Five Tried-and-True Moves to Capture a Democracy and Make a Killing

Democracies rarely end with tanks in the street. Peru’s did, on April 5, 1992, when Alberto Fujimori dissolved Congress and the courts in a night. But almost everywhere else in the last thirty years, the leader stayed elected, kept holding elections, and removed, one at a time, anybody in his way: judges, prosecutors, inspectors, editors, university presidents, election clerks, and, finally, voters.

Viktor Orbán did it in Hungary from 2010. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did it in Turkey; Hugo Chávez in Venezuela; Poland’s Law and Justice party from 2015; Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. The political scientists who studied them documented a common playbookSee Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, and Kim Lane Scheppele’s “Autocratic Legalism.” Also Protect Democracy’s The Authoritarian Playbook..

We’ll get to that playbook, but first, the pace. In March 2026, Staffan Lindberg, who runs the V-Dem democracy index at the University of Gothenburg, laid it out: what Orbán did in four years and Erdoğan in ten, the United States had done in one.

Below is the playbook: each move, a historical example, what has been done here, and a clock. The clock always starts on the leader’s first day in office.

1. Fire anyone who can stop him

The first move of the strongman is to remove or weaken anyone inside the government who can refuse an order: judges, prosecutors, the career civil service, the independent agencies, the military’s lawyers.

Poland did it in six weeks. Within a month of taking office in late 2015, the Law and Justice party elected its own judges to the Constitutional Tribunal, and the president swore them in at 1:30 in the morning so the old court could not sit without them when it opened a few hours later. Hungary took three years and did it by statute: it lowered the retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, forcing out 274 senior judges at once, then amended the constitution so the court could no longer review amendments at all.

In the United States the firings began with prosecutors and FBI agents in the first weeks of 2025 and reached the military’s leadership and its JAG lawyers in February. In July 2025, in Trump v. Boyle, the Supreme Court let the firing of the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s members stand, which means, for now, that the president can remove independent regulators at will. In February 2026 the administration converted the first 8,000 career civil servants to at-will employment. Of the eleven things on this list, ten have been done. The one a court has stopped is the campaign against law firms.

2. Make it too expensive to hold him accountable

The second move is to go after the people whose job is to find out what the government is doing and tell the public: inspectors general, reporters, universities, public broadcasters, watchdog nonprofits. Not all of them have to be closed, but enough have to pay that the rest learn to be careful about what they say.

Orbán’s media law of 2010 created a Media Council staffed entirely by his party. Eight years later the owners of nearly 500 pro-government outlets signed them over, as gifts, to a single foundation called KESMA. Nobody had to censor the papers that were left. Turkey was more overt. A single decree in 2016 closed 131 outlets in one day.

In America, the first targets were the government’s own auditors. Four days into his second term, Trump fired 17 inspectors general in one night; USAID’s followed three weeks later. In September a federal judge found the firings unlawful and declined to reinstate anyone.

The press and the universities were made to pay in cash. In July 2025 Paramount paid $16 million to settle Trump’s suit over a 60 Minutes edit. Three weeks later Columbia paid $221 million to get its federal grants back. Public media was defunded in May. Every other outlet and university watched what those two paid.

3. Point the law at critics

The third move is to turn the security services inward: name an enemy inside the country, then use the tools built for terrorists on the opposition.

In July 2016, an attempt to overthrow Erdoğan failed. He called it “a gift from God.” Five days later he declared a state of emergency; it ran for two years, and under it roughly 125,000 public employees were dismissed or suspended and 3,886 judges and prosecutors removed. Orbán did not need a coup. In 2016 his government declared a nationwide “state of crisis due to mass migration” that has been renewed every six months since, most recently in September 2026, by the government that replaced him. In every case the enemy named first was foreign or criminal. In every case the powers were then used on journalists, judges and the opposition.

The United States has not declared an emergency. In September 2025, the administration designated “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, and three days later NSPM-7 told the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate the networks that fund or organize “political violence,” listing “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity” among the things to look for. The former FBI director has been indicted twice. Of the fourteen things on this list, all fourteen have been done.

4. Put troops in American cities

The fourth move is to make soldiers on domestic streets ordinary, over the objection of the mayors and governors who run those streets, so that by the time an election needs guarding the sight is familiar.

In Venezuela the instrument was the National Guard. In early 2004, Guardsmen beat and tortured detained protesters in Caracas; Human Rights Watch wrote to Chávez documenting it. From 2014 the Guard was back on the streets, with armed civilian “colectivos” alongside it. In El Salvador, Bukele’s state of exception, declared in 2022, has kept troops in the streets since and produced roughly 93,000 arrests.

In June 2025, Trump federalized California’s National Guard and sent it into Los Angeles over the governor’s objection. The governor sued. Troops have since gone to five cities. The Insurrection Act has been threatened since January 2025 and is, in the administration’s phrase, on the table. Three of the six things on this list have been done.

5. Decide who gets to vote and who counts it

The fifth move is the one that runs through an election. Change the map and the rolls before the vote. Intervene between the count and the certificate. Then change the terms so that staying in power no longer depends on winning.

Hungary’s election law of 2011 cut parliament from 386 seats to 199 and redrew every district. In 2014 Fidesz lost about 441,500 votes, fell to 44.9 percent, and kept two-thirds of the seats. Venezuela went further. In July 2024 the electoral council declared Nicolás Maduro the winner and never published the precinct tallies; the opposition posted 80 percent of them, showing it had won by more than two to one. Maduro is still president.

The United States has redrawn the map, gone after the voter rolls, and taken ballots. In August 2025, at Trump’s request, Texas passed a five-seat mid-decade map; in December the Supreme Court let it be used. The Justice Department has sued thirty states for their voter files. Federal agents seized the 2020 ballots of Fulton County, Georgia, and the Postal Service has been asked to decide who receives a mail ballot. Of the sixteen things on this list, nine have been done and four more have started.

Yes, America is going south that much faster

Hungary took three years to clear its courts, seven months to take its media, and six years to find its emergency. Venezuela took five years on the courts and eight on the broadcasters. Turkey took thirteen years to get to the night it needed. The United States did the first four moves inside its first year, without a coup attempt and without declaring an emergency, using what it already had: a federal workforce that could be reclassified, a surveillance capacity that could be redirected, and a Supreme Court that had spent a decade expanding the president’s power to fire. Orbán, Erdoğan and Chávez had to build what this administration was handed.

The fifth move is the one still open, and it is where the examples part ways. Venezuela falsified a count and held. Turkey annulled Istanbul’s mayoral election in March 2019 and lost the rerun in June. Hungary never falsified a count at all. In April 2026, after sixteen years, Orbán lost on 79 percent turnout, with 53 percent for Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, and conceded the same night. The map he drew, the courts he filled, the media his friends owned: none of it stopped a margin that large. Magyar now holds the two-thirds majority Orbán used to write the rules, and can rewrite them.

That is the lesson of the one country on this list that has come out the other side. A tilted machine can still be beaten, but only by a blowout, the kind of margin that leaves nothing to annul and no certificate to hold. The midterms are November 3. The clerk of the House reads the roll on January 3, 2027.