New York Times columnist M. Gessen writes, ‘This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too.’
In January, I took on “The Silliest Venezuela Take You Will Read Today” from M. Gessen of the New York Times. Well, Gessen is at it again, this time on Hungary, telling us, “This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too.”
The first problem here is that Viktor Orbán was defeated because he was running for reelection. Trump is not. Father Time and the 22nd Amendment are all that’s needed to get rid of him, and Gessen never bothers to explain what other mechanism is involved here, but what is hinted at is a very dark future for American democracy indeed.
We’ll get to the menacing part; first, the ridiculous. Gessen writes: “Hungarians handed Tisza not just a victory but a constitutional majority, enough power to reverse Orban’s changes to Hungarian laws and institutions. The triumph was stunning — unique in our era of democratic backsliding — and it holds clear lessons for the United States.”
Unique how? Governing parties lose elections all the time. Trump and his party were voted out of the House, White House, and Senate between 2018 and 2021. Even if you look only at governing parties of the right, Jair Bolsonaro was defeated in Brazil in 2022, the Law and Justice Party lost in Poland in 2023, and the People Power Party lost in South Korea in 2025. (That’s parties that were allowed to govern; right-leaning opposition candidates were effectively disqualified from taking power after winning in Romania and from even running in Ireland.) For that matter, given that Orbán had been prime minister for 16 years, it is hardly that surprising that a democratic electorate would eventually tire of him.
Set all of that aside and assume that we’re talking here about how to defeat Republicans: The column is still a mix of serious wishcasting, naïveté, and just outright shamelessness. Sure, some of Gessen’s prescriptions from Peter Magyar’s victory are just basic politics: organize voters, hold rallies, make vague promises to “change,” use harsh language to criticize the incumbent party. Really revelatory stuff. And yes, it helps that Magyar is young, handsome, and charismatic — hardly new assets in electoral politics. “His politics are aspirational and inspirational, a tone that is an antidote to the cynicism and vulgarity of autocracy.” Hope and change? Morning in America? Nobody’s tried that before. But it also sounds strange coming a few paragraphs after praising Magyar for comparing his political opponents to the mafia.
Then we have this: “Speaking in the Parliament building, which Magyar called ‘the most beautiful building in the world’ — and it may well be — he was proclaiming a new era of beauty and love.” If only Donald Trump ever talked about beautiful buildings!
Where did Magyar’s support come from? Gessen writes that “Grass-roots organizations that have little or no connection to electoral politics — in the United States, that might be the networks formed by the No Kings rallies, ICE-resistance groups and so on — can matter as much as or more than those already focused on winning votes.” As if anybody thinks that No Kings rallies and ICE resistance are somehow apolitical groups with no ties to the Democratic Party. Then there’s just blind refusal to engage with Magyar’s actual politics:
One could say — and some have — that Magyar won at least in part because he was a former insider of Orban’s Fidesz party. But my interlocutors in Hungary emphasized that Magyar’s credibility lay in the fact that he was not a member of the old opposition, whose policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power. That’s a lesson, too: The person best positioned to break the power of Donald Trump would not be an anti-Trump Republican but an outsider to the Democratic establishment, someone who can credibly claim that Trump didn’t happen on his watch — a Graham Platner rather than a Thomas Massie.
This column is five days old, and already the Platner reference seems humiliatingly dated, but it’s intended to transfer lessons from Magyar — who ran on the promise of continuing many of the socially conservative aspects of his old party, including on immigration — and transplant them onto the left wing of the Democratic Party with references to Platner and Zohran Mamdani. That is also the unacknowledged reason — not in-person campaigning, which Gessen credits — why many of Orbán’s favorite attack lines fell short: because they didn’t accurately describe Magyar’s political record and positions. Would Democrats have a similar immunity to attacks on them for supporting left-wing positions that unlike Magyar they actually hold? Ah, but we can hope:
Marta Pardavi, co-chair of the only organization in Hungary that provides free legal representation for people seeking asylum, was even hopeful — despite the absence of any such promises — that the new government would resume accepting asylum applications. . . . I asked [Zsofia Ban] how she felt about placing her hopes in a politician who had come from the right wing, had seemingly never said a word in defense of immigrants and had barely spoken up for the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people. Could he be a wolf in revolutionary clothing? “Maybe he is,” she said, smiling broadly. “Maybe he is.”
One never can tell, but if Magyar goes in that direction, it will be not a victory for democracy but a fraud on his voters.
Then again, Gessen describes not an election but “regime change.” We’re told to group Orbán, who faced the voters and accepted their judgment, with “other autocrats and aspiring autocrats — Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump.” As for Magyar, “by getting elected to the European Parliament, in 2024, he secured immunity from prosecution in Hungary.” Wait, immunity that places politicians above the law is good now? Yet, this is paired with odes to how important it will be for Magyar to jail people from Orbán’s government, “not only to satisfy the desire for retribution but also to separate those who became rich through their connections to the Orban regime from the millions of ordinary voters who enabled it — an essential step toward healing a society” — in other words, in order to prevent the new governing coalition from facing a meaningful opposition. By contrast, Gessen makes clear the degree to which outside interference with Hungarian elections is supposed to be welcomed:
In 2022, the European Union started withholding funding, citing corruption. And in 2024, after Hungary ignored a European Court of Justice ruling that compelled it to process asylum applications, the court ordered Hungary to pay 200 million euros and imposed a daily fine of 1 million euros. (When Orban refused to pay, Brussels deducted the money from E.U. funds earmarked for Hungary.) These actions didn’t just hurt the Hungarian economy — they also allowed Magyar to draw a causal connection between Orban’s policies and the well-being of ordinary voters. One of his major campaign promises was to unlock E.U. funding.
Sadly for the likes of Gessen, no foreign power can do this to the United States of America.