Donald Trump IS the news cycle these days. There are so many outrageous things happening that you cannot possibly react to them all. And this is exactly what that narcissistic orange pinhead wants. In 2017, Axios reported that “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each Presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” His current domination of the news is meat and drink to him. I wish I could ignore him, but I can’t. It’s not safe for any of us to ignore Trump.

            He’s a big threat to Canada and to global peace and stability. He’s also a threat to the US constitutional democracy and that’s the issue I want to look at today. It is, in my humble opinion, the scariest development because it is the attack on the institutions of government that allows him to push the rest of his lunacy. There are, apparently, no guardrails against this guy. How did this happen?

            The answer is, he’s following a recipe known as Project 2025 written by the Heritage Foundation. But Project 2025 is adapted from a great Hungarian recipe popularized by Viktor Orban of whom Trump said in January this year “There is a great man, a great leader in Europe — Viktor Orban. … He is the prime minister of Hungary. He is a very great leader, a very strong man.”  

            I may someday dig more deeply into Project 2025, but I’ve not gotten there yet. Other than some references to Project 2025 that I plan to steal shamelessly from my main source article for this essay, Project 2025 will have to wait. The Orban connection is worth examining In tracing Orban’s path to power, I have relied heavily on an excellent article written for the European Council on Foreign Relations in October 2024 by Jeremy Shapiro and Zsuzsanna Végh. If you’re interested in the finer details of Orban’s rise, the piece is entitled “The Orbanisation of America: Hungary’s lessons for Donald Trump” and I recommend it highly. 

Viktor Orban is the darling of the world’s conservative movement. He has on several occasions hosted, and been the keynote speaker at, the Conservative Political Action Commttee (CPAC) Europe conferences, and he’s scheduled to do that again in 2025. The CPAC America conferences have also featured Orban as speaker several times. The Shapiro article details how Orban achieved his strongman status and reputation, and it makes some predictions about the Trump regime that are already looking quite prophetic.

Viktor Orban was first elected Prime Minister of Hungary in 1998. His party was defeated in an election in 2002. His followers didn’t storm the capital and try to disrupt the peaceful transition of power, but Orban and his Fidesz party insisted, as did Trump in 2020, that they’d been beaten only because of electoral fraud. He was ultimately re-elected in 2010. Fidesz formed an alliance with a minority party and created a powerful enough majority to allow them to pass and amend any legislation, and even rewrite the constitutional rules of the democratic game. Orban immediately set about using his majority to consolidate power within the executive and to gain total control over most state institutions. 

Orban “adopted a populist and nativist rhetoric that targets various external and internal groups – including critics of the government as well as various minorities and vulnerable groups – as potential threats to the country, its population, and its culture.” (Another lesson learned by the orange one). He has portrayed the EU, “Brussels”, the “liberal elite”, and critical politicians as enemies of the Hungarian people. So too are “illegal migrants” who are threats to Hungary and its Christian culture. Mirroring the QANON conspiracy, Fidesz declared a crisis over sexual minorities. In 2021, it adopted a so-called anti-paedophile law that gained a strong homophobic character when, by the introduction of amendments regarding sexual minorities, the law conflated homosexuality and paedophilia. Using his perpetual declarations of crisis, he has used “Emergency” powers as a tool to eliminate checks and balances in the system. Hungary has been governed under a state of emergency for over four years under various pretexts, sidelining both the standard rules of the governance process and the other actors in it. 

(Trump invoked an Energy Emergency in his first days in power to free the oil and gas industry from most regulatory constraints).

Orban now completely controls the courts in Hungary. First, he reduced the control of the courts by passing legislation to limit the scope of their authority. The court’s authority to review budget-related laws was annulled, allowing the government to implement economic policies without judicial oversight during Hungary’s economic and financial crisis. He then took over control of the judiciary by passing rules that changed the appointments process to ensure that only people loyal to Fidesz would be appointed to the bench. 

To gain control of state institutions, Orban got rid of career civil servants and replaced them with Fidesz loyalists. (Trump and Musk are busily doing that right now).

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has deemed Hungarian elections since 2014  to be free but not fair. Abuses of the electoral process include excessive gerrymandering, uneven campaign financing, misuse of state funds for election purposes and restricted access to the media for opposition parties.

Orban has near-total control of all news media in Hungary and uses that control to stifle dissent and silence his opposition. He eliminated regulations that prevented media monopoly positions. He empowered the state’s Media Authority to issue penalties and/or remove broadcasting licences for perceived “unbalanced or amoral content”, thus entrenching state censorship. New outlets that vocally supported the ruling party have been rewarded with state advertising contracts. “These outlets often run smear campaigns to discredit journalists and experts, making widespread use of elaborate conspiracy theories.”

 The Orban government has acted to muzzle and control non-governmental agencies (NGO’s). The State Audit Office and the Sovereignty Protection Authority (SPA) both have “broad and unchecked powers to investigate the activities of civil society organizations and media outlets.

In addition to stifling dissent through control of the judiciary and of the media, Orban has worked to eliminate dissent by providing “an ideological justification for its state capture.” Think tanks and foundations tied to Fidesz provide intellectual support for the government’s agenda. They’ve infiltrated the educational sphere, diminishing teacher autonomy and they’ve undermined the autonomy of Hungary’s public universities. One private college with ties to Fidesz now runs programmes from primary school to university and recruits students from Hungary and Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries, with the aim of creating an ideologically aligned intellectual elite. Think of it as a nation-wide brainwashing exercise.

   Although I’ve credited the Hungarians with being the source of the many similar activities that show up in Project 2025 and in Trump’s speeches and actions, some of these things have been part of the Republican approach since before Orban. The Koch brothers created foundations that were designed to insinuate libertarian teachings into university programs as far back as the 1970’s and 1980’s. Operation Redmap, the systematic gerrymandering of congressional districts to benefit Republicans has been in effect since 2010. But despite those earlier steps in America, Orban’s career is now seen by the right wing as a roadmap for how to defeat the liberal democratic process. Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation and the man behind Project 2025, has spoken of the country not only as a model of conservative statecraft, but as the model.

            Fidesz is like the Republicans in that both advance a strongly social right wing platform with fundamental religious overtones. They are opposed to immigration and immigrants of colour, to sexual liberation of any kind, and they are committed to the preservation of their traditional and fundamentalist Christian heritage. And both parties appear to be seeking to recapture a glorious past.

It seems that Orban and the Fidesz party are trying to take Hungary back to the good ol’ days as a Communist state.   The Hungarian government has employed the far-reaching restructuring or even shutting down of existing markets, limited competition, increased State ownership and employed direct price regulation, including price freezes to control their economy. 

The USA, by contrast, appears to be heading in the opposite direction, trying to get back to the “gilded age” of the late 1800’s – capitalist tycoons, the company store, an economically enslaved workforce, isolationism, international tariffs and President McKinley whom Trump reveres.

Orban’s destination doesn’t matter to MAGA. They like the socially repressive platform, and they love the pro-autocracy methods that Orban has used to attain his goals. That his desired end state doesn’t appear to comport with the Heritage Foundation’s view for America doesn’t matter to MAGA.

            Make no mistake. The attack on democracy is real and intentional. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Vice-President Vance have both stated concerns about the pitfalls of pure democracy and have suggested that more centralized control would be effective. President Trump has openly expressed his admiration of strongmen such as Orban, Turkiye’s Recep Erdogan and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. 

            The authors, Shapiro and Vegh have predicted in this paper, in October 2024 before Trump was re-elected, that we would see the following:

• Creation of a powerful executive that can overwhelm the other branches
• Filling of all key positions with Trump loyalists as opposed to people selected from the traditional Republican elite and replacement of 

up to 50000 persons from the Civil Service with conservatives. 

• The Trump administration would likely use impoundment of funds as a tool. 
• Trump will likely use “acting” officials to bypass the need for Senate approval.
•  The use of personal attacks against judges for rulings he disagrees with, which might serve to de-legitimize court decisions and intimidate some judges.
• Election reforms that include mechanisms for purging the voter rolls of individuals deemed suspicious, limiting voter registration and access, and undercutting the impartiality of election administration.
• Actions to further loosen campaign finance rules to allow larger and less transparent donations.
• An effort to regulate the media and non-government organisations.
• The strategic use of government contracts and advertising budgets to tilt the media playing field. 
• Massive across-the-board tariffs, severe immigration restrictions, and reduced US commitment to allies and alliances.
• Seeking a deal with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine and perhaps even a deal with Xi Jinping over Taiwan.

You will note that many of those predicted activities are already in progress.

Hungary is no longer classified as a democracy, but as an electoral autocracy. It is clear that the Europeans, from whom I have drawn most of the foregoing, foresee Trump following the Orban recipe towards autocracy. And that raises two questions. The first is “does that really matter to Canada?” The second is “what if anything can we do about it?”

The first question is easy. Yes, it matters.  The 2023 Democracy Index tells us that the quality of some existing democracies, including especially the United States of America, is declining. The Democracy Index essay “argues that we have entered an era of intensifying great power rivalries, which if left unchecked, have the potential to unleash a devastating conflict…According to this perspective, the world is bifurcating between democracies and autocracies, with the former being proponents of peace and the latter being instigators of war.

“Democratic Peace Theory” suggests that democracies are superior to other political systems, including all authoritarian models, because they favour reconciliation and peace over confrontation and war. The empirical evidence appears to support the theory of the democratic peace. There have been no wars between democracies since 1946.

So yes, a failure of democracy in the US matters to Canadians, because that failiure makes us more vulnerable to an autocratic neighbouring state which is becoming more aggressive and confrontational.

Which brings me to question number 2 – what can we do about it? 

The answer appears to be “frighteningly little”. Trump appears to be bent on sending Canada into a deep recession which might result in up to 7 – 8% unemployment in this country. We can survive that, if we pull together, but it won’t be fun. However, if Trump throws all caution to the winds and simply invades, then it’s game over. We shouldn’t bother to fire a shot, because there is no prospect that we could win a shooting war with the US. All we’d be doing is asking people to die. For nothing, in the end.

            However, what we can do is to defend and protect our democracy north of the border by doing things that help to counter the Orban recipe for autocracy. And what that implies is that we need to value the institutions that Orban subverted.

            The first thing we can do is to ensure that we are getting our information from reliable sources. There is no credibility to social media sources, especially with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk tucked firmly into Trump’s pocket. So, everyone, use the mainstream media. Get off X, get off Facebook and read a newspaper again. Online or paper, I don’t much care. But get yourself back into the newspaper habit.

Canada is blessed with a dozen or more highly credible newspapers, and three TV networks (CBC, CTV and Global) that are all well respected by MediaBiasFactCheck. The Toronto Star seems to be the the only left leaning major newspaper in the country. Pierre Poilievre, who professes to despise the media, should be very pleased to know that a strong majority of Canada’s newspapers are actually rated as right-center biased. But most of those major papers are well respected for their factual reporting and reasonably neutral positions. The National Post is a bit too right biased for my taste but it is rated as a credible source with high marks for factual reporting, So if you’re of conservative bend, you might like it. The Toronto Sun, Calgary Sun and Le Journal de Montreal are unreliable and should be avoided. 

We are rated as a country with excellent press freedom, and we should value that, preserve it and use it. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to subscribe to the publication of your choice and help keep good journalism alive in Canada.

The second thing we want to value and preserve is the quality of our non-partisan judiciary. I’ve written about this once before, but let me repeat myself a little bit. In Ontario, Doug Ford has taken actions to change the way judges are selected, setting things up so that the Attorney General (Ford’s appointee) makes the critical decisions, as opposed to a panel from the Ontario Law Society. We need to resist the notion that it’s appropriate in any way to appoint a judge because she has a clearly identifiable political leaning. That’s the last thing we want. We want neutral, unbiased, clinical, objective people on the bench.

Next – let’s acknowledge the value of our Civil Service. Sure, we might like to improve government efficiency and we might like to reduce regulatory red tape. But we have a civil service which is largely unbiased. They try to implement the laws and programs that have been designed by our elected lawmakers. And although we love to criticize our civil servants, the Civil Service is not a merciless monolith designed to grind you down. Remember that these are our neighbours and friends – ordinary working people like you and me. We absolutely must insist that senior civil service appointments are mostly merit-based promotions from within, not partisan ass kissing appointees. Parachuting in an outsider to run a Government Department ought to be an exception and it should get severe scrutiny any time it happens, and especially If it’s a friend of the PM or the Premier.

Finally, (and I’ve written about this before too), we must not, ever, open up our political financing rules to mimic what we see in the USA. I believe that much of the grievous partisan divisions in the States result from the ridiculous amounts of money that they spend on their elections. Let’s keep things simple here and rely on debates and interviews and published platforms to inform us of what our politicians stand for.

            There may be more, but this is getting too long, so it’s time to stop. The orange clown will undoubtedly get me back on my soapbox soon enough.

            Let me know what you think in comments below.

Dennis