In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has proven exceptionally good at breaking things. The Department of Government Efficiency’s total demolition of USAID, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s depopulation of America’s public health agencies, the total chaos at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon — there is little doubt that the Trump team has accomplished policy vandalism at an unprecedented scale.
Amid this constant barrage, it can feel like Trump has been stunningly successful in achieving his aims. But when it comes to perhaps his administration’s most ambitious task — removing checks on Trump’s power, transforming democracy into something more like an authoritarian regime — the evidence suggests a surprisingly hopeful conclusion.
Trump is failing — at least, so far.
There is an established playbook for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state, used in countries ranging from India to Hungary. It requires a leader to:
Trump has attempted all of these things. He has taken actions, like unilaterally declaring an end to birthright citizenship, that clearly violate the Constitution. He has targeted alternative power centers, launching an investigation into a Democratic fundraising platform and threatening the press. He has imposed sanctions on prominent law firms and universities in a bid to force compliance, and he has sold it all to the public as evidence he’s getting things done.
Yet in each arena, Trump is facing effective and mounting pushback. He is routinely losing in court. He is failing to silence the media. And he is losing support among the elite as his poll numbers plummet.
This failure is, in large part, a result of his team’s errors. While their approach broadly resembled foreign authoritarians’, it was a poor copy at every level — a strategically unsound campaign, with poorly thought-out tactics that were executed incompetently.
“We should thank [our] lucky stars that Trump chose to do this in the most stupid way possible,” says Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who studies democratic backsliding.
None of this is to say that American democracy is safe. Never before has a president been so committed to breaking the constitutional order and seizing power. We do not know whether America’s democratic institutions will hold when the pressure has been mounting for years rather than months. But the events of the first 100 days give us reason to hope.
To understand what Trump is attempting — and why it’s failing — it’s helpful to understand how Viktor Orbán successfully demolished democracy in Hungary. This is not only because Orbán is perhaps the most effective modern elected autocrat, but also because there is good reason to believe that the Trump team is self-consciously borrowing elements of his strategy.
Orbán was prime minister of Hungary from 1998–2002, when he ruled as a mostly normal conservative in a country widely seen as a post-communist success story. But once out of power, he spent his time out of power developing a plan to secure total control — even consulting law firms about a legal power grab in the event that his Fidesz party won another election. When he returned to office in 2010, Orbán executed that plan flawlessly, turning Hungary from a reasonably stable and healthy democracy into the European Union’s only autocracy.
Orbán did not immediately or openly claim dictatorial powers. Instead, he made a blizzard of incremental moves — each one technical and confusing. Individually, these policies might not have seemed like a big deal. Together, they added up to a quietly comprehensive assault on democratic institutions and civil society.
Orbán’s first and most impactful moves targeted the guts of democratic society. He neutered the courts, forcing out unfriendly judges and replacing them with his cronies. He attacked the free press’ economic foundations, developing financial tools to force independent media to sell to government allies. He began the process of stacking the electoral deck by gerrymandering Hungarian electoral districts. And he did all of this quietly, through obscure legal tweaks and quiet abuses of regulatory powers that even sophisticated observers of Hungarian politics had trouble tracking.
The Trump administration has borrowed elements of the Hungarian approach. They’ve said so themselves: Key figures in the administration, ranging from Vice President JD Vance to Christopher Rufo, have been describing Hungary as a model for America for years. But it’s also evident in their policies.
Jennifer Victor, a political scientist at George Mason University, recently combed through a database of 2,714 different policies and initiatives from the second Trump administration — looking specifically for attacks on voting rights, the rule of law, civil liberties, and free elections. She found that two-thirds of the events fell into at least one of these categories, with the rule of law and civil liberties the primary targets.
She found few attacks on free elections and almost no efforts to curtail voting rights. But this, she notes, is because of the way authoritarians sequence their attacks: typically going after the rule of law first to pave the way for other violations.
“Consolidating power by overpowering the other branches of government is a necessary step to corrupting elections, compromising voting rights, and restricting civil liberties — in other words, compromising the rule of law is the first step in creating a fully autocratic state,” she writes.
This is indeed how democracy died in Hungary: Orbán consolidated political power and then wielded it against more and more targets. But the mere fact that Trump is trying something similar does not mean he is succeeding.
In fact, the evidence suggests that he is not.
Trump’s bid to cow the institutions are (mostly) failing
Trump has certainly had some successes. He has managed to destroy USAID, acting as if he had broad power to redirect congressionally appropriated funds in the process. He illegally sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, and so far has refused to comply with court orders to bring him back.
But Hungary shows that the key question is not whether a would-be authoritarian wins specific fights. Rather, it’s whether they can force widespread acquiescence to their policies. Without courts routinely ruling in his favor, or the press on his side, Orbán would not have been able to get away with everything he did.
Trump does not enjoy this kind of consent. At nearly every turn, key alternative power centers are standing up and fighting.
According to data from the legal news site Lawfare, there are currently 255 lawsuits against various Trump administration policies; 108 of those cases have yielded temporary pauses or permanent orders ending Trump administration policies. The Trump administration has only received favorable orders in about 30, with the remainder awaiting decisions.
The rulings against Trump are not small-ball. Courts have blocked Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, ordered him to disburse suspended National Institutes of Health grants, and restored visas to international students targeted for deportations. Each of these orders represented a significant curtailment of Trump’s assault on the rule of law. And, as far as we know, the White House has complied with the rulings.
While any lower court ruling might be overturned by the Supreme Court, the conservative justices are not signaling an intent to act like pure partisans. They have already issued two major rulings requiring Trump to pay USAID contractors and to, at least temporarily, cease deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Clearly, Trump has not engineered the kind of compliant judiciary that paved the way for Orbán’s rise.
The story is similar with the press. While he has certainly attempted to intimidate reporters into silence — by, for example, punishing the Associated Press when it refused to use the term “Gulf of America” — it’s clear from the headlines that most of the American press is not running scared.
Since Trump took office, there has been a constant stream of negative coverage — including the sort of exposés that are most likely to hurt his standing with the public. Trump has not been able to scare the New York Times and Washington Post away from the sort of hard-hitting stories on the administration they publish daily.
And the same is true for other power centers in the business world and civil society.
In the early weeks, it seemed like Trump might be winning Hungarian-style compliance. Heads of major corporations, including Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, attended Trump’s inauguration. Columbia University and big law firms like Paul Weiss made major concessions to Trump amid pressure.
By April, that dynamic had flipped.
American corporations are in the midst of a collective freakout about Trump’s tariffs, which pose a major threat to their profits. Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are increasingly angry about the import duties, with prominent pro-Trump venture capitalist Marc Andreessen going radio silent amid the fallout. Both Business Insider and the Financial Times have published stories about finance types turning on the administration.
Among universities, Columbia’s acquiescence is looking like an increasingly lonely stance. Harvard has filed a major lawsuit against Trump’s attempt to cut off billions in federal research dollars. The Ivies and other elite schools have formed a collective strategy group for pushing back, and the Big Ten universities have developed a mutual legal defense compact. Over 150 university presidents published a letter denouncing Trump’s attempt to bully American colleges.
Law firms, too, are changing their tune. While nine firms have signed deals with Trump to get him to back off, and many of the biggest firms are still on the fence, over 500 signed an amicus brief supporting the firm Perkins Coie’s effort to fight Trump in court. The firms that have chosen to cut a deal with Trump are facing internal crises, including attorney resignations and recruitment difficulties.
Orbán’s success at grabbing power depended on an ability to force or win compliance from democratic watchdogs and civil society. Trump has tried to the same — and he has failed repeatedly
Trump is losing the public
Orbán-style authoritarianism cannot ignore public opinion: It depends crucially on enough people actually buying what they’re selling. In Hungary, that critical mass can be relatively small in number. Election rules are so stacked in their favor that Fidesz can win two-thirds majorities in parliament fairly easily, even while alienating major segments of the population.
But Trump has not yet been able to do rig elections, or win enough support from key institutions to pass laws that would do so. His ability to maintain enough power to keep attacking democracy depends critically on public support. And he is losing it.
Never truly popular, Trump has seen mass discontent in the weeks following his “Liberation Day” tariff announcement.
The New York Times poll average shows that his support is weaker than every 21st-century president at this point in their presidency save one — Trump himself during his first term. Another poll average shows Trump, from the data journalist G. Elliott Morris, shows him performing even worse than at this point in 2017.
While much of this decline is economy-related, his favorability is collapsing on issues across the board. Perhaps most surprisingly, Trump is losing his longstanding advantage on immigration amid Democratic attacks on the Abrego Garcia case. By late April, most polls were showing him in negative territory on the issue.
The latest New York Times/Sienna poll, one of the most respected in American politics, suggested voters are reacting to a perception of overreach. While they may have once looked at Trump’s blizzard of executive actions and seen a president getting things done, they now see a president who is dangerously exceeding his powers to make changes they don’t want.
“A clear majority of voters say the president has already gone too far — too far toward changing the economic and political system, too far with the tariffs, too far with the spending cuts, too far on immigration enforcement” the Times’s Nate Cohn explains. “Just 31 percent of voters approved his handling of the Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia case — his lowest approval rating in the poll — and he would find himself on even weaker footing should he push further.”
The tariffs have also played a central role in his collapsing support — among both business elites and the mass public. Threatening to tank the economy does tend to produce a political backlash.
This damage can be seen as a kind of byproduct of Trump’s authoritarian vision. Trump has a bizarre view of tariffs’ effects on the economy, one that he could not fully implement in his first term. Now, as he pushes the limits of his power, he could indeed put this reality into power — following other elected autocrats, like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose idiosyncratic economic policies created major problems for their regime down the line.
In essence, Trump’s authoritarianism is sowing the seeds of its own failure.
Why Trump is failing — and why his failure isn’t inevitable
Why are things going so poorly for Trump? Simply put: Trump is doing Orbánism all wrong.
Most Hungarians in 2010 wanted their country to be a democracy; recent polls suggest they still do. Had Orbán simply announced an intent to go after the press’ financial independence or get rid of unfriendly judges, he would have encountered mass opposition — not just from the public, but also from Hungarian elites and the European Union.
Instead, his aim was to neutralize potential threats before they even realized they were under threat. Once that realization arrived, the free press was already shrunken and the courts were on his side.The business world was so corrupted that if a wealthy Hungarian challenged the state, the state destroyed him. Even today, at a moment where support for a charismatic new opposition leader is rising, the electoral system is so compromised that he may not have any real chance to unseat Orbán.
Trump’s weakness can be exploited — but that depends solely on American society’s commitment to doing so.
Trump has not displayed the patience or strategic acumen for such a subtle accumulation of power.
Instead of taking the time to quietly weaken the courts and systematically marginalize the press, he bull-rushed ahead with flamboyant moves like stripping billions in research dollars from Ivy League schools and sending alleged criminals to a Salvadoran gulag. He was acting as if he had already attained absolute power; that nothing the courts, the press, or the Democrats could say or do mattered.
This big-picture strategic error — a version of putting the authoritarian cart before the horse — was compounded by poor tactical choices.
“A lot of the plans are rushed and poorly thought out,” says Robert Mickey, a political scientist at Michigan who studies anti-democratic politics in America. “Given that public opinion and the midterms have a big effect on at least short-term successes, it hurts his authoritarian goals.”
You can see this clearly in the way that his war on law firms and universities is increasingly going south. At first, threatening punishments produced compliance. But then the Trump administration began making additional demands — threatening to reimpose sanctions if the targets did not submit. This made Trump look unreliable, and resistance appear a more reasonable option.
“The Trump administration is playing its hand very badly,” the political scientist Henry Farrell writes. “If Trump had been more willing to accept defectors into his camp, by sticking to deals that gave them something worth having, he would be in a much stronger situation than he is at the moment.”
There is also a problem of simple incompetence. Reportedly, Harvard’s leadership desperately wanted to make a deal with the Trump administration along the lines of Columbia’s concession. But then the Trump administration sent them a list of demands so extreme, amounting to putting the university under direct federal control, that Harvard had no choice but to fight.
So, if all this is true, does that mean that everything will sort itself out? American democracy is saved?
It’s possible — perhaps not likely, but possible — that Trump could become more savvy as the term goes on. He could correct some of his own most obvious errors, by (for example) fully backing down on the tariffs. There’s also a possibility that he makes a naked bid for power, like open defiance of a court order, and it works.
The failure of Trump’s assault on democracy is not inevitable. Its current troubles are a result, in large part, of American society’s willingness to fight: its sense that resistance is not only feasible but necessary. His weakness can be exploited — but that depends solely on American society’s commitment to doing so.
