How to break Trump's power -- A new look at the lessons from Hungary

[erronis]

https://www.headsupnews.org/p/how-to-break-trumps-power
Dan Froomkin



Well worth the read. And a link via the article to M. Gessen's excellent piece (unfirewalled?) in the NYT.

It will take a massive electoral defeat to put Trumpism fully behind us.

That's why the fall of Viktor Orban is such a talisman for democracy-loving Americans. Hungarians overwhelmingly threw out their entrenched, corrupt, authoritarian leader in April.

What can we learn from them about how to cleanse the country of ours?

I wrote a bit about this when it happened. My initial takeaway was that if Hungary is a model, then the way to motivate voters across party lines is with a more aggressive, principled, and insurgent pro-democracy agenda than anything the current Democratic leadership is offering right now.

Now M. Gessen, New York Times opinion columnist and my go-to for all things Eastern European, has weighed in with a must-read piece headlined "This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too."

She writes that one lesson of now-Prime Minister Peter Magyar's success "lies in the scale, reach and relentlessness of his organizing network." Magyar had somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 volunteers. The U.S. population is 36 times the size of Hungary's, so that would equate to at least a million people here.

. . .