The president of the world’s greatest democracy admires autocratic leaders. He speaks with great affection about Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. But the model that he and his MAGA acolytes have long apparently hoped to emulate was that of former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who ruled for some 20 years by boring into Hungary’s democratic institutions, including the media and the courts, and either gutting or corrupting them.
Trump tried his best, and it has now led him to the same dead end. Last spring, Hungary experienced the highest voter turnout since the country’s 1990 transition to democracy. Voters threw out Orbán and his party, Fidesz, in favor of a former Fidesz member, Peter Magyar, who’d tied Orbán to autocracy, corruption, and decreasing living standards. Orbán, who was widely expected to do whatever he could to subvert the vote, realized he faced a result too big to challenge. The numbers were overwhelming in every corner of Hungary, and Orbán could not remotely make even a laughable case for casting doubt on the result.
Last night, Trump and his party experienced a similar fate as they suffered the consequences of their brazen attacks on American democracy, of allowing the stench of corruption to envelop the White House, of starting a foolish and unpopular war, and of promising a better economy and instead delivering inflation and high gas prices. Like Orbán, he had to sit helplessly and watch his party take beatings from the Democratic Party in places where Democrats were supposedly almost extinct. (In Kansas, the Democrat Adam Hamilton will become a senator. Hamilton was born in 1964. The last Democratic senator from Kansas was born in 1879.)
[Read: Trump repeats a centuries-old mistake]
The president’s reaction to this crushing loss has been remarkably muted. As vote counting began, Trump spent his time excoriating not the Democrats but, for some reason, Fox News. On Truth Social, he railed about how much he hated the voice of one of Fox’s few in-house liberal commentators, Jessica Tarlov, and claimed that Fox’s ratings were down “because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats.” In fact, Trump said, Fox was ignoring a CNN poll that showed him to be more popular among Republicans than Abraham Lincoln. (In reality, the poll asked an open-ended question about which president people most admire, and the respondents tended to choose recent presidents.)
As the night wore on and Republican losses piled up, Trump, who often posts barrages of messages, was unusually quiet. Shortly after 10:30 p.m. eastern time, he reacted to the accelerating bad news by donning the suit of armor made of his high-tensile-strength narcissism. “I wasn’t on the Ballot,” he whined, “and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” (And then, of course: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”) The problem is that Trump, over the past weeks, challenged Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot, and millions of people apparently took him up on the offer.
By late evening, Trump’s transformation into Orbán was complete. He said—again without his characteristic combativeness—that he would accept the outcome of the election and that he would be willing to work with Democrats. Whether he means to hold to those commitments is anyone’s guess. (At the same time he was sounding conciliatory, he posted a picture of a hat with the word VETO on it.) This morning, Trump appeared at the worksite of his beloved White House ballroom. When reporters asked him about the election, he quietly deflected, saying that he would not have done anything differently, and then went back to talking about marble and kitchens.
[Read: The simple message that produced a Democratic landslide]
Whether Trump has sincerely accepted the victory of the Democrats and intends to cooperate with them in governing the country is, in a sense, irrelevant: The more important reality is that he faces an electoral result too decisive to challenge, as Orbán did. I was among the many who feared that he might inundate state election authorities with lawsuits or even try to seize ballots, but those possibilities evaporated before midnight. So many votes had been cast, even in red states, that any attempt to undermine the result would look either violently dictatorial or patently ridiculous.
Trump, like Orbán, wanted to seize power using democratic means, and then eviscerate any future challenges to his power by destroying those same practices and institutions. Like Orbán, Trump’s arrogance, contempt for the law and toleration of corruption, and staggering incompetence pushed even former supporters beyond their limits. Unlike Orbán, he does not have to leave office, and he could provoke any number of crises between now and the 2028 elections. But he seems genuinely deflated by the scale of punishment that the American people have inflicted on his party and his chosen candidates.
The Hungarians, many of whom perhaps thought Orbán was destined to be a permanent fixture in their life, relearned the lesson of their Cold War liberation: Mobilization, organization, and voting can bring down an autocracy. Last night, Americans proved that the same methods can forestall one.
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