Viktor Orbán’s defeat showed Democrats how to end Trump’s rule.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
This past week, we discovered anew that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner—who serves as a chief Trump administration diplomatic envoy—also profits mightily from business deals with countries with whom he negotiates. We learned, further, that Donald Trump’s negotiated settlements between himself and the IRS benefit … himself. As we already knew, Trump deploys his pardon power to benefit himself and his cronies. And that $63 million in “settlements” between Trump and big tech and media companies that were earmarked for Trump’s presidential library? That seems to be unaccounted for.
In short, we are so incredibly deep into the Trump-corruption tar pits, we barely notice that this is an administration that uses self-dealing as brick and mortar to build yet more corruption. As the recent example of Hungary’s ousting of authoritarian President Viktor Orbán demonstrates, though, there is the potential to come back from this. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick and former Obama administration ethics czar Norm Eisen discussed the ways in which Hungary’s Peter Magyar used anti-corruption as a shorthand to talk to voters about reinstituting democracy, and how that language can succeed in upcoming elections in the United States. Eisen served as the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014. He is the co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, which has been helping lead the successful national court fights against the Trump administration, and he’s the co-founder and publisher of the Contrarian. An excerpt of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, appears below.
Dahlia Lithwick: Do you have a pulldown menu of which instrumentalities of democracy you would fix first, if Republicans lose the next election? What is essential?
Norm Eisen: People don’t want to hear about Locke and Burke and John Rawls. The way democracy hits them is they want to have a better life, and there’s nothing wrong with talking to people about the cost-of-living crisis. That’s not smaller than talking about ethereal democracy ideas. That’s what Magyar did, and he did it brilliantly. He connected the cost of living with the corruption. He made a deal with the right, left, and center in Hungary, and he was ruthless, and rigorous, and disciplined in making this commitment. Essentially he said: I’m gonna stop the stealing. They are stealing from you and making everything more expensive. I’m going to bring costs down, and that includes better government services. It was a very simple message.
Politics is not for the faint of heart, and you’ve got to tell the people what you did. The Biden administration had some of the most amazing policy accomplishments since LBJ, but not enough people knew about it. So to drive the message home, you have to have a popular leader who is maintaining that compact with the people.
And it needs to be a big tent. I like to call it A to Z, Abigail Spanberger and Andy Beshear representing one end of the tent, all the way over to Zohran Mamdani at the other. That’s what we need. People have wildly different views on Israel, for example, but in the big tent there are other issues that are larger, that transcend that. Magyar did that; he said: I don’t wanna talk about that other stuff. We’re gonna talk about costs and corruption.
So costs and corruption are part one, then the rest of the pulldown menu is dealing with all the power centers. In no particular order: Article 3, the courts in the United States, must be cleaned up—they’re a mess. There’s been a decadeslong project to break our courts, and the courts up to and including the Supreme Court will have to be unbroken. Also, Congress has given up its power, and it must claw back its war powers and more. And then we have to do more to constrain Article 2.
That first item: corruption. That was a huge part of the message in the Hungarian election: They are self-dealing. They’re enriching themselves and their families. But I’m old enough to remember emoluments during Trump’s first term. I remember you and I having conversations where we said, “The public is not going to stand for this!” And yet, the American public has stood for corruption that now makes the emoluments violations look, frankly, adorable. We’ve been talking about corruption and Trump, and self-dealing and Trump, and the oligarchs and Trump, and the meme coins … The stuff that is happening now is so profoundly disheartening in terms of corruption, and yet it’s been just crickets from the public on this. Help me understand how to take the anti-corruption message that really was metabolized in Hungary and import it to an American public that seems to just be shrugging off the corruption here?
Well, I think the corruption narrative did work in 2020. Donald Trump was ousted. We can analyze what went wrong in 2024, but my view is that a relative handful, about 150,000 or so voters in three states, the same three states we always talk about, were aggravated about a series of issues, and they took a gamble. That’s my view. I do not think it was a giant repudiation, like in Hungary where they have an electoral magnifier system. The Electoral College was a disproportionate reflection of those 150,000 or so voters’ discontent. So let’s not over-read 2024 as a referendum authorizing corruption.
I saw a poll by one of the long-term pollsters that’s been polling since before Nixon: Trump is now minus 42 in this poll. He’s 1 point lower than Nixon at his lowest point in the middle of his corruption scandal. So the crickets are actually chirping loudly, if you listen to them. They don’t like the billions that Donald Trump and his family have made from being in office. They don’t like the crony capitalism.
I’ll tell you why we’re not doing emoluments again: We’re focusing on other corruption now, like the Paramount/Warner merger, where instead of the independent review the feds usually do (under both parties), you have a presidential endorsement of preferred oligarchs, with Trump openly expressing his preference and Pete Hegseth saying the quiet part out loud, that he can’t wait for the Ellisons to take over CNN. When you turn the channels, every channel is going be Fox News! So we’re fighting that. That’s a corruption battle.
So I think we’re well situated in the United States to have a simple message in 2026—not dissimilar to Hungary—about corruption and the cost-of-living crisis. And the message is this: Because of the betrayal of Trump and his MAGA enablers, you are paying more. There’s a corruption tax that every American is paying. If the Democrats are successful in getting power back, they will lower costs and they will make life and the pursuit of happiness affordable. And they will do that by investigating and stopping the corruption.
You’ve now connected up, and I think this actually was ably done in the Hungarian messaging too, corruption and the cost of living, right? We’re not doing well, and we’re not doing well because they’re enriching themselves. There’s another piece of this, and that is democracy itself. Folks kept telling us before the ’24 election that nobody cares about democracy, it’s just an abstraction, and Americans vote on the price of eggs, or the price of gas. And yet democracy being under threat did seem to be a factor in the Hungarian elections. My question: How to make it salient and relevant for Americans this time around, and to get them to care about Electoral College reform, and statehood for Puerto Rico, and Supreme Court reform?
When Magyar was talking to the Hungarians about the cost-of-living/corruption nexus, he was talking about democracy. Listen, I really venerate Joe Biden. I’ve known him for decades. I worked on one of his presidential campaigns. He’s a good man. His concerns about democracy were genuine, but the way to deal with it is not to have abstract conversations. The way to do it is to talk about the costs of America not functioning the way we promised. Instead of a more perfect union and the pursuit of happiness for Americans, what we have is a cost-of-living crisis and a corruption crisis. You don’t even have to say the D word! We should banish it, because I’ve learned the hard way that it’s too abstract.
We have to find a way to translate this when we talk to average folks, because when we’re defending democracy, what we’re really defending are those ideas of the pursuit of happiness. The worst criminals who are stealing from the American people right now? They’re stealing from you and from me, and from 330 million others, and they have to be brought to justice.
We have to get that money back for the American people, but we can’t be in an endless cycle of the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Other countries have phrased it well: truth and reconciliation. Because you have to balance the part where we’re going to get to the truth with how we’re going to reconcile. We can’t survive as a country in a permanent Hatfield-and-McCoy intergenerational feud. I think we need to have truth for the worst offenders, but we need to have reconciliation for others. Those defectors are a very important part of the movement. There is a big tent that we can reconcile, and there’s going to need to be a lot of reconciliation. But the crux will be, who broke the laws? These are criminals who are out there stealing, every day, from the American people. And the answer must be: “No, you can’t steal from the American people.” We can’t say, in 2029, “Let’s kiss and make up.” No. In Hungary, Magyar went to see the president, an Orbán apparatchik, and then he tweeted afterward something along the lines of, The president must go. He’s not fit to lead our country. He must resign. So Magyar is not pulling punches. Maybe we pulled some punches in 2021 that we shouldn’t have. It’s time for accountability.
Source link
