Attending a banned event will carry fines up to about €500, and authorities will be able to use facial recognition tools to identify attendees.

When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience.

As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency—the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats—it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.

I saw the roots of Orbán’s media strategy when I first met him for an interview, in 2006. He was in the opposition then but had served as prime minister before and was fighting hard to get back in power. When we met in his office in a hulking century-old building that overlooked the Danube River in Budapest, he was very friendly, even charming. Like Trump, he is the kind of politician who knows how to connect with people when he thinks he has something to gain.

During the interview, his demeanor shifted. I still remember how his face went dark when I pushed on questions that he obviously did not want to answer. It was a tense exchange, but he reverted to his cordial mode when we finished the interview, and I turned off the recorder.

What happened afterwards was less friendly. In Hungary, journalists are expected to send edited interview transcripts to their interviewees. The idea is that if the interviewees think you took something they said out of context, they can ask for changes before publication. But in this case, Orbán’s press team sent back the text with some of his answers entirely deleted and rewritten. When my editors and I told them we wouldn’t accept this, they said they wouldn’t allow the interview to be published.

In the end, we published it without their edits. That was the last time I interviewed Viktor Orbán. And when he returned to power in 2010 after a landslide election victory, he made sure that he would never have to answer uncomfortable questions again.

One of the first pieces of legislation his party introduced was a media law that restructured how the sector is regulated in Hungary. The government set up a new oversight agency and appointed hard-line loyalists to its key positions. This agency later blocked proposed mergers and acquisitions by independent media companies, while issuing friendly rulings for pro-government businesses.

The Orbán government also transformed public broadcasting—which had previously carried news programs challenging politicians from all parties—into a mouthpiece of the state. The service’s newly appointed leaders got rid of principled journalists and replaced them with governing-party sympathizers who could be counted on to toe the line.

Then the government went after private media companies. Origo, a popular Hungarian news website, was one of its first targets. For many years, Origo—where I had been working when I conducted the 2006 Orbán interview—was a great place to do journalism. It was owned by a multinational telecommunications company and run by people who did not interfere with our work. If anything, they were supportive of our journalism. In 2009, after conducting some award-winning investigations, I was even invited to the CEO’s office for a friendly chat about the importance of accountability reporting.

But a few years after Orbán’s return to power, the environment changed. As we continued our aggressive—but fair—reporting, the telecommunications company behind Origo came under pressure from the government. Instead of sending encouraging messages, the outlet’s publisher started telling the editor in chief not to pursue certain stories that were uncomfortable for Orbán and his allies.

My colleagues in the newsroom and I pushed back. But after repeated clashes with the publisher over one of my investigations, into the expensive and mysterious travel of a powerful government official, the editor in chief was forced out of his job. I resigned, along with many fellow journalists, and soon the news site was sold to a company with close links to Orbán’s inner circle. Now Origo is unrecognizable. It has become the flagship news site of the pro-government propaganda machine, publishing articles praising Orbán and viciously attacking his critics.

Origo is part of an ecosystem that includes hundreds of newspapers and news sites, several television channels—including the public broadcasters and one of the two biggest commercial channels—and almost all radio stations. That’s not to mention the group of pro-government influencers whose social-media posts are distributed widely, thanks to financial resources also linked to the government.

This machine is not even pretending to do journalism in the traditional sense. It is not like Fox News, which still has some professional anchors and reporters alongside the openly pro-Trump media personalities who dominate the channel in prime time.

The machine built under Orbán has only one purpose, and it is to serve the interests of the government. There is hardly any autonomy. Editors and reporters get directions from the very top of the regime on what they can and cannot cover. If there is a message that must be delivered, the whole machine jumps into action: Hundreds of outlets will publish the same story with the same headline and same photos.

In 2022, Direkt36, the investigative-reporting center I co-founded after leaving Origo, wrote about one such example. In the story, which was reported by my colleague Zsuzsanna Wirth, we described an episode in which Bertalan Havasi, the prime minister’s press chief at the time, sent an email to the director of the national news agency.

​​“Hi, could you write an article about this, citing me as a source? Thanks!” Havasi wrote. (The instruction was about a relatively mundane matter: a letter that a European rabbi had sent to Orbán thanking him for his support.) Later, Havasi also told the agency what the headline and lead sentence should be. The news agency followed the instructions word for word.

A few years ago, I investigated the pro-government takeover of Index, another of Hungary’s most popular news sites. I obtained a recording in which the outlet’s editor in chief described to one of his employees how Index had received financial backing from a friend of Orbán’s, a former gas fitter who has become Hungary’s richest man thanks to lucrative state contracts. The editor in chief warned that Index had to be careful with news about Orbán’s friend because, without him, “there will be no one who will put money into” the outlet.

Just as Orbán explained in his CPAC speech, this sophisticated propaganda machine has played a crucial role in his ability to stay in power for more than 15 years. When the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a watchdog group of which the United States is a member, published its report on Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections, it pointed to the media as a major weakness in the country’s democratic system.

“The lack of impartial information in the media about the main contestants, the absence of debates among the major electoral competitors, and the independent media’s limited access to public information and activities of national and local government significantly limited voters’ opportunity to make an informed choice,” the election monitors concluded, after a vote that yet again cemented the power of Orbán’s ruling party.

What has happened in Hungary might not happen in the United States. Hungary, a former Eastern Bloc nation that broke free of oppressive Soviet control only three and a half decades ago, has never had such a robust and vibrant independent media scene as the one the U.S. has enjoyed for centuries. But if someone had told me when Orbán returned to power that we would end up with a propaganda machine where the free Hungarian media had once been, with many of the old outlets shut down or transformed into government mouthpieces, I would not have believed it.

And I see ominous signs in the U.S. that feel similar to the early phases of what we experienced here. When I read about the Associated Press being banned from White House events, that reminds me of how my colleagues at Direkt36 have been denied entry to Orbán’s rare press conferences. When I see the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump, that reminds me of how big corporations and their wealthy executives, including the owner of my former workplace, bent the knee to Orbán.

When I read about ABC settling a Trump lawsuit of dubious merit—and CBS contemplating the same—it brings to mind the way the courts and the government itself can be used to manipulate and bully media organizations into submission.

Journalists and anyone else who cares about the free press must understand that democratic institutions are more fragile than they look, especially if they face pressure from ruthless and powerful political forces. This is particularly true for the news media, which is also being challenged by the technological revolution in how we communicate information. Just because an outlet has been around for decades and has a storied history does not mean that it will be around forever.

If any good news can be learned from Hungary’s unhappy experience, it is that unless your country turns into a fully authoritarian regime similar to China or Russia, there are still ways for independent journalism to survive. Even in Hungary, some outlets manage to operate independently from the government. Many of them, including the one I run, rely primarily on their audience for support in the form of donations or subscriptions. We learned that it is easy for billionaires and media CEOs to be champions of press freedom when the risks are low, but that you can’t count on them when things get tough. So we rely on our readers instead.

If they feel like what you are doing is valuable, they will be your real allies in confronting the suffocating power of autocracy.

For three years, I was President Barack Obama’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He’s a transactional leader.” I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s thinking and intentions.

I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He’s been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don’t define the whole of his project.

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

For too long, we in the West have underestimated Putin’s global ideological vision as an animating force for his foreign-policy agenda. The tragic consequence is that today Putinism is advancing across Europe and the United States.

In the beginning, Putin was an accidental leader. After Russia’s 1998 financial crash, its president, Boris Yeltsin, and the oligarchs around him scrambled to find a viable candidate to run against the Communists in the 2000 presidential election. They settled on an obscure KGB agent, selecting Putin to become first prime minister in August 1999, then acting president at the end of 1999, and then the ruling elite’s choice to succeed Yeltsin in the March 2000 election. Voters ratified Yeltsin’s pick, not the other way around.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

At the time, Putin was not anti-Western. He had not joined forces with the neo-imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Rather, he had spent the ’90s working as a mid-level bureaucrat for pro-democratic, pro-Western politicians, first Sobchak in St. Petersburg and later Yeltsin in Moscow. So the failure to anticipate his pivot away from these people and ideas is understandable.

But Putin made his disdain for democracy clear early in his rule. (I wrote about his autocratic proclivities just three weeks before Russia’s 2000 election.) On other issues, he initially signaled continuity with the Yeltsin era. For instance, Putin expressed pro-Western positions, adopted free-market policies, cut corporate and income taxes, and even suggested that Russia should join NATO: “Why not?” Putin answered when asked this in 2000. “I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Putin fully embraced President George W. Bush’s idea of a global war on terror and even helped the U.S. open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to support its war effort in Afghanistan.

Over time, however, Putin became less enamored with free markets and relations with the West. He began to gradually reassert state control over Russia’s economy and media. In 2003, for instance, he arrested Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and handed Khodorkovsky’s oil company to one of his KGB comrades, Igor Sechin, because Khodorkovsky was becoming too active in supporting the political opposition. By 2003, all of Russia’s independent television networks—TVS, TV6, and NTV—were either shut down or had become state channels.

Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin berated the U.S. for interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in the service of its own ideas. He asserted, “One state and, of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule. Sure enough, in 2011, what happened in Georgia and Ukraine seemed poised to occur in Russia too. That December, Russia held a parliamentary election that was falsified in Putin’s favor, in the manner usual at the time. On this occasion, however, Russia’s election observers documented the irregularities, and political opposition leaders mobilized the biggest nationwide demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, Russian protesters chanted for free and fair elections—also for “Russia without Putin.”

[Read: The Putinization of America]

Putin was frightened, and so he pushed back hard. He blamed President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and me (I arrived as the U.S. ambassador in 2012, right as these demonstrations were taking place) for fomenting regime change against him and his government. He told his citizens that the U.S. sought the destruction of Russia as a country and was using “fifth column” agents such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov (both later allegedly assassinated by Putin’s regime) as domestic agents to achieve these goals.

After his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin used ever more coercive methods to weaken opposition leaders, civil society, and independent media. In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To justify this clampdown, Putin has evoked the defense of Russian sovereignty and conservative Christian values against the decadent liberal West. Not unlike other populists, he blamed international forces for Russia’s economic woes, but his real bread-and-butter issues were cultural clashes. He devoted obsessive attention to issues of sexual orientation, blaming the West for promoting homosexuality, LGBTQ identities, and other ideas he considers deviant and antithetical to Russian culture and traditions. As he bluntly claimed at the annual forum held by the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, “Many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world. He wants to return to a 19th-century-style world, in which a handful of great powers dominate their spheres of influence unconstrained by multilateral institutions, international laws, or global norms. If the Cold War’s central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states.

After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world. To do so he invested heavily in several instruments of influence and used them in support of largely far-right movements across the West.

He allocated considerable resources to Russian state media operating abroad, including the flagship television network Russia Today, the Sputnik news agency, and armies of propagandists across all social-media platforms. Russia’s ideological efforts in this domain were so effective in Romania’s 2024 presidential election, for instance, that an obscure far-right presidential candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, came out of nowhere and won the first round. The violation of Romanian sovereignty was assessed by intelligence services to be so acute that the country’s supreme court felt compelled to cancel the second round of the election.

Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church’s aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States. In 2013, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage traveled to Moscow, where he gave a speech opposing the adoption of children by same-sex couples—something Putin sharply limited by law that same year, leading the American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark on his radio show, “I have to tell you that it freaks me out that Vladimir Putin is saying things I agree with.” In 2015, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who praised Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.”

At the same time, Putin cultivated ties with illiberal populists across Europe. He shared with these leaders a rejection of liberalism, a commitment to traditional values, an embrace of national and ethnic identities, and a disdain for alleged constraints on sovereignty—whether those of the European Union on its members or of American “imperialism” on Russia. Putin’s closest ideological ally in Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—the only EU leader who did not condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and who subsequently tried to block EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. No European leader has done more to weaken the EU than Orbán, and weakening the EU is precisely what Putin wants.    

In France, Putin has nurtured a relationship with the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, providing financial assistance for her 2017 presidential campaign and meeting her at the Kremlin that year in a public show of support. In turn, Le Pen enthused, “The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.” In Italy, Putin has nurtured personal relations with the illiberal nationalist leader Matteo Salvini. Secret audio recordings revealed that Salvini’s Lega Nord allegedly participated in backroom deals with Russian operatives to receive funds from a Russian state-owned company. The United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage is a longtime Kremlin favorite thanks to his disdain for the EU; Putin’s government supported Farage’s Brexit campaign.

Shared anti-liberal and culturally reactionary values have also undergirded Putin’s relationships with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and nationalist-conservative-party leaders in Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany. More proximately, Putin has supported the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko for decades, helping his autocratic partner hang onto power despite mass demonstrations following a fraudulent election in 2020. In Georgia, Putin has linked up with the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose political party, Georgian Dream, has undermined democratic institutions and suspended the country’s accession talks with the European Union for four years. In Ukraine, of course, Putin’s man was Viktor Yanukovych, who also tried to turn his country away from European ties and ideas, only to lose power to a popular uprising in 2014.

For the past decade, however, Putin’s most important target for ideological promotion was not Europe but the United States. He courted like-minded conservatives within the U.S. as a strategy for dividing and thereby weakening Russia’s foremost enemy. The conservative populist Pat Buchanan was an early darling of the Russian right. More recently, several major MAGA influencers, including Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, have embraced the militant Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin as an ideological hero. Dugin is now a regular guest on American conservative podcasts, whose hosts frequently amplify their common ideas on social media. When Elon Musk publicly stated on X at the beginning of the month that the U.S. should quit NATO and the United Nations, Dugin echoed him. American and Russian nationalists share many common enemies these days, including the “globalists,” the “neocons,” the “gays,” and the “woke.”

Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian cyberintelligence officers stole thousands of emails and documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. They then publicized this content to embarrass the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and help the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump. Kremlin surrogates, in both traditional media and social media, campaigned in support of Trump and against Clinton. The extent to which these Russian efforts affected the outcome of that election is hard to measure. That Putin tried is clear.

During his first term as president, Trump made his support for Putin, his ideas, and his style of rule explicit. He never once criticized the Russian dictator over his human-rights record or anything else, but instead praised him as a strong leader. Unlike previous presidents, Trump did not publicly meet with Russian human-rights activists or opposition figures, and he paid zero attention to the Russian-supported war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and continued throughout his term. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a cease-fire with Putin in 2019, Europeans were at the table, but Trump’s team was absent. Most shockingly, at a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian dictator against his own intelligence community and would not acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also refused to debrief his senior staff after his one-on-one with Putin at that summit; one official characterized his attitude as suggesting,“This is between me and my friend.”

Trump did not succeed in enacting Putin’s full ideological agenda during that first term, however. Some of Trump’s senior national-security officials slowed or even altogether stopped the president from achieving the objectives he and Putin shared—for instance, ending NATO. In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national-security team, the first Trump administration at times pursued confrontational policies toward Russia, including expelling its diplomats with ties to intelligence, sanctioning its companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. Putin blamed the American “deep state” for Trump’s failure to deliver. Trump sometimes hinted that he agreed.

After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe. They each admire the other’s “strong” leaders. Russian nationalists have pushed for the destruction of the alleged American deep state; Elon Musk and his aides express agreement and are attempting to do just that.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Trump has now made the restoration of his personal relationship with Putin a top foreign-policy priority; negotiating an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is a secondary or tertiary concern. How else to explain why Trump has delivered to Putin multiple concessions without asking for anything in return?

After just a few weeks in office, the list of Trump’s concessions to Russia is truly extraordinary. It includes (1) intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been discontinued; (2) USAID assistance for Ukraine, including funding to repair its energy grid and for anti-corruption programs, has been discontinued; (3) U.S. funding for Russian civil society and independent media operating in exile has been stopped; (4) diplomatic relations with Moscow have been restored, beginning with a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago; and (5) in radical reversal of past policy, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and a handful of other rogue autocracies against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Trump has insisted that (6) Ukraine cannot join NATO; (7) Zelensky must give up territory to Russia; (8) no new military aid for Ukraine will be made available, even previously appropriated funding; (9) U.S. forces deployed in Europe might be reduced and will not participate in any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine; and (10) sanctions on Russia could be lifted, although Trump suddenly reversed himself last week when he said he was “strongly considering” new sanctions and tariffs.

To use Trump’s favorite metaphor for dealmaking, these are not clever “cards” played to shape a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has secured nothing for either the United States or Ukraine by playing them. Instead, the concessions are meant to rekindle a personal relationship between Trump and Putin, anchored by a shared ideology. In all of American history, I cannot think of a more radical change in U.S. foreign policy in such a short period of time.

Many Russians reject Putinism. They remain liberal internationalists, not illiberal nationalists. However, these Russians have no ability to influence politics in Putin’s dictatorship. Many of them now live abroad.

Many Americans likewise reject Trump’s ideological mind meld with Putin. I am one of them; most Americans seem to share my view. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of Americans do not trust Putin, and only 9 percent do. Unlike Russians, Americans still live in a democracy and therefore have the ability to influence their country’s foreign policy. The question moving forward is whether this overwhelming majority of Americans cares enough about this issue to try to do something about it, to try to slow Trump’s historic pivot of putting America on the side of the autocrats and against the democrats. To date, the answer is unclear.

The same question can be posed worldwide. Putinism resonates with millions in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. In Europe and the United States, Putin’s illiberal orthodox populism is more attractive than Xi Jinping Thought, which has some tepid followers in the developing world but very few fans in the developed world. For years, American national-security experts have rightly focused on addressing the rising threat from China, but wrongly neglected the threat from Russia, including this ideological menace.

In our new era of great-power competition between dictators and democrats, Russia is the generally junior partner to China in the axis of autocracies, except when it comes to the appeal of its style of governance. Xi, after all, has courted no ideological allies as powerful as the current president of the United States of America. And yet, the supporters of Putinism are not the majority anywhere—not even in Hungary.  

Right now, the transnational movement of illiberal nationalism is more organized, united, and strategic in its collective actions than the liberal democratic movement. But those in Europe and the United States who support liberal democracy should remember that they far outnumber those who embrace illiberal autocracy, and that they have a history of victory over the forces that oppose them. During the Cold War, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, civil-society organizations, and even religious leaders forged transnational ties in defense of democratic ideas—remember the AFL-CIO’s embrace of Poland’s Solidarity movement? The global anti-apartheid movement? We can do these things again now.  

This is not the first time in history, or even in the past century, that democratic ideas appeared to wane as autocratic ideas appeared to surge. That happened in the 1930s. It happened again in the 1970s, when Marxist-Leninist regimes were seizing power in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, and the practice of American democracy at home was inspiring few worldwide, thanks to the violent suppression of protesters, the assassinations of political figures, and the resignation of President Nixon.

The world democratic movement eventually recovered from those dark periods. It has to find its nerve and recover now. The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

Congratulations, American taxpayer: You are going all in on crypto.

This weekend, President Donald Trump announced that he is moving forward with a plan to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, purchasing bitcoin and ether, as well as the more esoteric instruments XRP, solana, and cardano. The reserve will “elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks,” Trump wrote on his social-media site, Truth Social. “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.”

For the taxpayer, the purpose of such an initiative is obscure. The crypto industry is a hyper-speculative casino. It is not essential to the American financial system, nor are cryptocurrencies essential to the American public. Workers cannot put bitcoin in their gas tanks; parents cannot feed XRP to their kids; businesses do not need cardano to build roads, light cities, produce vaccines, or provide loans to homeowners and entrepreneurs.

Yet for the White House, the purpose is obvious. Trump’s commerce secretary, his AI and crypto czar, and several of his most influential policy advisers are crypto investors, and the president launched his own memecoin. Establishing a reserve would boost prices, enriching these public officials and the crypto magnates donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican campaigns. It would not be a public investment, but a private giveaway—one of a mounting number in the Trump era.

The White House has put out few details on how a federal crypto reserve would work. But a stalled Senate bill would order the government to purchase 100 million bitcoins, hold the assets for two decades or longer, and sell them to retire the national debt. The government could transfer the $19 billion in crypto it has seized from criminals to the stockpile; the Treasury could finance additional purchases by revaluing the gold reserve, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has proposed, so that “not a single U.S. taxpayer dollar” would be spent. Trump’s crypto czar has also indicated that the reserve would not involve new taxes or spending.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Yet the reserve would use taxpayer resources, diverting them from other purposes. If crypto prices soar, the Treasury could retire a chunk of the debt. If crypto prices crater, the public would end up worse off. “I don’t think turning the government into a hedge fund is a viable solution” to the country’s fiscal challenges, Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, told me. He suggested addressing them the old-fashioned way, by cutting spending, raising taxes, and promoting growth.

Government experts see no strategic justification for the proposed reserve. The United States maintains stockpiles of crucial materials: vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, rare-earth minerals used in weapons manufacturing, crude oil. “There are important differences between reserves for real commodities, like petroleum, where a shortage may result in serious harm to the American people,” and the kind of speculative fund Trump is promoting, Bharat Ramamurti, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, told me. “Cryptocurrency does not meet any of those standard conditions.”

For the many, the reserve poses an unnecessary risk; for the few, it offers rich rewards. The mere prospect of the government speculating in the crypto market is already enriching the small share of Americans heavily invested in the assets. The price of bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP, and cardano jumped more than 10 percent when Trump published his Truth Social post. More broadly, the proposed reserve would mainstream a fringe industry and create public interest in high crypto prices—justifying later interventions in the market and nudging foreign governments and institutional investors to get in too.

The crypto fund is only the latest example of ascendant crony capitalism in Trump’s Washington. The president is strip-mining taxpayer resources and doling out contracts and favors to the politically connected. The risk is not just corruption, but higher interest rates and less competitive markets.

The tariffs that Trump has implemented on imports from China, Mexico, and Canada create a massive opportunity for favor-trading. In Trump’s first term, the White House imposed levies on $550 billion worth of Chinese goods, allowing American firms to apply for a tariff exemption if they could not find substitutes for imports or if the tariff would “impose significant harm on American interests.” An analysis found that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative disproportionately awarded exemptions to firms that made contributions to Republican candidates and disproportionately denied exemptions to firms supporting Democrats. The policy amounted to a “quid pro quo,” the economists concluded.

The Trump administration has pushed more blatant quid pro quos this time around. The advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group is attempting to merge with its rival Omnicom. Lawyers from Elon Musk’s X suggested that  Interpublic executives should boost advertising spending on the social-media platform “or else,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Or else, the Interpublic employees gathered, they run the risk of federal regulators scuttling or delaying the merger. Musk has also agitated for the Federal Aviation Administration to award a contract for air-traffic-control communications systems to SpaceX, his space-technology company. As a special government employee, Musk is supposed to be banned from influencing contracts in which he has a financial interest.

Threatening companies that decline to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Investigating firms that choose to maintain DEI policies. Proposing to privatize the United States Postal Service. Each is an example of the Trump administration trying to aid his supporters or damage his opponents, without regard for the public’s welfare. Each is an example of crony capitalism.

The strategic crypto reserve is a foolish idea, and the broader trend a dangerous one. Fifty years of studies on Russia, Hungary, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere have found that governments creating policies for and awarding contracts to politically aligned firms warps investment and damages markets. Connected firms flourish. Disfavored firms struggle. Corruption takes root. Taxpayers end up with degraded public services, and lose confidence in their elected representatives. In extreme cases, the practice heightens interest rates, slows down GDP growth, and makes countries vulnerable to financial collapse.

Trump fashions himself a swamp-draining, free-market-loving conservative, but there’s nothing conservative about this kind of intervention in the economy. “I’m against it! I’m against it all,” Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the right-of-center Mercatus Center, at George Mason University, told me. Trump “just announced: Farmers, prepare yourselves to sell all your products here; we’re going to tax exports. What is he talking about, really? Five percent of the consumers in the world are here. There’s only so much corn I can eat.” She told me she held out some hope for Trump’s deregulatory push and his plans to cut the budget. But she worried about the government being in hock to steel CEOs, crypto bros, Big Agriculture executives, military contractors, and anyone else who happens to have deep pockets and Trump’s ear, particularly given the president’s willingness to push his executive authority beyond the limits of American law.

“For us libertarians,” de Rugy said, “it feels like we’re being punched in the face with our own fist.”

The near-total freeze on foreign aid from the United States has many vocal detractors, but it also has passionate backers—and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy” has made him a darling of the global far right and an ally of President Donald Trump.

Hungary recently escalated its efforts to stamp out pro-democracy groups and media organizations that rely on foreign funding by naming a government minister to investigate USAID’s activities. Today, that minister, András László, was received in Washington by Peter Marocco, the top American official disassembling the agency from the inside. The meeting, which was confirmed to me by a U.S. official and another person familiar with the gathering, reflects the convergence of interests between Budapest and Washington. Like the Trump administration, the Hungarian government has giddily embraced the idea that U.S. aid programs are not only wasteful and unnecessary but also criminal.

“The Hungarian government has decided to closely follow the politically corrupt USAID funding scandal revealed by DOGE and Elon Musk,” László, a member of the European Parliament from Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party, wrote on social media last week. He added, “American and European patriots should work together to dismantle the globalist networks operated by Democrats.”

Before today’s meeting, Marocco ordered the termination of all USAID contracts in Hungary, according to the U.S. official I spoke with. Marocco also requested data from the agency’s staff about U.S. programs in Hungary stretching back years.

The goals of the Hungarian investigation, now furthered by U.S. officials, are wide-ranging. It aims to reveal the recipients of U.S. funds and, according to Hungarian right-wing media, “dismantle what officials describe as a deeply embedded international corruption network.” Musk, the billionaire DOGE co-founder who boasted last month of “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” has repeatedly referred to USAID’s work as “criminal,” without providing evidence. Since the inauguration, a DOGE team has embedded itself within USAID, gaining sweeping access to the agency’s payments system while thousands of USAID workers globally have been fired or placed on leave.

The State Department, USAID, and the Hungarian embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have scolded and spurned traditional European allies. For solidarity, they have looked instead to Hungary, which has embraced its role as Europe’s enfant terrible, seeking closer ties to Russia and flouting European Union rules (it recently refused to pay a 200-million-euro fine for failing to comply with the bloc’s asylum policies).

Orbán’s standoff with Brussels is one aspect of a larger effort to steer his country in a more nationalist, authoritarian direction. The prime minister and his allies have steadily gained control over the country’s media landscape as part of a years-long effort to limit dissent and consolidate power within government and across civil society. In the process, Budapest has cracked down on independent organizations reliant on foreign funding, painting them as enemies of the Hungarian state. The crackdown has included the ejection from the country of the Central European University, endowed by the billionaire financier George Soros.

These actions have endeared the Hungarian prime minister to Trump. Orbán traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, multiple times during the U.S. presidential campaign last year, and then again in December to meet with the president-elect.

Today’s meeting wasn’t Marocco’s first audience with Hungarian-government representatives since he became the director for foreign assistance at the State Department. Last month, he reportedly met with Tristan Azbej, a Hungarian official responsible for programs aiding persecuted Christians.

The same week, Orbán vowed in comments on state radio that his government was taking legal action to eradicate nongovernmental organizations and media outlets receiving funding from the U.S. and other foreign sources. He cheered Trump’s moves against USAID and promised that Budapest would examine “line by line” groups funded by the agency.

USAID has supported a wide range of independent media and literacy programs in countries worldwide. In 2023, the agency funded training and other support for 6,200 journalists and aided 707 nonstate media outlets, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press-advocacy group based in New York. The 2025 foreign-aid budget allocated $268.4 million for “independent media and the free flow of information.” Among the media organizations in Hungary that relied on USAID funding is the investigative news website Átlátszó, which received up to 15 percent of its budget from USAID, according to the Financial Times.

The Hungarian government, meanwhile, argues that foreign-funded media organizations are “used as political tools to manipulate public opinion.”

“Their mission?” wrote Orbán’s spokesperson, Zoltán Kovács, of USAID-funded outlets. “To promote a specific ideological agenda, one that aligns with left-liberal interests, supports mass migration, and undermines governments that refuse to toe the globalist line.”

László, the Hungarian official tasked with leading Hungary’s probe of USAID activities, said in a video on X last week that he would “reach out to our American friends to understand how U.S. taxpayers’ money finally ended up in political projects in Hungary.”

“I believe we can work together based on mutual interests,” he added.

Trump-administration officials appear to agree.