Last week, former Chicago congresswoman, Marie Newman, wrote that “There is no question we must fight and be a strong, loud and rigidly-clear opposition force. We used to be clear as a party that Anti-American, authoritarianism and fascism were wrong and to be opposed, vigorously and visibly by our leaders. Sadly, that may not be the sentiment held by a small group of our top Dem Senate leaders. They may oppose fascism, but are unwilling to oppose it vigorously.” Good description of Chuck Schumer, since I’ve known since we were high school students in Flatbush, not a guy known for taking any chances:
Schumer is often referred to as “the Senator from Wall Street” but it wasn't always that way. When he was first elected to the state legislature (from my district in Brooklyn), he very briefly toyed with the idea of presenting himself as a progressive populist. He even attacked Wall Street once. But they barked so loudly at him, that, always the political coward with his own career trajectory uppermost in his mind, he immediately raised the white flag and never crossed them again.
If you’re putting together a resistance movement, Schumer is the last person you want to think of— unless you’re trying to figure out who is most likely to sell the movement out for his own grubby self-interest. There were people like that all over Nazi-occupied Europe, like Karel Čurda in Czechoslovakia, British con man Harold Cole in France, Mathilde Carré, (“La Chatte”) in France, Prosper Dezitter in Belgium, Engelbertus Fukken (Anton de Wilde) in Holland, Henry Oliver Rinnan in Norway, Milivoje "Milo" Perović in Serbia, all sentenced to death.
Fast forward a few decades to generally fascist Hungary, where anti-fascist activist András Pethő, is best known for his been reporting on corruption and on the rise of Viktor Orbán. He was one of the founders, and now leads, Direkt36, an investigative-journalism center in Hungary. Yesterday he noted— as Maddow had the night before— that Trumpist America is starting to look a lot like Orbán’s Hungary, particularly in the way the two authoritarians worked to muzzle the press. Pethő has watched how Orbán built his own fascist-oriented media infrastructure, while disabling Norman, mainstream news outlets. He sees the same thing happening in the U.S. now.
In Hungary, journalists are expected to send edited interview transcripts to their interviewees. The idea is that if the interviewees think you took something they said out of context, they can ask for changes before publication. But in this case, Orbán’s press team sent back the text with some of his answers entirely deleted and rewritten. When my editors and I told them we wouldn’t accept this, they said they wouldn’t allow the interview to be published.
In the end, we published it without their edits. That was the last time I interviewed Viktor Orbán. And when he returned to power in 2010 after a landslide election victory, he made sure that he would never have to answer uncomfortable questions again.
One of the first pieces of legislation his party introduced was a media law that restructured how the sector is regulated in Hungary. The government set up a new oversight agency and appointed hard-line loyalists to its key positions. This agency later blocked proposed mergers and acquisitions by independent media companies, while issuing friendly rulings for pro-government businesses.
The Orbán government also transformed public broadcasting— which had previously carried news programs challenging politicians from all parties— into a mouthpiece of the state. The service’s newly appointed leaders got rid of principled journalists and replaced them with governing-party sympathizers who could be counted on to toe the line.
…This machine is not even pretending to do journalism in the traditional sense. It is not like Fox News, which still has some professional anchors and reporters alongside the openly pro-Trump media personalities who dominate the channel in prime time.
The machine built under Orbán has only one purpose, and it is to serve the interests of the government. There is hardly any autonomy. Editors and reporters get directions from the very top of the regime on what they can and cannot cover. If there is a message that must be delivered, the whole machine jumps into action: Hundreds of outlets will publish the same story with the same headline and same photos.
… A few years ago, I investigated the pro-government takeover of Index, another of Hungary’s most popular news sites. I obtained a recording in which the outlet’s editor in chief described to one of his employees how Index had received financial backing from a friend of Orbán’s, a former gas fitter who has become Hungary’s richest man thanks to lucrative state contracts. The editor in chief warned that Index had to be careful with news about Orbán’s friend because, without him, “there will be no one who will put money into” the outlet.
Just as Orbán explained in his CPAC speech, this sophisticated propaganda machine has played a crucial role in his ability to stay in power for more than 15 years. When the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a watchdog group of which the United States is a member, published its report on Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections, it pointed to the media as a major weakness in the country’s democratic system.
“The lack of impartial information in the media about the main contestants, the absence of debates among the major electoral competitors, and the independent media’s limited access to public information and activities of national and local government significantly limited voters’ opportunity to make an informed choice,” the election monitors concluded, after a vote that yet again cemented the power of Orbán’s ruling party.
What has happened in Hungary might not happen in the United States. Hungary, a former Eastern Bloc nation that broke free of oppressive Soviet control only three and a half decades ago, has never had such a robust and vibrant independent media scene as the one the U.S. has enjoyed for centuries. But if someone had told me when Orbán returned to power that we would end up with a propaganda machine where the free Hungarian media had once been, with many of the old outlets shut down or transformed into government mouthpieces, I would not have believed it.
And I see ominous signs in the U.S. that feel similar to the early phases of what we experienced here. When I read about the Associated Press being banned from White House events, that reminds me of how my colleagues at Direkt36 have been denied entry to Orbán’s rare press conferences. When I see the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump, that reminds me of how big corporations and their wealthy executives, including the owner of my former workplace, bent the knee to Orbán.
When I read about ABC settling a Trump lawsuit of dubious merit— and CBS contemplating the same— it brings to mind the way the courts and the government itself can be used to manipulate and bully media organizations into submission.
Journalists and anyone else who cares about the free press must understand that democratic institutions are more fragile than they look, especially if they face pressure from ruthless and powerful political forces. This is particularly true for the news media, which is also being challenged by the technological revolution in how we communicate information. Just because an outlet has been around for decades and has a storied history does not mean that it will be around forever.
If any good news can be learned from Hungary’s unhappy experience, it is that unless your country turns into a fully authoritarian regime similar to China or Russia, there are still ways for independent journalism to survive. Even in Hungary, some outlets manage to operate independently from the government. Many of them, including the one I run, rely primarily on their audience for support in the form of donations or subscriptions. We learned that it is easy for billionaires and media CEOs to be champions of press freedom when the risks are low, but that you can’t count on them when things get tough. So we rely on our readers instead.
If they feel like what you are doing is valuable, they will be your real allies in confronting the suffocating power of autocracy.
Jonathan Bernstein would rather people view what’s happening as more an attack than a crisis. He won’t be calling what Trump is up to a “Constitutional crisis... Trump’s administration,” he wrote, is now either outright defying judicial orders or, at the very least, making improbable legal arguments for why what they’re doing doesn’t constitute that serious step. It’s part of a serious attack on the Constitution… What’s happening now is a sustained, multi-prong attack on the Constitution and the rule of law by Donald Trump and his allies. It didn’t just happen. Nor is there any question about who is responsible for what’s happening overall, even if there are reasonable quibbles over exactly which actions are legitimately contested, which are clear overreach, and which are even worse. We need to say plainly: The president is attacking the Constitutional order.”
He thinks it’s likely that the Constitution won’t be nullified outright and “will remain formally in effect, and that in fact Trump will continue to (falsely, of course) claim he’s the one respecting it while all his many enemies seek to undermine it and him… [T]he real question is whether we’ll have ‘normal’ free and fair elections, and the most likely answer is that Trump and his allies will try, and may or may not succeed, in tilting things to themselves as much as he can.”
We’ll see what happens in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and the special election in Florida’s 6th congressional district, both on April 1. “Obvious violations, such as the current attempt by North Carolina Republicans, who are still attempting to steal a seat on their state supreme court months after the November election, have been rare and may stay that way. We’ll see. Expect instead (for example) election laws that change things on the margins; expect, perhaps, increased violence or threats of violence against potential candidates; expect, perhaps, disruptions of Democratic campaigns by thugs encouraged by Trump’s pardons of the January 6 criminals. But how much of that will happen, and how state and local election administrators will cope with it is unknown and will probably vary in lots of ways. Again: So far at least (and yes, it’s only been a few weeks!), elections are going on normally, as are many other forms of political activity.”
Yesterday, AOC told her followers, without mention Schumer by name, but certainly describing him, that she believes “that we need to be a party of brawlers for the working class. And we have turned into a party that caters to people who call themselves ‘upper middle class,’ but they're actually wealthy. We've been chasing this affluent group, making all of these little concessions, and hoping that working people don't notice. I think the most famous one that comes to mind is [Schumer recruit] Kyrsten Sinema doing her little curtsy when she voted down the $15 minimum wage. But it wasn't just her. That was the most public expression of it, but there were a bunch of Democrats in the Senate behind her that also voted it down.” The Vichy Dems that day who joined every anti-working class Republican were:
Tom Carper (DE)
Chris Coons (DE)
Maggie Hassan (NH)
Angus King (I-ME)
Joe Manchin (WV)
Jeanne Shaheen (NH)
Kyrsten Sinema (AZ)
Jon Tester (MT)
Trump's second term won’t simply be a continuation of his first— it will continue to be something far more radical. The current Trump presidency isn’t just about governing but about entrenching power in a way that makes future elections irrelevant. His administration systematically dismantles its real authority. This is the Orbán playbook in action: preserving the outer shell of democracy while hollowing out its core, using the language of constitutionalism to justify the erosion of constitutional rights. Just as Orbán manipulated Hungary’s media, judiciary, and political opposition to consolidate his grip on power, Trump and his enablers are methodically undermining America’s democratic institutions— packing courts, defanging regulatory agencies, and co-opting the press through intimidation and financial pressure.
The difference is that Trump, unlike Orbán, lacks the patience or ideological discipline to execute this strategy with surgical precision. His approach is more erratic and grievance-driven, which creates openings for resistance. But this shouldn’t lead to complacency. Trump’s allies— figures like Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, and the Federalist Society cadre shaping his judicial appointments— have the strategic vision that he lacks. Their goal isn’t just to win another election; it’s to ensure that future elections are irrelevant, either by gutting the administrative state, further stacking the courts, or cementing minority rule through voter suppression and gerrymandering.
What we need are real resistance fighters like AOC, Summer Lee, Becca Balint, Greg Casar, Jamie Raskin, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, Robert Garcia and Jasmine Crockett in the House and senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, not useless windbags like Chuck Schumer, Elissa Slotkin, Kirsten Gillibrand, John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego and Cory Booker. And candidates running for House seats like Josh Weil (FL) and Saikat Chakrabarti (CA).
