How to break Trump’s power

A new look at the lessons from Hungary

Orban and Trump in the Oval Office.

It will take a massive electoral defeat to put Trumpism fully behind us.

That’s why the fall of Viktor Orban is such a talisman for democracy-loving Americans. Hungarians overwhelmingly threw out their entrenched, corrupt, authoritarian leader in April.

What can we learn from them about how to cleanse the country of ours?

I wrote a bit about this when it happened. My initial takeaway was that if Hungary is a model, then the way to motivate voters across party lines is with a more aggressive, principled, and insurgent pro-democracy agenda than anything the current Democratic leadership is offering right now.

Now M. Gessen, New York Times opinion columnist and my go-to for all things Eastern European, has weighed in with a must-read piece headlined “This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too.”

She writes that one lesson of now-Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s success “lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network.“ Magyar had somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers. The U.S. population is 36 times the size of Hungary’s, so that would equate to at least a million people here.

Another lesson: “Old-fashioned in-person politics can be a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.” Magyar was a relentless campaigner.

Another lesson: “Don’t mince words.” Magyar didn’t just call Orban’s regime “corrupt,” he “called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise.”

Another lesson: Be an outsider. Magyar “was not a member of the old opposition, whose policies had led to the discontent that made Orban’s rise possible and whose timidity had helped perpetuate Orban’s power.”

Another lesson: Voters don’t only care about pocketbook issues. Post-election polling showed that Hungarian voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far, way more than the economy, and also frequently cited “lies,” “fearmongering, war rhetoric,” and “people got fed up.”

Gessen writes:

In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage.

Gessen also gives Magyar credit for thinking big:

In his inaugural speech to Parliament, broadcast on giant screens set up around the square, Peter Magyar said that voters had handed him a mandate “not just to change the government, but to change the system. To start over.

So, here’s my takeaway: Hungary tells us the way to beat an authoritarian is with an enormous popular movement led by uncorrupted, charismatic people full of moral outrage and committed to radical reconstruction.

So does that mean the answer lies in a group like Indivisible, rather than the current Democratic party? And in someone like AOC, not someone like Josh Shapiro?

What do you think?

Day 13 in Newark

Protests outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark are in their 13^th day, while an unknown number of immigrants inside remain engaged in a hunger and labor strike to call attention to the facility’s inhumane conditions and the denial of their due process rights.

I wrote last week about how ICE had begun routinely assaulting protesters outside the facility.

In a strange turn of events, New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill on Friday sent state police to Delaney to take over from ICE, whose conduct she decried as too aggressive. ICE itself posed a threat to public safety, she said. Exactly right.

But not long after the state troopers arrived on Friday night, they broke out the riot gear and the horses, and took up where ICE had left off, firing tear gas and shooting pepper spray at protesters with little or no provocation.

On Saturday night, troopers – now using flash-bang grenades as well -- aggressively pushed protesters more than half a mile away from the facility. And early on Sunday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka – an outspoken opponent of Delaney Hall – nevertheless declared a curfew, violating the First Amendment rights of protesters who up until then had been holding a round-the-clock vigil.

Sunday night, when several dozen entirely peaceful protesters refused to leave at nightfall, troopers again responded with violence, shooting at least two people with rubber bullets and arresting 61 people, including at least two credentialed photojournalists.

On Monday, Baraka sent Newark Police officers – notably not in riot gear or on horseback -- to take over from the troopers. Monday and Tuesday nights were calm. The curfew has also been lifted.

Meanwhile, the situation inside Delaney Hall appears unchanged.

Indivisible is hosting a Zoom briefing on “Delaney Hall and Beyond: Showing Up Strategically” Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, “for anyone looking for what to do in this moment to support the strikers and nonviolently take on Trump’s detention and deportation machine.”

This is Very Bad

A federal jury in Spokane, Washington, last week found the “Spokane Three” guilty on felony conspiracy charges for their part in a June 2025 anti-ICE protest.

Felony charges!

Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II were found guilty of “conspiring to impede law enforcement officers or injure property used in the execution of their duties.” They face up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

As the Spokesman-Review reported:

The case widely examined the lines between the First Amendment and when assembly can turn into a crime. Protesters that day had showed up to Spokane’s ICE facility at 411 W. Cataldo Ave. to sit in front of a bus to prevent it from taking a group of immigrants to a federal detention center in Tacoma. The initial group that stationed themselves in front of the bus, including Archer, had intended to remain nonviolent and were prepared to be arrested.

When protesters saw agents attempting to leave out of a parking lot gate, they ran to the gate and stood in front of it. Agents then came outside, walked into the crowd and began pushing and grabbing people, pulling them towards the ground, video footage from the trial showed.

At some point, protesters slashed the tires of the transport vehicles and others linked arms around a red U.S. Customs and Border Patrol van to stop it from leaving.

As Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian: “By this logic, any protest could be a conspiracy.”

Archer’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich, told the Spokesman-Review:

I think it was an extraordinarily aggressive approach to prosecution of protests. And it certainly is going to chill people who want to utilize their First Amendment right to dissent against government actions that they don’t agree with … And it is heartbreaking to see that is the climate of the nation we live in.

By contrast, it’s a dream come true for the fascism-adjacent, like the Manhattan Institute, which as Wired reports is working hard “to classify minor protest-related crimes as ‘civil terrorism.’”

The goal is “to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during a protest as felonies that would carry 18-month prison sentences as punishment,” Wired reports.

This comes “amid a broader Trump administration effort to crack down on leftist organizations, causes, and social movements, while recasting acts of nonviolent civil disobedience as potential crimes.”

MoveOn’s Next Move

MoveOn rolled out its 2026 midterm election strategy last week. The plan is to reach out in particular to people who – for whatever reason -- voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but sat out the 2024 election when Kamala Harris was the Democratic nominee.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 15 percent of Biden voters – or about 12 million people – did not vote for Harris. MoveOn puts that number at 19 million.

MoveOn is calling those missing voters the “skippers,” and it intends to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers to find them and win them back. That will entail contacting and persuading skippers directly, as well as volunteering for progressive candidates, and canvassing.

“These are the most important voters for us, and the outcome of the midterms rests on bringing hundreds of thousands of them back into the fold,” MoveOn Executive Director Katie Bethell said.

Warehouse Watch

NBC News reports that DHS is “looking into selling some of the large warehouses that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had purchased earlier this year to serve as mega-detention centers for immigrants.”

DHS officials told NBC that ICE no longer needs the capacity to hold 100,000 immigrants.

ICE is currently detaining as many as 70,000 immigrants on a daily basis.

Project Salt Box reports that DHS paid just over $1 billion for the eleven warehouses it bought this year, and is unlikely to recoup anywhere near as much. “A review of state tax and land records and commercial sales data shows the government paid above the most recent valuation at every one of the sites and above recent market comparables at most of them,” the group reports. “In Socorro, Texas, ICE paid $123 million for a property last valued at about $11 million. In Flowery Branch, Ga., it paid $68 million for a site previously valued at $400,000….” The list goes on.

You’re Being Tracked

A broad coalition of grassroots, civil-rights and press-freedom groups has launched a new campaign called “Solidarity Over Surveillance” to “engage individuals, communities and organizations in the fight against corporate and government-sponsored surveillance.”

Its goals are “to stop data brokers from selling sensitive user information to law enforcement; protect dissent, privacy and anonymity in an age of AI-powered surveillance; empower people to use open-records requests to expose local and state governments’ surveillance partnerships; help mobilize local resistance to the construction of extractive data centers; and challenge the government’s weaponization of domestic-terrorism powers.”

The Past Week in the Courts

• A federal judge in Virginia blocked all activity related to Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and other political allies. Plaintiffs represented by Democracy Forward had filed suit against the fund on May 22. The issue is probably moot now that acting attorney general Todd Blanche has said the fund has been scrapped. But you never know.

• A federal judge in Washington prohibited the National Park Service from taking action against a group for displaying an “8647” flag as part of its protest encampment near the National Mall. The ruling by Judge Randolph D. Moss bodes poorly for DOJ’s preposterous indictment of former FBI director James Comey for posting a photo of seashells arranged into the same numbers. “Not every use of the slang phrase ‘86’ constitutes a threat of violence,” Moss wrote. “[T]o the contrary, it is most often used to mean that an item is no longer available or that someone or something should be removed, ejected, or thrown out.” His conclusion: “no reasonable observer could have viewed Plaintiff’s display of the flag as a threat to the President’s life or physical safety.”

• A federal judge in Denver blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by giving its supercomputing center away. The supercomputing center is a pillar of the nation’s atmospheric research. Judge R. Brooks Jackson agreed that the move was an act of political revenge for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’s refusal to release from prison Tina Peters, a former county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines in an attempt to support Trump’s election-rigging conspiracy theories. Ironically, Polis caved and released her last week.

• The ACLU is asking a federal judge in Tennessee to order members of the 31-agency Memphis Safe Task Force to stop retaliating against activists who are monitoring their behavior. The task force, a Trump creation, has been wreaking havoc in Memphis since September. Thousands of federal, state, and local agents aggressively patrol the city, terrorizing immigrants and people of color in particular. The request for an injunction includes declarations from community observers describing pretextual traffic stops, surveillance, bumper-rushing, and false arrests.

End Notes

• From ProPublica: “U.S. Lawmakers Demand Reforms to Immigration Officers’ Use of Tear Gas and Pepper Spray.”

• From In These Times: “How Resisting Trumpism Could Revive the U.S. Labor Movement.”

• In honor of Pride Month, from MoveOn: Buy a “Queer Joy Is Resistance” Unisex Cotton T-Shirt.