Force at Full Price
What Viktor Orbán's loss can teach us about Donald Trump's fate
Péter Magyar voted on Sunday morning at a polling place in a leafy district of Budapest called Hegyvidék. He took a selfie with a woman in a puffer coat. He held a brief press conference for the international media. By midnight he had handed Viktor Orbán the largest electoral defeat any sitting authoritarian populist has suffered in the twenty-first century.
Magyar is forty-five years old. Two years ago almost nobody in Hungary had heard of him. He had spent most of his career as a Fidesz man, a member of Orbán’s own party, married to Orbán’s justice minister, a fixture of state company boards and government commissions. Then, in early 2024, after a scandal he refused to help cover up, he broke publicly with the party. He started a new movement called Tisza. He spent the next two years driving around Hungary in a van, holding town-hall meetings in places no national politician had bothered to visit in years. On Sunday, Tisza won fifty-four percent of the vote and a two-thirds supermajority in parliament. Turnout was the highest Hungary had seen since the fall of communism in 1989.
This was not supposed to be possible.
Viktor Orbán was supposed to be unbeatable. He had spent sixteen years building the kind of regime that Donald Trump and his coalition openly admire and openly try to copy. Friendly courts. Captured media. Weakened universities. Districts gerrymandered to the point of cartoonishness. State resources funneled into his party through every channel his lawyers could find. Deepfake videos circulating in the final week. Cash payments to favored districts. Five days before the election, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest in person to campaign for him at a “Day of Friendship” rally. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, offering “the full Economic Might of the United States” to prop up Hungary’s economy if Orbán needed it.
None of it worked. Orbán conceded before midnight. The crowds in Budapest chanted Russians, go home.
Why? Why did the courts, the media, the gerrymanders, the deepfakes, and the American vice president fail to save the man who had spent sixteen years showing Donald Trump how it was done? Why does a regime that controls every visible lever of power suddenly lose to a forty-five-year-old former insider in a van?
To answer that question, it helps to look at another country.
By 1989, the East German government, the German Democratic Republic, had built the most invasive surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen.
The Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) kept files on roughly six million people in a country of sixteen million. More than a third of the population was under surveillance. They employed 91,000 full-time officers. They ran a network of nearly two hundred thousand unofficial informants on top of that: neighbors, coworkers, husbands, wives, even children, reporting on the people around them. By some estimates, counting occasional informers, one in every six and a half adults in East Germany was passing information to the secret police. Nothing in the modern history of states comes close.
Now ask the same question. Why? Why did this government need to spend so much of its national resources on watching its own people? Why was a Stasi necessary at all, when democracies of comparable size were running their countries with a small fraction of the personnel?
The answer to both questions, to understanding what happened in Hungary on Sunday, and to what was happening in East Germany forty years ago, is the same answer.
For the most part, people stop at red lights even when there is no cop in sight. They stop because they accept that traffic laws make sense, that the system is fair enough, that the rules apply to them the way they apply to everyone else. Multiply that by every American filing a tax return, every soldier following an order, every bank honoring a check, every foreign central bank parking its savings in U.S. Treasuries. None of that is force. All of it is built on consent, on the consent of the governed.
Consent is what makes force cheap.
It is the legitimacy subsidy that runs underneath every powerful regime in history, and it is the most undervalued asset on any government’s balance sheet. With it, you can run a country on a normal-sized police force and borrow money at four percent. Without it, you need East German numbers of secret police and you pay fourteen percent.
Force at full price is ruinously expensive.
By the late 1980s, almost no one in the German Democratic Republic believed the official story anymore. Nobody thought the rules were fair. Nobody thought the state was legitimate. So the state had to do, by force, what every functioning regime in history has done by consent. It had to police every conversation. It had to put a watcher in every apartment building. It had to manufacture, at staggering cost, the cooperation that working systems get for free.
It worked, in the way that holding your breath works. Right up until it didn’t. And then the Berlin Wall came down in a few weeks.
The same thing, in slow motion, was happening to Viktor Orbán.
One way to think about power is that there are six kinds of power in the world. Three of them (political, economic, and enforcement) are force-based. They can compel. They are visible. They are the part of the iceberg above the waterline, and they are what almost everyone means when they say the word power. The other three (cultural, moral, and network) are consent-based. They don’t compel anything. They tell the story of who we are, and who we ought to be, and who can reach whom. They are the part of the iceberg below the water: invisible, enormous, and the entire reason the visible part stays upright.
The legitimacy subsidy is the line where those two halves meet. It is the conversion mechanism. When the consent-based powers are working, when the story holds, when the moral case feels right, when the networks carry it through the population — the force-based powers operate almost for free. Most people just go along. When the consent-based powers shift, the subsidy dries up, and the force-based powers have to start paying full freight for everything they used to get on credit.
This is why regimes built on force are always more fragile than they look. Not as a moral observation. As an accounting one.
Through this lens, the second Trump administration is not a winning streak. It is an arsonist setting fire to his own house.
He is not consolidating power. He is spending the subsidy that made his power cheap, and he is spending it fast.
Start at home. Planes flown to El Salvador after a federal judge ordered them turned around. A federal judge finding probable cause for contempt over those flights. The Justice Department filing an unprecedented suit against an entire district court bench in Maryland. Whistleblowers from inside the Justice Department reporting that defying judges was the strategy, not an accident. A sitting Vice President saying out loud that judges who rule against the administration should be removed. An executive order trying to redefine birthright citizenship that every court that has touched it has called blatantly unconstitutional. Masked agents grabbing people off the street with no badges, no warrants visible, no due process. Federal employees fired in defiance of court orders to reinstate them. Universities pressured into compliance. The chair of the Federal Reserve under criminal investigation.
Each of these things, taken alone, looks like the administration getting its way. That is how it gets reported, and that is how Trump’s coalition experiences it.
It is not what is actually happening.
What is actually happening is that each of those things teaches some new constituency that the system isn’t fair, isn’t predictable, and doesn’t deserve their voluntary cooperation. Judges. Federal workers. University administrators. Soldiers. Immigrants who used to comply with ICE check-ins because compliance felt safer than flight. Ordinary people who used to assume the government wasn’t lying to them. Each of those people is a withdrawal from the legitimacy account. Once they are gone, you do not get them back by signing another executive order.
Now look abroad. Same play, bigger stage. Trump opened 2026 by threatening to annex Greenland and slapping escalating tariffs on eight NATO allies for refusing to go along. He launched a war on Iran without consulting any ally and then publicly raged at NATO members for declining to send their navies into the Strait of Hormuz to clean up his mess. He has called NATO a paper tiger. He has questioned Article 5 out loud, repeatedly. He has used the dollar settlement system as a coercion tool so aggressively that countries with no particular love of China are quietly building alternatives.
Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, ran the Bank of England before politics. He is not a man given to dramatic rhetoric. Last month, he described what is happening to the U.S.-led world order with one word: rupture.
The obvious objection is that Trump still has his base. He won the popular vote. His coalition watches the El Salvador deportations and cheers. The masked ICE agents are heroes to a third of the country. Every court ruling against him is, to MAGA, evidence that he is the only one fighting for them. The legitimacy subsidy may be draining from the elites and the institutions and the allies, but the people who matter to Trump are still with him.
Or so the story goes.
The polling says the story is wrong.
In CBS News surveys, Trump’s net approval among white voters without a college degree — his core demographic, the people who put him in office — went from plus thirty-six in February 2025 to minus four this month. That’s a forty-point negative swing in fourteen months. Among self-described MAGA supporters specifically, approval has dropped five points since the Iran war began. Among Republicans overall: down five. Among 2024 Trump voters: down six. Among independents: twenty-two percent. CNN has him at thirty-five percent overall, thirty-three percent on Iran. Pew has him at sixty-one percent disapproval on Iran. Harry Enten at CNN ran the numbers and found that Trump’s disapproval on inflation now exceeds both Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden at comparable points in their presidencies. The generic congressional ballot has Democrats up nearly six points.
The number that matters most in any of those polls is one that didn’t show up.
John Cluverius is a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who tracks presidential approval ratings for a living. He is, by profession, exactly the kind of person who knows what a normal pattern looks like. American presidents who start wars almost always get a rally-around-the-flag bounce that lasts months before public opinion turns. It is one of the most reliable findings in political science. When Cluverius’s April poll came out last week, the rally bounce was missing. He called the Iran war “an unmitigated public-opinion disaster” because Trump had skipped the rally entirely and gone straight to the decline.
That is not how this normally works. It happens when the consent-based foundations have already shifted before the war begins. It happens when the population is no longer willing to extend the wartime president the benefit of the doubt that Americans normally extend by reflex.
The subsidy was already draining. Iran just made it visible.
The bills are starting to arrive.
The international ones are the easiest to see, because they come denominated in dollars. The United States has spent seventy-five years enjoying what economists politely call exorbitant privilege: the ability to borrow in our own currency at below-market rates because every reserve manager on Earth parked their savings in U.S. debt. That privilege is not a law of physics. It is the legitimacy subsidy with a yield curve attached.
The dollar has dropped roughly ten percent on a trade-weighted basis in the first year of Trump’s second term. Not in a slow grind. In sharp jolts that line up almost perfectly with his most erratic moments. The April 2025 tariff rollout. The January 2026 Greenland threats. Each shock produced something the textbooks say is not supposed to happen: the dollar fell and Treasury yields rose at the same time. That is not a flight to safety. That is capital walking out the door. Deutsche Bank’s head of FX research called it uncharted territory. Traders had to invent a name for it. They called it the Sell America trade.
The structural picture is contested: reserve managers are slow to move, and the dollar still dominates global trade. But the trend is real and the trajectory is wrong. European NATO members increased their defense spending by more than sixty percent between 2020 and 2025 and are now mobilizing close to eight hundred billion euros under the explicit assumption that the United States will not be there. None of that is happening because Europe woke up loving Trump. It is happening because the subsidy is gone and they are pricing in what comes next.
The domestic bills are harder to see, because they don’t come with a yield attached. But they are just as real. Immigration enforcement that used to run on voluntary check-ins now requires masks, soldiers, thousands of agents per high-profile raid, constant litigation, and a population that is becoming structurally non-cooperative. That is not cheap. That is the opposite of cheap. The previous version of immigration enforcement worked because most people complied voluntarily, because the system carried enough perceived legitimacy that compliance was safer than flight. Burn the legitimacy and every arrest now requires the full apparatus of force.
The same pattern is showing up everywhere. Federal workers refuse to leave when they’re fired. Whistleblowers leak. Judges who used to give the executive enormous deference now write opinions with visible exasperation. States sue every other Friday. Universities lawyer up. The friction coefficient on every action this administration tries to take is rising, and rising friction means rising cost.
Force-based regimes do not gradually weaken. They usually look invincible right up until they don’t.
East Germany looked invincible in October 1989. The Wall came down in November. The Shah looked invincible in 1978 and was gone by January 1979. Mubarak looked invincible the week before he wasn’t. The Soviet Union looked invincible the year before it dissolved. Viktor Orbán looked invincible the morning of April 12, 2026. By the end of the night he had conceded.
In every one of those cases, the visible institutions held right up until the moment the legitimacy subsidy underneath them ran dry. Then everything collapsed at once. And afterward everyone said they had seen it coming, even though almost nobody had.
But collapse is not automatic. The bills come due either way. Whether they bring down the regime depends entirely on whether something better is ready to take its place.
East Germany fell in a few weeks because Solidarity had already broken Poland, because Hungary had already opened its border, because Gorbachev had already decided not to send the tanks, and because there were enough East Germans in the streets of Leipzig every Monday for months that the regime ran out of options. Hungary fell in one night because Péter Magyar had spent two years driving a van around the country building Tisza into something voters could actually grant their consent to, and because the opposition coalition put their differences aside long enough to give the country a coherent alternative. The subsidy ran out in both cases. That part was structural. What was waiting on the other side was not.
This is where the framework turns into a job description.
The fight for the United States right now is not the fight to control the visible institutions. Trump already has those. The fight is for the legitimacy subsidy underneath them, which is generated by cultural power, moral power, and network power: the story of who we are, the story of who we ought to be, and who can reach whom. Every act of organized non-cooperation is a withdrawal from a regime that absolutely cannot afford to pay full price for what it is doing. Every judge who writes a sharp opinion. Every soldier who refuses an unlawful order. Every European leader who builds the workaround. Every reserve manager who quietly buys gold instead of Treasuries. Every citizen who shows up at the courthouse, the school board, the town hall.
But that is only half the work. The other half is building the thing that is ready to be granted consent next: an organized opposition with a real story, real moral credibility, and real reach. That is what Magyar built in Hungary. That is what Solidarity built in Poland. That is what is not fully built yet here.
Trump and his people think they are accumulating power. They are not. They are spending a subsidy they did not build, do not understand, and cannot replenish. The Stasi spent its subsidy too. And in the end the watchers and the filing cabinets and the apartment-building informants and the microphones in the lampshades did not save the German Democratic Republic. They were what it had instead of legitimacy. They were the bill it could not stop paying. And when it could no longer pay, the whole thing came down in a few weeks.
The question for us is whether when the subsidy finishes draining out of this regime there is something organized enough and morally credible enough waiting to be the thing that people grant their consent to next.
That part is on us.
Super analysis, Darcy!!
Excellent crafting.