Donald Trump Is No Viktor Orbán—He’s Well on His Way to Being Worse

In a recent report, Carrier and Carothers did a detailed analysis comparing Trump’s administration to regimes in Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey that have taken power in recent years and eroded democratic norms. Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro are the leaders abroad most often likened to Trump. And in all of these nations, democracy backsliding occurred largely because of executive overreach, as opposed to say, a military coup or civil war. 

Trump, according to Carothers and Carrier, is employing three general tactics. He is personally dominating the executive branch of government much more than previous American presidents, firing basically anyone in any agency not aligned with him. Second, his presidential-controlled executive branch is then dominating other parts of government, ignoring and overriding court rulings, congressional appropriations, and states and cities’ decisions. 

Third, the administration is using its power to curb the independence of U.S. civil society, for instance by forcing law firms and universities to abide by the administration’s edicts or face the loss of federal funding and security clearances.