Trump’s mostly forgotten plan to put the media under his thumb didn’t work the first time. It might if he gets another chance.
Donald Trump entertained Hungarian prime minister (possibly for life) Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago on Friday and lavished him with the praise he reserves for the world’s great dictators. “He says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader,” gushed Trump.
Orbán is a slightly tricky kind of leader to categorize. He’s not a dictator, exactly. What’s he’s done is rig the rules of the game to a point where it’s almost impossible for his party to lose. His methods include stacking the judiciary and important government agencies with loyal cronies and aggressive gerrymandering, but his most important maneuvers have entailed gaining almost complete control over the Hungarian media ecosystem.
Orban leaned on the owners of Hungary’s main media organs to fall in line or sell to his allies, so that all of them now follow his party line in the same way Fox News advocates for Republican Party interests. Andrew Kramer, the New York Times Budapest bureau chief, calls Orbán’s regime a “propaganda state.”
One of the most underappreciated developments in Trump’s first term was an effort to employ the exact same model in the U.S. In an effort to pressure Jeff Bezos to make the Washington Post more friendly, Trump directed the Pentagon to deny a lucrative contract to Amazon, which it did. He also threatened AT&T both publicly and by using the Justice Department to block a proposed merger to pressure CNN.
Neither gambit succeeded at producing pliant coverage. But his pressure campaign failed in part because his targets expected Trump to be a fleeting phenomenon who would depart the scene after one term, after which the Republican Party would return to normal. (It is difficult to remember now, but Trump’s miserable approval ratings were widely seen as proof he would lose decisively.) The safest move for media barons targeted by Trump was to wait him out. That calculation might look very different in a second Trump term.
This is especially so because the Republican Party has been transformed in Trump’s image. His crude efforts to put the media under his thumb got little pushback and none whatsoever from within the party. If you listen to Trump’s Republican critics enumerate his flaws, they will cite January 6, perhaps scold him for his trade policies or lack of message discipline, but never reprimand him for using state power to lean on the media.
That’s not because they approve of the tactic in the abstract. If President Biden did the same thing to Fox News that Trump did to CNN and the Washington Post, impeachment would be the mildest GOP response. There would be mobs in the streets. But Republicans were willing to look the other way when Trump used state power as a crude bludgeon against the media.
The discourse around democracy suffers from a tendency to frame the question in binary terms. Will Trump end American democracy? Possibly — and the risk of him doing so alone justifies supporting his opponent. But the more likely scenario is not that Trump will destroy democracy completely but that he will further weaken it. The full descent to Putin’s Russia begins with a stop at Orbán’s Hungary. And Trump could not be more clear that this is where he intends to lead us.
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