Donald Trump's political career has closely tracked the trajectories of autocratic leaders Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, whose rise to power offer a "chillingly clear" picture of where his second term could lead, according to historians.
The former president and his supporters are tremendously hostile to civic institutions like the judiciary, the media, universities, many nonprofits and even some religious groups, and Trump will likely follow the lead of those autocratic leaders in Hungary and Russia by sidelining experts, regulators and other civil servants, wrote New York Times columnist M. Gessen.
"When Orban was re-elected, he carried out what [Hungarian historian Balint] Magyar calls an 'autocratic breakthrough,' changing laws and practices so that he could not be dislodged again," Gessen wrote. "It helped that he had a supermajority in parliament. Trump, similarly, spent four years attacking the Biden administration, and the vote that brought it to the White House, as fraudulent, and positioning himself as the only true voice of the people. He is also returning with a power trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress. He too can quickly reshape American government in his image."
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Magyar described the disorientation that accompanied Orban's return to power after eight years spent consolidating support from his base, and said he quickly unleashed an agenda that gathered autocratic powers for himself – which Gessen expects Trump to attempt from the start.
"We all remember it from Trump’s first term, this sense of everything happening all at once and the utter impossibility of focusing on the existentially threatening, or distinguishing it from the trivial — if that distinction even exists," Gessen wrote. "It’s not just what the autocrats do to stage their breakthrough, it’s how they do it: passing legislation (or signing executive orders) fast, without any discussion, sometimes late at night, in batches, all the while denigrating and delegitimizing any opposition."
Trump starts his second term with a sprawling road map for transforming the U.S. government to reflect his priorities, even if many of the policies conflict one another.
"Much has been written about Project 2025 as a sort of legislative blueprint for the second Trump presidency," Gessen wrote. "Consistent with Magyar’s theory of autocracy, the document is more a reflection of the clan of people who empower Trump and are empowered by him than an ideological document. It is not a blueprint for coherent legislative change, but it is a blueprint still: a blueprint for trampling the system of government as it is currently constituted, a blueprint of destruction."
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