The MAGA model for returning to power and dismantling democracy

Why Trump and Heritage keep rolling out the red carpet for Viktor Orban

As former president Donald Trump steamrolls his way to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he and his MAGA allies are, once again, rolling out the red carpet for their favorite authoritarian, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He’ll be welcomed at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday and at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club on Friday.

Why?

For the MAGA movement, Orban is a model for retaking the executive office and then consolidating power to maximum effect. Like Trump, Orban was ousted by voters and then spent time out of office making plans to win the next election, get control of the levers of power, and abolish democratic checks in the system so he would never lose again. He envisioned building a “central political force field” that would rule for the next 15 to 20 years.

Which is exactly what happened. 

Orban has now held power for 14 years and counting in a corrupt system of his own making that the European Parliament condemned as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.” 

That’s because when Orban returned to office in 2010 he knew what to do. He systematically tore down his country’s democracy with a strategy straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook. Most notably by:

Aggrandizing power by rewriting the Constitution to change the electoral rules and take control over the judiciary: 

Orban and his party rewrote the Hungarian Constitution to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor. Princeton Professor Kim Lane Scheppele explained:

How did the governing party Fidesz stack the deck so much in its favor that the upcoming Hungarian election’s results are not in doubt?

Fidesz started immediately after its election victory in 2010 to reshape the electoral system to ensure its hold on power. The Fidesz parliamentary bloc, which enacted constitutional changes without including or consulting any opposition party, slashed the size of the parliament in half, redrew all of the individual constituencies unilaterally, changed the two-round system to a single first-past-the-post election for individual constituencies, and altered the way votes were aggregated.

The Second Orban government also amended the country’s constitution to gut the judicial independence of the Constitutional Court, barring it from reviewing any constitutional amendments made by Orban’s party which had the two-thirds majority required to enact them. In 2018, he went further by creating a parallel court that completed the country’s transformation from a democracy into a “competitive authoritarian regime.” 

Quashing dissent by choking independent media: 

Budapest-based scholar Marius Dragomir wrote: 

The first move Fidesz made following the electoral victory in 2010 was to adopt new media legislation. Back then, Orban said that this measure was a ‘corrective’ for the leftist bias in the country’s media. The then newly adopted legal provisions, vague and equivocal, requiring, among other things, media content to be ‘balanced’ and not to incite hatred ‘against any majority,’ were aimed at hectoring independent journalists. Violating these provisions could attract steep fines. A new authority, the Media Council, staffed by people appointed by parliament where Fidesz had a two-third majority, was created to enforce the new rules.

But their real strategy was even more pernicious. 

Faced with the crushing pressure of the regulations and dwindling advertising revenue, many owners eventually succumbed to offers to buy their floundering media companies. For many, the choice was: sell or go bankrupt. 

But the buyers were not saviors. They were Orban’s oligarch allies, ready to pool those previously-independent media outlets into a centralized propaganda machine. As the New York Times reported in 2018:

The results are plain to see. In 2010, when Orban regained power, Hungary ranked 23rd on the World Press Freedom Index. In 2023, Hungary suffered a dramatic fall, ranking 72nd.

Targeting vulnerable communities as a deliberate scapegoating strategy: 

While Orban returned to office in 2010 by harnessing economic discontent at the peak of the financial crisis, he has built an enduring and riled-up populist base by scapegoating immigrants and refugees. 

According to the German Marshall Fund, a transatlantic think tank:

Orbán used the 2015 refugee crisis to forge an unmatched electoral base united by the government’s tireless hate propaganda and fear of migration. In September of that year, his government introduced a special “state of emergency caused by mass migration,” which is still in power, having been diligently prolonged in six-months installments to the present day.

Orban has been widely condemned for his remarks that diverse European nations are “no longer nations, they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.” He went on: “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become mixed race.”

Compare that to Trump: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

This is not just rhetoric. Orban has enacted one of the strictest immigration and refugee regimes in Europe — repeatedly clashing with the rest of the EU over the draconian restrictions. In 2022, only 44 people even managed to apply for asylum in Hungary. 

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These are all moves Trump and the Heritage Foundation endorse by championing Orban as an ideal conservative leader. 

In fact, they have said as much explicitly. In The Authoritarian Playbook 2025: Promises, Powers, and Plans, my colleagues and I summarize Trump and his supporters’ plans for his second term, often in their words. Their plans map almost exactly onto the strategies Orban has used to build an enduring, illiberal, nationalist, authoritarian state in Hungary. 

Moreover, Orban is the textbook example of why autocrats are often much more dangerous the second time in office. They learn from their mistakes, shortcomings and — above all — the things that caused them to lose power previously. Orban is well on his way to staying in office for the rest of his life. 

On that too Trump aims to do the same.