The last time we covered a virtually identical story was back in July, when The Atlantic came out with the same article Vox has just published—making the case that President Donald Trump can ‘destroy democracy’ in the United States the way Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. Chances are we will have the opportunity to do this over again within a few months.
The earliest specimen of such an article I could find still online is from November 2016, right after President Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, and is by the British public media company BBC. That piece is titled ‘Does Trump win mark the end for liberal democracy?’
Since then, POLITICO (more than once), CNN, Deutsche Welle (DW), The Atlantic again, and The New York Times, among other major outlets, have written about the ‘sinister ties’ or parallels between President Trump and Prime Minister Orbán; and how American democracy could be damned to the fate of Hungarian democracy. Even the same author of Vox, Zack Beauchamp, has covered this subject once already in September 2018, with virtually the same title and subtitle for the two pieces published nearly seven years apart.
What's more, in 2022 Zack Beauchamp wrote the same article about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that time. Accordingly, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker gave Governor DeSantis the ‘Viktor Orbán treatment’, accusing him of taking America to the authoritarian path à la Hungary.
A good portion of these articles were written at a time when President Trump was banned from using all major social media sites by the tech giants acting in concert, something that no opposition leader had to deal with here in Hungary.
In this year’s variation of his Orbán piece, the author is likening the dismissal of personnel in the FBI by President Trump to Prime Minister Orbán’s ‘takeover of the prosecutor’s office’ in 2010, without much elaboration. By the same token, the prosecution of President Trump ahead of the 2024 election could have easily been compared to the prosecution of Alexei Navalny in Russia by President Vladimir Putin’s administration, yet not many journalists writing for these mainstream outlets published any of those articles…
Since there is a new public enemy for the Western liberal mainstream, Elon Musk, Vox had to find his Hungarian equivalent. The author had to settle for Lajos Simicska, who at the time of Fidesz's 2010 rise to power had companies in the billboard advertisement and construction businesses that had a combined annual turnover of a couple hundred million dollars—nothing like Musk's immense centibillionaire wealth, or anything comparable within the Hungarian context at the time. Furthermore, Simicska never took on a public, vocal advocate role within the Orbán administration as Musk does now.
Simicska and Orbán had a falling out in 2015, which is only briefly mentioned here. In the 2018 election, the billionaire supported the opposition party Jobbik, a group regarded as being to the right of Fidesz on the political spectrum. This fact does somewhat undermine the author's point, as Fidesz continued to have similar (if not greater) electoral success than before, while Jobbik is on the brink of collapse, having received only one per cent in the 2024 European Parliamentary election.
The faults of this parallel do not end there.
Perhaps the most glaring one is, as the author himself points out, that PM Orbán in 2010 could work with a constitutional supermajority in the legislature that he captured under the old electoral system, a luxury that Donald Trump does not have. In fact, his republican party has to navigate with just a narrow, five-seat majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
In other words, Hungary in 2010 and the United States are universes apart. Still, we look forward to the next Trump–Orbán ‘authoritarian’ comparison when it inevitably comes out in the next few months. You can place your bets on which mainstream outlet's turn it will be to publish it next.
Related articles:
