the misuse and abuse of executive power in Trump’s second term, shows that America’s descent into autocracy hasn’t stabilized after an initial rush—it has accelerated. Orbán paced himself, enacting roughly one radical action per year. Trump is flooding the zone. His operating motto is that what is not stopped is allowed. He deliberately engages in rampant unconstitutional and illegal acts and then dares the other branches of government to act against him. But given that these branches are either in his pocket or too weak, he is getting away with a level of destruction of governing norms and institutions never seen in American history. Make no mistake: we are witnessing is an authoritarian revolution.
Let’s compare Orbán’s record in the first few years after he returned to office with Trump’s first few months since he reentered the Oval Office.
2011: Orbán used his supermajority to change Hungary’s constitution and reduce judicial power while giving his party an edge.
Trump: pressured the spineless Senate to rubber-stamp a Cabinet of rogues and loyalists; handed over the keys of the federal government to Elon Musk, who—without even being formally appointed as a government employee—used DOGE to remake the government, firing employees and starving agencies in defiance of congressional designs. He eviscerated Congress’s power of the purse. OMB Director Russ Vought has come up with the clever trick of pocket rescission to permanently eliminate programs that he was previously merely trying to kill via financial starvation, again in total violation of congressional intent, essentially thumbing his nose at Article I of the Constitution. Article I can’t be formally scrapped so they are hollowing it out.
2012: Orbán passed the Media Law and placed state and private media under a government-appointed council.
Trump: has repeatedly attacked the media, filed defamation lawsuits against major news outlets, and sought to use regulatory power to punish critical coverage—for instance, by pressuring the Justice Department and FCC during network merger reviews. To obtain regulatory approval to merge with Skydance, Paramount agreed to appoint an ombudsman to review “bias complaints” by a right-winger with no media experience, a naked attempt to influence newsroom culture. Trump has openly called for comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel to be taken off the air. And that doesn’t even count the outlets, such as The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, that engaged in “anticipatory obedience”—subtly adjusting their coverage to avoid becoming direct targets.
2013: Orbán implemented the Act on the Election of Members of Parliament of Hungary that gerrymandered the country and diminished the number of parliamentary seats to concentrate power and give his party an edge before the 2014 election. He also allowed Hungarians abroad to vote because they tend to be pro-Fidesz.
Trump: has pressured red states to aggressively gerrymander to affect the outcome of the 2026 elections. In addition, he is trying to: get Nebraska to switch to a winner-take-all electoral vote system from its current proportional representation one; implement Voter ID laws to depress Black and Hispanic turnout; ban the counting of ballots received after Election Day. Needless to say, all these actions are designed to give Republicans an edge. How far he’ll go to rig the 2026 midterm election where Republicans are widely expected to lose seats is anyone’s guess. At this stage, anything is possible for a man who attempted an insurrection to keep himself in power the last time he lost.
2014: Orbán declared he’d remake Hungary as an “illiberal democracy”—his words—modeled on Russia and Turkey.
Trump: has been ruling like a dictator from day one.
2015: Orbán launched an anti-refugee propaganda binge which culminated in Hungary, a country not particularly blessed with immigrants, to build a border fence and call in the military to enforce it.
Trump: has unleashed ICE agents on brown-skinned people without due process; deported foreign nationals to CECOT, El Salvador’s maximum-security prison; called in the National Guard against a fabricated crime spree; deployed Texas troops in Illinois against local officials’ objections—calling for the arrest of Illinois’s governor and Chicago’s mayor and implemented many, many more cruel and senseless measures too numerous to list here.
2017: Orbán shut down Central European University after a sustained campaign of demonization against its founder, progressive philanthropist George Soros, three years after getting reelected as prime minister for the third time
Trump: is using threats to cut federal funding to bring universities to heel and force them to fire their presidents; implement anti-DEI policies; submit admissions data to the government for inspection; turn away foreign students; crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy, and worse.
All of this doesn’t even include the:
Gutting of the Inspectors General officers in various executive agencies. These officials are internal watchdogs whose job is to keep an eye on waste, fraud, abuse and corruption in the executive branch.
Firing of Schedule F civil service employees and their replacement with loyalists.
Attacks on Big Law to make it harder for political opponents targeted by Trump to even obtain legal representation—a basic guarantee in any civilized country with any semblance of a functioning rule of law to guard against innocents from being put away.
Weaponization of the DOJ to implement his retribution agenda against political enemies, especially those who tried to hold him accountable for his criminal acts.
Creation of new criminal division in the IRS to go after non-MAGA non-profits.
Illegal imposition of punitive tariffs on disfavored countries.
Abuse of pardon power to hand get-out-of-the-fail-free cards to cronies and those willing to commit violence on Trump’s behalf.
Engaging in manifest corruption by violating the emoluments clause; employ extrajudicial, unconstitutional killings of Venezuelans in international waters; and chillingly declaring to top military brass that he will be calling them soon to fight the woke “enemy within.”
And this hardly covers all of Trump’s abuses. Orbán has nothing on Trump. And a comparison with Modi would look no different.
But there is one other dimension for measuring how much trouble a democracy is in: Can it reverse course? Here, I’m more hopeful about America than Hungary or India. Hungary has reached a point of no return—even if Orbán loses the next election, which seems increasingly possible, the country’s institutions have been too fundamentally restructured, as Zack Beauchamp notes. His successors might make cosmetic changes but the temptation to exploit the same levers of state power will be great in a country without long experience with neutral governance. The same applies to India.
America is different. It has a deep cultural aversion to autocracy, reflected in the massive turnout for the No Kings protests on Oct. 18. Tuesday’s election was a referendum on Trump—which he failed miserably.
This shows that while Congress and parts of the judiciary might have bailed on rescuing America’s sinking liberal democracy, citizens have not. Trump faces far greater resistance than Orbán or Modi ever did. They never became widely despised in their countries in a way that Trump is right now. A year after Modi committed the demonetization blunder that overnight declared 85% of India’s currency null and void, decimating the meager savings of a vast swath of Indians, his popularity in fact soared with nine out of 10 Indians supporting him, leaving only India’s beleaguered Muslim and Christian minorities on the other side. Trump, on the other hand, is losing popularity across the board.
America has a history of pushing back hard after overweening assertions of executive power: It did so after Andrew Johnson tried to stop the post-Civil War reconstruction by passing the Tenure of Office Act, requiring a president to obtain congressional approval before firing federal officials the Senate had confirmed (a bulwark that has subsequently been weakened and the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court, enamored of the Unitary Executive Theory, might all but gut in an upcoming ruling). It did so after FDR violated the two-term norm. It did so after Nixon, when Congress enacted the Church Committee’s recommendations and established more robust oversight of the executive and limited domestic spying, among many other reforms to curb political corruption.
There is a race between authoritarian consolidation and the resistance movement in every backsliding democracy. The resistance has the best shot of prevailing in America.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Political power is like money: mostly a shared belief. When you are openly authoritarian, in principle it is very difficult to win elections. But if you win, you have massive political capital. Being elected in an openly authoritarian agenda, after a coup attempt, implies absolute control of your coalition, that will resist all along the authoritarian consolidation path.