I’ll concede to being grimly amused by Donald Trump again, and that’s probably a mistake.

It’s easy to chuckle at his theatrics. At times, he’s undeniably funny, and as such I won’t apologize for laughing.

But as Steven Levitsky — of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority fame — warned this week, complacency’s dangerous. “[Trump’s] return to office has been met with striking indifference [as] politicians, pundits, media figures and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown,” Levitsky wrote this week, for Foreign Affairs, adding that “the timing of this mood shift could not be worse.”

In that linked article, Levitsky (whose books make for quick, easy reading and are thus a very efficient way to make yourself smarter) described how Trump put America on the road to so-called “competitive authoritarianism” à la Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Narendra Modi’s India and, of course, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, on which the new American right blueprinted Trump’s second term domestic agenda.

In competitive authoritarianism, “the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact,” Levitsky reminded the world, noting that sometimes, the ruling party even suffers meaningful ballot-box setbacks. Modi had just such a setback last election, and Erdogan’s had plenty.

But it’s not really democracy because the playing field isn’t level. You can contest power in Turkey, for example, and Erdogan’s not especially likely to kill you. But if you oppose him, life’s going to be quite difficult. He controls the levers of government, which he’ll turn against you to significant deleterious effect.

One of Trump’s greatest tricks is to conflate the legitimate prosecution of, for example, January 6 rioters and cronies like Paul Manafort, with the weaponization of government. He says the same thing about his own legal troubles — namely that no case against him is legitimate and that every accuser, in any context, even those which have nothing whatever to do with politics, is an example of weaponized government.

To be sure, some of Trump’s antagonizers are politically motivated, but the sort of weaponization Levitsky (and other scholars) discuss in the context of authoritarian regimes is a different animal entirely. It’s the sort of weaponization that finds the strongman instructing, for example, tax authorities, to audit everyday people, for no reason. Or to sue journalists for defamation, which in most cases means to sue them for doing their jobs. It’s the sort of weaponization that turns a nation’s law enforcement on political rivals just because (solely because) they’re rivals. It’s the sort of weaponization which, ultimately, makes contesting power too risky, or too costly, to be worth the trouble.

As Levitsky put it, “no democracy is entirely free of politicization, [b]ut when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy [by turning] politics [into] a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.” So, it’s not Putin’s Russia. The other team can still win, and not just in theory. But it’s harder to win, and the extra effort required can be a deterrent.

Americans as a group are simply too uninterested in world affairs to understand the context for what it is Trump’s doing. Again: This administration’s domestic agenda is in very large part blueprinted on Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. Here’s Levitsky one more time: “After Orban became prime minister in 2010, his government stripped public employees of key civil service protections, fired thousands and replaced them with loyal members of the ruling Fidesz party.” Sound familiar? That’s precisely what Trump and Elon Musk are doing in the US under the guise of cost-cutting. “DOGE” is just Orban’s civil service overhaul.

So far, I’ve avoided spelling this out because it’s very uncomfortable for readers who pulled the lever for Trump in November, and unlike a lot of over-educated people, I don’t enjoy deriding Trump voters merely for the sake of it. That got old for me a long time ago. Much as it pains me to say this, it’s unrealistic to expect the average person (or even the above-average person) to connect these dots, even when the connection’s overt and explicit, where that means the new American right makes no secret whatever of the extent to which it believes Trump’s America should be modeled on Orban’s Hungary.

But I do want to spell it out now, because it’s very glaring, and everyone needs to hear it at least once. This administration is unapologetically bent on creating a super-sized version of Orban’s “illiberal democracy.” Musk, while standing next to Trump in the Oval Office earlier this week, said, “You can see everything that’s going on.” He’s right. You can. And what you see, if you just look, is an out-in-the-open effort to replicate Orban’s methods and run his playbook.

I can’t emphasize this enough: It’s not a secret, which means it doesn’t really even meet the definition of a conspiracy. All you have to do is Google it. Google “Viktor Orban” with Steve Bannon, or with Elon Musk, or with Project 2025, or with Tucker Carlson, or with JD Vance or with any of the rest of them, and it’s right there. It’s all right there.

More than anything else, that — the almost comically overt nature of the right’s attempt to recast and remake America’s system of governance in the image of tiny Hungary’s rotund quasi-despot — accounts from my blasé mordancy about this whole sordid debacle.

But it’s precisely that sort of fatalistic nonchalance that Levitsky warned Americans against this week. I suppose I owe him an apology for not doing my part to sound the alarm, but hell, what can you do? Not a lot. It is what it is.

On Thursday, Trump said Musk might’ve uncovered evidence that the US Treasury Department paid Politico “millions of dollars for nothing,” while the Pentagon paid “Radical Left Reuters” $9 million. “THEY ARE BUYING THE PRESS!” he shouted, in the course of demanding the media “GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!”