Since January 20, 2025, the federal government has fired 17 inspectors general, converted the first 8,000 career civil servants to at-will employment, designated a protest movement a terrorist organization, indicted the former FBI director twice, sent the National Guard into five cities, seized the 2020 ballots of Georgia’s largest county and sued 30 states for their voter rolls.
None of this is new. Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela and Poland all had elected leaders who kept holding elections while they took apart everything that could check them. Political scientists who study those countries have settled on a short list of moves those leaders made. The five fronts below are those moves.
The speed is what’s new. Hungary took almost three years to bring its constitutional court to heel, and Venezuela took five. Turkey needed a failed coup and a two-year state of emergency. The United States had checked most of the boxes on that front by March 27, 2025, in its third month, without a coup or a declared emergency.
The other fronts move just as fast. Hungary passed its media law seven months in, while Trump fired the inspectors general in his first week. Erdoğan turned the security state on his critics only after the 2016 coup attempt, but Trump designated “Antifa” a terrorist organization eight months in. And the National Guard was federalized into Los Angeles over the governor’s objection five months in.
The last front runs through an election, and it is where the foreign cases split. Hungary never falsified a count, and in April 2026 Orbán lost by a landslide and conceded the same night. Venezuela did, and Maduro held on. Which way the United States goes will be settled by January 3, 2027, when the clerk of the House reads the roll.
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