The Orbanization of the United States

The good news for Hungary, Europe and the wider democratic world is that Viktor Orban has finally fallen. The bad news is that the Orbanization of the United States is in full progress. 

Orban’s political technology of hollowing out democracy involved a governing style focused on capturing the media, bending the rule of law, reshaping the courts, as well as providing vast avenues for corruption and self-enrichment for his own immediate clan and a wider circle of cronies.

Presumably in the name of the “real people”

To give it all an air of pseudo-legitimacy, Orban pursued a permanent culture war, presumably in the name of the “real people.” Over sixteen years, he turned Hungary into a textbook “illiberal” democracy.  

Formally, he stuck with the election process but basically dispensed with rules of democratic fairness.  He created a political playing field that was so tilted that a change of power became nearly inconceivable until the shock election result of April 2026.

Orban also relied on pushing a daily diet of spreading conspiracy theories, which in his case were rife with antisemitism and what might be labeled visceral anti-Europeanism.

Hijacking the media

Orban used state advertising, crony oligarchs and regulatory harassment to hollow out traditional fact-based journalism and turn it into a regime-boosting PR machine. 

In the United States, a handful of billionaires is pursuing a very similar effort.  The Washington Post, a potent symbol of the resistance during Trump’s first term, has completely reversed course after owner Jeff Bezos sidled up to Trump.

The combination of billionaire owner interests and collapsing newsroom finances has greatly facilitated the hijacking mission which, as it stands, will also catch CNN ins its grip.

Judges disputing the facts

Then there is the judiciary. In Hungary, Orban methodically packed courts and prosecutors’ offices with loyalists who understood that their job was not to check the leader, but to protect him. The law became a political weapon in the hand of the regime to pursue its domestic opponents with completely dubious charges.

In the United States, Trump’s movement has spent years stacking the federal judicial bench with ideologues who show little to no loyalty whatsoever to any constitutional principle or factual truths for that matter.

Rather, like brainwashed puppets or hyper-cynical careerists, a range of young nominees to become federal judges at the Circuit Court level even refused to answer the question of whether or not Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.

This is not just bewildering in itself but also gives one great reason to worry about how these individuals will dispense any semblance of justice over the next several decades. They already have a distinct air of Soviet truth bending about them.

When judges start treating election results as negotiable truths, democracy is in deep trouble. An emerging judiciary that cannot say, in plain language, who the winner of a presidential election actually was is not conservative or originalist. It is post‑democratic.

The West’s rotten (former) core

Americans like to imagine that their institutions are rock solid and tower above all others.  This is increasingly the stuff of fantasy.

In the Age of Trump, the United States is rapidly unmooring itself from being the keystone of the West’s security, financial and political architecture. An orbanized America, brought about by a totally irresponsibly acting Republican Party, is no longer a guarantor of the rule‑bound global order.

Meanwhile, the continuously ineffective Democratic Party somehow comforts itself with the belief that institutions are self‑healing. They are not. Institutions are made of people, and people can be bought, bullied or conditioned to look away, as Viktor Orban has shown aplenty in his time at the helm of Hungary.

If the United States, the self‑styled “leader of the free world”, chooses to normalize the idea that courts are tools in the hands of a political movement and that truth is optional, then authoritarians the world over will feel greatly encouraged, if not legitimized, to expand their wn forms of abuse further.

Orban’s defeat thus looks less like a turning point than the moment where his ghost has crossed the Atlantic and lives on in the Oval Office.

Conclusion: The challenge to the U.S.

Hungarians have done their part.  They have pushed Viktor Orban out. 

Americans are still unwilling to confront the Orbanization of their own republic with the required clarity and determination. They should stop sticking to the outdated narrative congratulating themselves on being the last best hope of anything. They are fast becoming the next cautionary tale.