I Recognise Every Brick

Watching the U.S. through the memory of Orbán’s Hungary.

Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán during a bilateral lunch meeting at the White House in Washington, 7 November 2025. Photo: The White House / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

To many Americans, Donald Trump still feels like an aberration. A disruption to be endured, not a direction being chosen. The institutions will hold, the argument goes. They always have. The republic is resilient. It has survived worse.

I recognise the instinct. I once felt it, too.

Every democracy believes itself to be the exception. Americans have believed it more than most, and with more justification than most. The Constitution has held for two and a half centuries. The institutions have bent and recovered. The republic has survived. All of that is true. But it has also produced a confidence that sits very close to complacency, and complacency is where these things begin.

I used to believe that about Hungary. Then I watched Viktor Orbán unmake democracy gradually, almost bureaucratically, through a thousand small adjustments rather than a single decisive break. That is what feels so unsettlingly familiar now. Not the spectacle, but the method.

There was no rupture, no decree, no moment you could point to and say: there. That was when it ended. It did not end. It was converted, procedure by procedure, appointment by appointment, into something that performed democracy without practising it.

I was a child when it started. Children do not notice the architecture of the state. They notice whether their parents speak carefully on the phone. Whether certain subjects change the temperature in a room. Whether the adults around them have learned, without being told, what not to say out loud.

Back then, I looked to the U.S. It felt like evidence that the alternative was real. That politics could carry obligations rather than just opportunities. That a leader could speak to a country as though it were made of adults.

I do not have that anymore. And watching the U.S. now, I am not sure it does either.

Orbán learned what successful autocrats always learn: the building does not need to come down. It only needs new tenants. Laws do not need to be abolished. They need only be turned. Rewritten to serve new purposes. Enforced against the disloyal, ignored for the faithful, left on the books as decoration. The law remains. The rule of law does not.

He understood something else, too. Doing it in the open is not a risk. Visibility is the cover. When each step is visible, documented, and legally defended, the opposition is always fighting the last move while the next one is already in place. Resistance requires a clear line. Incremental dismantling never draws one.

That is the script so many people are still struggling to read. Democratic decline does not usually arrive in the form of a coup.

In Hungary, it looked like this. A new electoral law in 2011, redrawn to make opposition victories structurally improbable. A constitution rewritten over a long weekend, by men who held every seat and needed no one’s permission. A media authority handed to a loyalist. A Constitutional Court packed so carefully that by the time it mattered, it had already been decided. Each move had a legal basis. Each could be explained. Together, they built something that called itself a democracy and functioned as something else entirely. Slow enough to deny. Technical enough to excuse. Relentless enough that one day it was simply the weather.

I know that rhythm by heart. Not as a sequence of events to be studied, but as something lived at close range, accumulated slowly, noticed fully only in retrospect. The kind of knowledge you do not choose to acquire.

The United States differs from Hungary. The differences are real, and they matter. But the belief that deep roots make a democracy immune has often proven to be the precise vulnerability democratic backsliders exploit. The confidence that it cannot happen here is an invitation. It tells the people who would dismantle a democracy exactly where to begin.

With Trump, the spectacle is a useful cover. Beneath it lies a logic, recognisable to anyone who has watched this kind of politics before. I have watched it before, up close, for most of my life. The insistence that institutions exist to serve the leader, not the other way around. The deliberate cultivation of enemies, because enemies are useful. The conversion of public life into a loyalty test. The slow pressure on courts, civil servants, prosecutors, and journalists to choose between their principles and their careers.

Orbán understood this with a clarity his opponents never quite matched. The façade is the strategy. Leave it standing. Tend to it. Let it reassure people that nothing fundamental has changed, while everything fundamental is changing behind the scenes.

The details map onto each other. In Hungary, Orbán slashed state advertising to independent media, gutting budgets without shuttering newsrooms. Loyalists bought up what remained. In the United States, the approach is less surgical, but the destination is familiar. Powerful allies buy newspapers and social media platforms. Television news learns what not to say. The outward forms endure. Ownership and intent quietly shift.

The same logic shapes elections. Orbán redrew Hungary’s districts to lock in an advantage. In the U.S., Trump urged Republican states to redraw maps mid-cycle while they still held power. Orbán would recognise the instinct immediately: do not wait for the rules to favour you. Rewrite them.

This is what people so often fail to understand. They wait for the dramatic break, the moment the mask comes off.

It never does.

The authoritarian’s most effective weapon is patience. Trump spent four years out of office. He came back more certain, more unhinged, and with a clearer understanding of which obstacles to remove first.

People adapt. Expectations fall. Abuses get sorted into categories: shocking or routine. Each new violation, however sordid, is rationalised. Someone else, surely, will draw the line. Endurance is mistaken for resilience. Soon, the abnormal feels normal. By then, the real damage is done.

Hungarians know this process by heart. We have watched a system learn to perform democracy rather than practise it. Elections held on schedule, their outcomes shaped long before polling day. Constitutional phrases repeated until they lost their meaning. The forms of legality maintained with great care, because they are what legitimacy looks like from a distance.

In eight days, my country votes. None of our elections ever felt as though they could truly change anything. This one does. The opposition has a real chance. Not a protest vote, not a moral gesture, but a chance to actually win. I have lived my entire conscious political life inside Orbán’s system. I grew up inside it. I do not know what a Hungary without it looks like. For the first time, I may find out.

Last week, I dropped my ballot at the post office. I have voted before. It has not always felt like it mattered. This time it did. People who emigrated have arranged to vote from abroad. People who had not voted in years have changed their minds. People who decided, rationally and not without reason, that none of it mattered have decided that perhaps it does after all. Something has changed. Whether it has changed enough is the only question left.

What we do know is how hard it is to turn back. Once patronage sets in, once fear and cynicism become the atmosphere of daily life, once enough people decide that resistance costs more than it returns, the window closes. Not with a bang. Quietly, from within, while everyone is watching something else.

Trump chills me because he is familiar. I have seen this type of politician before. The leader who claims to be the nation’s only authentic voice. Who brands independent institutions as illegitimate whenever they fail to serve him. Who turns law into leverage, governance into theatre and grievance into a governing philosophy. Around such men, opportunists gather because of their contempt for democratic norms, not despite it.

Institutions do not save themselves.

People do. Courts matter only if judges are willing to hold the line. Laws matter only if officials enforce them without fear or favour. Bureaucracies matter only if public servants remember their loyalty is to the constitution, not to the whims of a leader. An institution can stand long after it has lost its meaning.

That is how democratic decline works. The buildings remain. The signs stay up. The language persists. But something essential inside the system shifts. You sense it before you can prove it.

It arrives as the weather arrives. Without announcement. Already everywhere by the time you look up.

Today’s autocrats rarely arrive with fanfare. They come through elections, speaking the language of democracy, promising to restore what was lost. They claim to fight corruption while rewarding loyalists. They denounce elites while building their own. They promise order and govern through chaos. The style changes. The destination does not.

They also need enemies. Orbán found his early. First George Soros, then migrants, then the LGBTQ+ community, then Brussels, then Ukraine. The target rotates. The function remains the same: to give the nation something to fear that is not the government, and someone to blame that is not the leader. I watched it happen so many times that I can now recognise the pattern before the new enemy’s name is even announced.

Trump has run the same rotation. Muslims. Black Lives Matter. Trans people. Migrants at the border. The deep state. Universities. Judges who rule the wrong way. Generals who will not go along. The targets accumulate. None of them is ever meant to be defeated. A defeated enemy is one that can no longer be used.

Orbán also learned to weaponise Christianity. Not as faith, but as identity. As a border drawn around the nation, separating the authentic from the foreign, the pure from the corrupted. The cross became a political instrument. Churches became transmission belts for government messaging. God was recruited into the coalition.

Trump has done the same, and he has done it with remarkable speed. A White House Faith Office. A task force to eradicate anti-Christian bias. Prayers on government meeting agendas. Churches told they may now endorse candidates from the pulpit. The Bible sold as merchandise. The presidency framed as a spiritual mission. Political opposition cast as an assault on Christian civilisation itself. Orbán spent years building this architecture. Trump is building it in months. I recognise every brick.

To Hungarians, these are not hypothetical threats. We have watched every stage of this process unfold. A democracy slowly accepting what once would have been unthinkable. Legal processes bent until they provided cover for actions that undermined the system. Enough people convinced that only the leader embodied the nation, and that any opposition was therefore illegitimate.

We have watched it. We thought we knew how it ended.

Now, for the first time in sixteen years, we are not sure.

And we know this: the decisive moment is never the one that looks decisive.

It comes earlier and quieter than that. When the political class begins to speak the leader’s language without being asked. When bureaucracies start anticipating rather than resisting. When the media learns, on its own, what not to say. When enough people trade principle for positioning and call it pragmatism.

That is when normalisation takes hold. Not a collapse. A recalibration. What was unthinkable becomes debatable. What was debatable becomes policy. What was policy becomes the way things are.

After that, there is no single line left to defend. The lines have already moved.

The fantasy that one man can stand above law, above scrutiny, above the ordinary limits of democratic life is not unique to any country. Neither is the capacity to reject it before it hardens into a system. But that capacity has to be exercised. It does not exercise itself.

That is why, for all the differences, I recognise the warning signs. And why I hope Americans do, too.

The U.S. still has what it took Hungary years to lose. A press that can still report. Courts that can still rule against the government. A civil society that has not yet decided resistance is futile. These are not small things. They did not feel small in Hungary either, right up until they were gone. Use them. Protest. Whistleblow. Organise. Do not wait for the institutions to save you. Institutions do not save themselves.

And if Orbán loses in eight days, I hope Americans feel it not as a foreign story but as proof. Proof that these systems can be reversed. That the people who built a machine to contain change can still be defeated by the people they built it to contain. That the window, however narrow, is still open. That is the message a Hungarian result could send across the Atlantic to everyone frightened right now and wondering whether any of this is still worth fighting for.

I know what it looks like when a system begins to bend. It looks ordinary. It looks incremental. It is wrapped in procedure and narrated by calm men with credible arguments. And I know how many decent, thoughtful people will go on insisting it is temporary, exceptional, reversible, long after the window for reversal has quietly closed.

But the story does not end while people are still fighting it. History is not inevitable. It is made incrementally, by the same kinds of small decisions that unmade Hungary.

The U.S. is being asked a question it has always assumed it would never face. The assumption was the problem. The question is here now, and it will not wait for a more convenient moment.

There is still time. Before corruption becomes the structure. Before fear becomes a habit. Before resignation becomes the culture.

That window does not stay open. Hungary’s almost closed for good. Whether it still can, we will find out in eight days.

What I know, from having lived it, is this: the strongman does not make the country. The people around him do. The judge. The journalist. The official. The ordinary person who must decide, every morning, what kind of country they are willing to live in.

The choice is hard. It carries risk. It asks people who are already tired for something more. But it is available. It is always available, until the moment it is not. That is the moment Hungary is approaching. That is the moment the U.S. must not reach.