“It is important to remember that, as dire as things are, the United States is not Hungary.
When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.
America’s federal structure also creates quite a few checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.
The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, does not depend on.
But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.
While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.
This is the case against despair.
As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given — especially not the outcome of a struggle as titanic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since the moment he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to begin deploying them.
Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into reality. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.”
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/382696/donald-trump-wins-2024-election-results-democracy