| American conservatives recently hosted their flagship conference in Hungary, a country that experts call an autocracy. Its leader, Viktor Orbán, provides a potential model of what a Trump after Trump might look like.  Illustration by Tyler Comrie “In recent years, as the future of the Republican Party has seemed increasingly up for grabs, American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home,” Andrew Marantz writes, in a deeply reported piece in this week’s issue on how Hungary, under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has provided one such blueprint. Orbán has spouted increasingly nativist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric over the years. (Steve Bannon called him “Trump before Trump.”) Although Hungary appears to be a democracy, one in which the Prime Minister must run for reëlection every four years, in practice, Marantz writes, Orbán “has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured.” One Hungarian sociologist explains that the democratic backsliding in Hungary resembles a similar regression in the United States: “The frog isn’t boiling yet, but the water is getting hotter.” Last month, Marantz was in Budapest, to cover the first Conservative Political Action Conference ever held in Europe, when he discovered that his request to attend had been denied, along with requests from other American and Hungarian journalists. Outside the conference, a friend of the conservative writer Rod Dreher came out to meet Marantz. “I’ve got one of these badges,” he said. “Why don’t you put it on, try to walk in, and see what happens? —Jessie Li, newsletter editor Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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