How to Prevent the Orbanization of America

Every day for the last ten years politically literate Americans have been deluged by an endless firehose of outrages perpetrated by a real estate scammer and demagogue who regularly appears in public looking for all the world like a geriatric oompa-loompa. And yet, much like his political forebears—Mussolini, Hitler, and the second wave of the American Ku Klux Klan were all also frequently derided by contemporaries as little more than clowns—the threat he poses and the damage he’s doing are deadly serious. In just the past few weeks, the Criminal in Chief and the Star Wars cantina of criminals, racists, weirdos, and power-hungry opportunists who comprise his administration have: 

1. Arrested a state judge in Wisconsin on flagrantly spurious charges in an apparent effort to intimidate the judiciary and portray judges as corrupt to the MAGA base.
2. Continued to defy and stonewall numerous court orders, including decisions from the Supreme Court ordering it to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, one of the hundreds of people it has illegally abducted and sent to a gulag in El Salvador with zero due process, even though the administration’s own officials have had to admit in court that Garcia was kidnapped by mistake. 
3. Reportedly held immigrant families incommunicado and deported them, along with their U.S. citizen children before a court could rule on their habeas corpus petition and without allowing them to take the cancer medication one of the U.S. citizen children needs to survive. 
4. Continued to accept billions of dollars in bribes from all manner of sleazy interests both foreign and domestic through a crypto scam set up specifically as a bribery vehicle for the president and his family days before he was inaugurated. Trump is openly offering facetime with himself and his family to the largest contributors to this bribery fund. 
5. Tripled down on accepting a flagrant bribe in the form of a palatial 747 airplane from a literal foreign prince, the ruler of Qatar, in direct violation of the Constitution’s several prohibitions against bribery and emoluments. 
6. Continued to urinate on the Constitution from a great height by illegally gutting federal agencies in direct violation of federal law and court orders, taking a wrecking ball to education and scientific research in the process—arguably the two most important pillars of American economic and military power as Samantha Hancox-Li and Adam Gurri convincingly argued in these pages. 
7. Publicly floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus altogether.

This is far from an exhaustive list and it grows every day. And, not coincidentally, many of these actions are reminiscent of the ways Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Reccep Tayip Erdogan, and myriad other aspiring tyrants consolidated their power. It’s worth reiterating that any one of these would rightly be an earth-shattering, potentially presidency-ending scandal in normal times. But as practitioners and scholars of military strategy are fond of saying and as many commentators have noted about both Trump terms, quantity has a quality all its own. Fascist guru Steve Bannon famously made this strategy explicit in 2019 and the second time around the administration has been more intentional and by many measures more effective at carrying it out. 

So how can the pro-democracy, pro-Constitution coalition counter this multi-front assault and resist MAGA’s attempts at turning us into Budapest on The Potomac? Thus far the primary strategies we have been utilizing have been street protests and litigation. These have had some tangible successes. It’s notable for instance that after the initial flurry of flights carrying a reported 238 immigrants (the vast majority of whom appear to have no criminal record) to Naib Bukele’s Kafkaesque mega-dungeon in El Salvador, the resulting avalanche of litigation and public protest has so far deterred the administration from sending anyone else there. Mass protest has an impact on politicians and judges, and provides a permission structure to other citizens to resist.

Any student of the American civil rights movement or of the modern political science literature on the subject will tell you that it’s an indispensable part of any movement seeking to resist an authoritarian regime. Likewise, litigation is an essential tool in resisting authoritarians’ attempts to flatten the rule of law and consolidate their own power and it has slowed and in some cases reversed some of this administration’s abuses. But experts will tell you the courts are a limited and imperfect tool. We have also—belatedly and unevenly—seen universities uniting to defend themselves in the face of the administration’s attacks on American higher education and research institutions. We will need more of this from universities, law firms, unions, and every kind of civil society organization. 

The main ingredient that’s been largely absent from the fight against authoritarianism and corruption has been leadership from the titular Democratic congressional leadership. Some rank and file Democratic members of Congress have shown laudable evidence that they possess a pulse and a functioning spine. Most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders have held opposition rallies across the country, Sen. Corey Booker performed a marathon filibuster, Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Reps. Yassamin Ansari, Robert Garcia, Maxwell Frost, and Maxine Dexter visited El Salvador to advocate for Kilmar Abrego Garcia and other wrongly imprisoned immigrants, several members visited federal offices in attempts to gather information on and call attention to DOGE’s illegal activities, and Rep. Shri Thanedar introduced articles of impeachment against Trump. Some Democratic governors, most notably J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, have also done an admirable job of publicly and consistently standing up to the fascist vandals. 

By contrast, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and their leadership teams have so far done an absolute bang-on impression of potted plants since January 20th. They appear to be operating under the belief that Americans only care about the economy, that immigration and democracy are losing issues for Democrats, and that if they just hunker down, make mildly critical noises about Trump’s handling of the economy, and bide their time, they’ll retake Congressional majorities in 2026 on the strength of the cyclical backlash to Trump.

There are two major problems with this plan. First, it dramatically underestimates the scale and urgency of the threat. Every day, this administration is doing massive damage to the sources of American power and sawing an ever-larger gash into the American-led system of alliances and trade that has given us the most peaceful and prosperous period in human history. They’re similarly doing life-threatening damage to the rule of law and democracy in the world’s most important democracy. At a minimum, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die—in Ukraine, in the world’s poorest countries which had been recipients of life-saving aid from USAID, and in the U.S. from gutting scientific research, putting anti-vaccine lunatics and grifters in charge of American public health, and from cutting the national weather service—and billions of people are going to lead poorer, worse lives as a direct result of this administration. And that’s if we succeed in beating them back and keeping American democracy alive and if they actually abide by the results of elections they lose, not something they’ve shown much propensity toward. 

The other problem with the delusions Democratic congressional leaders appear to be laboring under is that it turns out when you tell people what the administration is doing on immigration, most Americans are actually revolted by it. And that’s without any concerted effort by elected Democrats to systematically push back. Call me old-fashioned, but I would suggest that the job of the political opposition is to lead and shape public opinion, rather than to be a decorative object, which Congress has increasingly become. This is especially true in a country with a power-mad sociopath occupying its highest office who, together with his cult of followers, is busily destroying any and all limits on his own power and trying his level best to turn the United States into another Hungary or Russia—a ramshackle kleptocracy ruled by violence, graft, and the whims of one man. 

There are several levers congressional Democrats can and should be using. These include withholding unanimous consent on everything and utilizing coordinated filibusters to grind the Senate as nearly as possible to a halt, as well as a vigorous strategy of publicly resisting the regime’s power grabs. This should involve media spectacles designed to grab the public’s attention—what Dr. Martin Luther King called “creative non-violence.” 

One obvious lever that Democratic leaders have so far spurned is impeachment. It’s true that Democrats don’t control either chamber of Congress and so Trump’s Congressional bootlickers could likely prevent articles of impeachment from ever coming to a floor vote, let alone getting to the Senate. And it’s also true that most Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated that there’s no line they won’t cross, no principled hill they’ll die on if it involves standing up to Trump. But again, the job of the political opposition is to lead and shape public opinion. 

As mentioned above, Congressman Shri Thanedar did file articles of impeachment—which are very much worth a read. Far from backing him up in this effort, Hakeem Jeffries and the rest of what passes for the House Democratic leadership pressured him and his cosponsors into abandoning it. One can only assume they’re trying to give Chuck Schumer a run for his money for the title of most feckless response to an emerging authoritarian regime.

What Congressional Democrats ought to do instead is hold televised hearings similar to those held by the January 6th Committee. It’s true such hearings would lack legal subpoena power, but Republicans routinely flout Congressional subpoenas anyway. Democrats should make these hearings a weekly, primetime event where they systematically highlight the administration’s crimes and outrages, taking testimony from both experts and people whose lives have been upended by Trump and his cronies. This would have the twin effects of helping to shape public opinion and energizing the pro-democracy movement which has so far been mostly leaderless and impromptu. And Democrats have a deep roster of talented communicators to deliver their message in such hearings: Rep. Ocasio Cortez, Rep. Jake Auchincloss, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Governors Walz and Pritzker, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttiegeg leap to mind, among others.

If public polling, Congressional town halls, and the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies are any indication there is an enormous unmet market demand for an opposition party that will actually fight. We must do everything we can to make that a reality through public protest and through organizing and supporting efforts in support of political leaders who show a willingness to fight. Likewise, we need to organize and support primary challenges to the seat-warming, Vichy Democrats who are content to issue milquetoast statements of disapproval without actually doing anything to oppose the fascist assault against America. 

Last summer I argued in these pages that even in authoritarian regimes, resistance is possible and can be successful, as both our own history and the more recent experiences of other countries teaches. But contrary to the famous proclamations from President Obama and Dr. King, the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice unless enough people do the hard work of bending it that way. 

Featured image is Kilmar Abrego Garcia meeting Senator Chris Van Hollen