A lesson from Orbán’s fall: the media bubble can actually bring down a leader

We tend to think control of major media helps autocrats stay in power. But what if it’s having the opposite effect in a world in which so many other outlets render mainstream media obsolete?

The defeat of authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary was a major triumph for democracy in Europe and around the world. And, as Trump used Orbán as a model—Steve Bannon infamously said Orbán was “Trump before Trump”—it is a five-alarm fire for the MAGA movement in the United States.

Trumpists treated Orbán as a deity, having him speak at CPAC and conservative conferences around the U.S. often and even holding CPAC in Budapest five times. Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party aggressively passed anti-democratic laws and radically altered the Constitution; assaulted voting rights, including with extreme gerrymandering; stripped the rights of minorities, such as LGBTQ people; and hollowed out government institutions and the judiciary, and installed loyalists. And, through his oligarch allies, Orbán came to control over 80% of media, having a massive propaganda machine.

And still, after cementing 16 years in office, he faced a crushing defeat by an organized opposition led by a former member of his own party, Peter Magyar.

Luckily for us, Trump doesn’t have the amount of time Orbán had to transform the political and cultural landscape—and Orbán had the luxury of centralized national government, while Trump has to contend with federalism and the states having much power.

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Nonetheless, it’s clear that Trump is trying to do in four years what Orbán did in 16. Trump’s already attempted to cram in a lot in just two years before the mid-terms—after faltering in his attempts in his first term and then seeing much of the damage he caused undone by Joe Biden.

But at least one thing that was an ingredient in the mix of issues that brought down Orbán is playing out for Trump right now as well: The right-wing media cocoon.

Orbán and his party had near-total control over both public and privately owned media by 2026. Peter Magyar, the newly elected prime minister who slayed Orbán in Sunday’s election, told the Associated Press in 2024:

It might be very difficult to imagine from America or Western Europe what the propaganda and the state machinery is like here. This parallel reality is like the Truman Show. People believe that it’s reality.

Orbán early on took hold of public television and public radio, which have consistently had more presence and government funding in European countries and have valued independent, nonpartisan reporting. Orbán installed his propagandists, who echoed the talking points of his Fidesz party.

According to press watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Orbán, modeling Vladimir Putin in Russia, also oversaw media buyouts among privately owned media by his oligarch buddies to build “a true media empire subject to his party’s orders.” The organization estimated the control by Orbán of more than 80% of the traditional media.

But reports in the past year showed that Orbán himself was a victim of his own fawning media, increasingly out-of-touch and believing what he saw reported, as the public was souring on him, angry about a cratering economy they could feel and a corruption they could see, as Orbán’s billionaire friends made a fortune while people were struggling.

Magyar, meanwhile, who’d broken from Fidesz several years ago over the pardoning by the government of a child predator and founded his Tisza party, was using social media outlets and podcasts in the past two years to campaign, as well as holding old-fashioned rallies, traveling all across the country, and bringing out massive crowds in even the most rural outposts that were Fidesz strongholds. His message couldn’t be snuffed out by Orbán’s control of media, while Orbán himself was in a bubble of his own making, not seeing the unrest. As The New York Times noted:

The result on Sunday did not represent an ideological earthquake or a sudden swerve among Hungarians from right to left, but rather something highly personal. Voters toppled a strongman leader who, increasingly cocooned in the flattery of sycophants and the praise of a sprawling propaganda machine, had lost his touch.

I certainly don’t mean to simplify the results of the Hungarian election, which were about many things beyond media control. And Hungary and the U.S. are different countries with very different histories.

But you can see the same outlines in the U.S., as Democratic candidates fed up with corporate media use social media and thousands of podcasts, Substacks, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and a vast array of other platforms to get the message out.

And they’re doing the tried and true organizing in communities, meeting voters, holding rallies—like Bernie Sanders and AOC on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour or the many political leaders and candidates joining millions in “No Kings” marches. They’re able to get past the filter of the corporate media and its stereotyping of their political views and agenda, and win elections. Just ask Zohran Mamdani.

The corporate media, with TV ratings in the toilet and publications like the Washington Post collapsing, just doesn’t have the impact it had in the past, and every Democratic candidate who’s trounced—and flipped seats from red to blue—in the past year used the alternative outlets to build their following and make big shifts in the elections.

Also, Trump’s attempts to consolidate media to create an echo chamber so far are failing: After the Trump regime allowed the MAGA-supporting Ellison family to buy up Paramount and CBS, where anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss was installed as executive editor of CBS News, the CBS Evening News ratings have plummeted. What good is state propaganda if nobody is watching it?

More than that, the rest of us who are using social media, Substack, YouTube, SiriusXM Progress and other outlets are taking what we want from the mainstream media and putting it in proper context, sharing viral clips from CBS or ABC or CNN that embarrass Republicans or hold up progressives and their message. Of course, the right has a far bigger universe of alternative media, with well-funded podcasts and friendly social media platforms. But in a way, they’re just expanding the MAGA media bubble, as they push lies and conspiracies and don’t do any favors for GOP politicians who aren’t hearing the reality about what’s happening on the ground.

The point is that we’re not allowing our voices to be suppressed or stopped from getting the truth out, though there’s surely a constant effort to do so—even as the U.S.’s own oligarchs, like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, own the platforms. Thankfully, neither Hungary nor the U.S. has reached the point of Russia—and surely not Iran or China—where even social media and alternative outlets are radically censored by the government.

The conservative media bubble led by Fox and the many other newer outlets, meanwhile, is feeding the MAGA masses, keeping them in the dark. That’s a bad thing, for sure. But it’s also created an altered reality that many Republican politicians themselves are deeply immersed in to their own detriment, out of touch with voters, just like Viktor Orbán.

And that’s what’s happening to Trump too. That line from the Times about Orbán—“increasingly cocooned in the flattery of sycophants and the praise of a sprawling propaganda machine“—could just as easily have been written about Trump. We in fact recently learned that Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles was asking members of his cabinet to start telling Trump the truth about the war in Iran rather than tell him it’s going great. People around him are afraid to tell him bad news, and the outlets like Fox or Newsmax that he watches all day are telling him he’s doing a spectacular job.

Is it any wonder then that this man, in mental decline and drinking his own Kool-Aid, lashed out at Pope Leo—who has an 84% approval rating among American Catholics—and then posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, causing enormous backlash even among MAGA and the Christian right, his own supporters? Immersed in all this worship of him, Trump thinks he’s the messiah, as his and the GOP’s poll numbers are in free fall.

Trump was forced to delete the image, clearly retreating only after some in the White House let him know how bad this was, just as he did when the post of the Obamas depicted as apes was removed. Yesterday we even saw the Trump administration reverse itself and allow the Pride flag to fly at Stonewall. We didn’t need their permission, by the way, as gay activists had replaced the flag within days after the Interior Dept. removed it. It’s clear though that some people in the White House realize how bad it’s all playing out, causing these quiet reversals to happen.

But it’s not enough to control Trump, who will continue to soak up adoring media that makes him literally feel like he’s God—and post crazy shit online or make outlandish statements. He will continue to be glorified by many other sycophants in the White House and beyond. And many GOP leaders in the House and Senate, too, and in the states, are just as immersed in this same fiction they’ve created, living in a cocoon.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to use all of these thousands of other platforms to get the message out, sometimes even bringing in people who escape the conservative media bubble but mostly galvanizing the millions who are already seeing the horrors happening. And we’ll defeat the authoritarian, just like they did in Hungary.