Using democracy to kill democracy—Trump takes a redistricting trick from Viktor Orbán

Democrats’ unilateral disarmament via independent redistricting commissions is coming back to haunt them

Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán

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It’s “drive off the cliff” time again in America’s casino democracy. The Trump racketeers have a plan to swipe votes from Americans in order to keep their bare GOP House majority in the 2026 midterm elections. But they aren’t going to do it by tampering with voting equipment or storming the US Capitol building, instead they are going to monkey with the legislative district lines, a.k.a. extreme gerrymandering, in a number of red GOP states. The plan is to pick the voters before the voters have a chance to pick them. They believe that will maximize their chances of winning more seats and keeping and possibly expanding their slim House majority.

Much has been written recently about this latest travesty, about how the Democrats are counter-responding to this MAGA assault on the American castle of democracy by copying Trump’s tactics and threatening to re-gerrymander some blue states. “No unilateral disarmament,” has become the Democrats battle cry. Which is understandable, because if the Republicans are able to successfully manipulate the process to gain unconstitutional advantage, the Democrats have little choice but to fight back, and by any means necessary. So begins yet another American-style banana republic race to the bottom.

I have been an advocate for independent redistricting commissions all my political life, and it pains me to admit this, but the evidence is now overwhelming. In the face of Trump’s authoritarianism and willingness to cheat until the courts or term limits stop him, it’s time to admit that IRCs at the federal level have failed. IRCs should not be ends in themselves. They must solve a larger dilemma of democracy – levelling the playing field and making politics more fair. But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that this worthy goal cannot be done on a piecemeal basis, state-by-state, for federal elections. It must be done nationally. Otherwise, as we have seen, it does in fact amount to unilateral disarmament in which one party (the Democrats, who have supported IRCs) is relinquishing a powerful tool in an increasingly bitter political war, while the other party is merrily brandishing its weapon. That is not a fair fight.

Winner-take-all makes all of us losers

But we should hardly be surprised by this. The US uses a winner-take-all form of representative democracy in which representatives are each elected from a single geographic district. So how the district lines are drawn becomes all important. Move a line a few miles to the east, and another line a few miles to the north, and suddenly a district goes from electing a Democrat to electing a Republican. In the wrong hands it can be a dangerous and arbitrary business. There have been infamous examples of districts that looked like a smashed mosquito, another compared to a Picasso painting, another to an inkblot test, or the Zorro district in Louisiana shaped like a giant Z, or another district in North Carolina that snaked along the Interstate 95 corridor capturing pockets of Democratic voters – as one pundit commented, “If you drove along I-5 with your car doors wide open, you would kill everyone in the district.”

Of course, gerrymandering wars have gone on in the US ever since our national birthquake, and both the GOP and Democrats have resorted to it. And truth be told, in most states and for most districts it’s not the line-drawing that decides winners and losers, it’s the partisan demographics of where people live. In cities and many suburbs, there are too many Democratic voters for a Republican to win; in rural areas and exurbs, too many GOP voters render it impossible for a Democrat to win. But in recent years Republicans have cleverly outmaneuvered Democrats in the redistricting wars, both in their audacity and their ability to win control over more state legislative chambers with the power to oversee redistricting in each state.

This part of the democratic sausage-making has always been ugly, but at least it was restricted to a one-time travesty at the start of each decade, right after the release of the US Census. Now, the MAGA Trumpers are going for the jugular by launching a perverse twist – a second redistricting in the middle of the decade. The GOP is looking to redraw maps in Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio and perhaps other states, especially if Democrats respond in kind in their major blue states, including California, Illinois and New York. The two sides will deploy increasingly sophisticated computers, data sets and biographic tracking of voters to really twist the lines further than they did in 2021-22 and wring a little more blood out of the stone. Republicans have perfected this dark art to its most perverse artform yet. After all, if you can redistrict in the middle of the decade, why not redo the district lines every two years for each House election?

Sure, it would be confusing as hell for voters as they could see their “representatives” regularly switching from Democrat to Republican and back again. But damn the voters. If US democracy was about the voters, we wouldn’t be using a winner-take-all, two-choice tango electoral method, we would be electing our representatives by some kind of proportional representation method which would foster multi-party democracy and give voters more authentic choices. If this was about the voters, we would have universal/automatic voter registration like every other established democracy has and finally terminate the ridiculous voter registration wars we suffer through, and we would have publicly financed elections so that voters could hear from a range of candidates offering different, exciting ideas, instead of only from those blah-blah candidates who have access to wealthy donors or are themselves wealthy.

No, this is not about the voters. That’s the perverse logic of winner-take-all. In the world of winner-take-all, of course Trump and his mini-me Republicans would attempt this audacious gambit, because in winner-take-all that’s how you win. And of course the Democrats would have to follow suit, because that’s the only way to keep up the pace in this race to the bottom. Within the narrow reptilian logic of winner-take-all, the Republicans are right to do this; and the Democrats are right to respond in kind.

But that just illustrates how wrong is America’s winner-take-all democracy, as we spiral downward toward post-democracy. This is just the beginning. Here’s a front row seat to where it’s likely to go next.

The Orban-ization of US politics

Trump’s role model, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, has unleashed a brand of crony capitalism and Christian nationalism that has turned Orbán into the Jedi master of exploiting the “loopholes of democracy.” As Donald Trump has illustrated by his noxious daily examples, representative government can only work if there is a modicum of fairness, justice and respect for the rule of law embraced not only by its elected leaders but also most of its citizens’ attitudes and the institutions that form the scaffolding of democracy. America’s Founders built into our political framework a degree of separation of powers and checks and balances. Under Trump, these features are now struggling mightily. Even more effectively than Trump, Orbán has systematically undermined representative government in Hungary from its halcyon post-Communist days, including substantially constricting and in some sectors eliminating an actual opposition. But he hasn’t done it the old-fashioned way, through martial law or political repression.

Instead, Orbán has accomplished this by using the rules of democracy to manipulate and squeeze democracy itself. Orbán cleverly practices what I call “python democracy,” i.e. strangling Hungary’s civic and democratic institutions to the point where they barely function and the opposition is suffocated by a lack of political space.

While some have called Orbán a quasi-dictator, his regime continues to hold elections. But he has rigged the rules so that the results are grotesquely lopsided. In 2010 when he first came to power, Orbán began a process of changing a number of electoral laws that would cement his advantage for years to come. First, in Hungary’s National Assembly elections, which combine US-style single-seat “winner take all” districts with a European-style proportional representation method, Orbán increased the percentage of US-style winner-take-all districts from 46% of all seats to 53%. Then, he became the Gerrymanderer in Chief, by granting the power to redistrict the entire country to his political party instead of an independent commission.

And here’s Orbán’s secret sauce that you could expect Trump to try at some point. He allowed the population of the districts to vary greatly in population size by up to 35% (in the US the allowable variance is usually 5%). This has allowed Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, to pack voters from the opposition into a smaller number of heavily populated districts, and spread out its own supporters among a great deal of less-populous districts. Pretty clever.

The result? In 2014, Fidesz won less than 45% of the popular vote, so you’d think that another political party might be able to command a majority of the parliament. Instead, Orbán’s party captured an astounding 91% of the gerrymandered single-seat districts, and two-thirds of the seats overall. In the 2022 election, things were hardly better, with Fidesz winning “only” 82% of the single-seat district races, and 67% of the seats overall, even though it only won 54% of the popular vote. These winner-take-all dynamics have been a major factor in creating such huge “votes to seats” distortions in the single-seat districts that allow Orbán’s party to be so vastly overrepresented.

Orbán also has packed the courts and eroded judicial independence, and packed the media with his cronies and curtailed press freedoms, including forcing some media outlets out of business. Orbán and his allies now own many of the newspapers in the country, and only a handful of independent outlets have survived.

Following that playbook, Trump also has powerful allies for his own pursuit of power – including a deeply conservative Supreme Court. The third branch of government, with a 6-3 right-wing majority, as well as the increasingly conservative lower courts, have been undergoing their own “Orbán-ization.” Judicial leaders are using the vagueness of some legal and democratic norms to overturn precedent and push a backward-looking jurisprudence. These Judicial Orbáns already have begun flexing their power to undermine US democracy by using their extraordinary authority to reverse long-standing judicial practices employed by the lower courts.

The US Supreme Court and a federal appeals court overruled four state judges in Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama which had thrown out illegal GOP gerrymanders. The GOP legislatures stalled and stalled over re-drawing the court-ordered lines, and as the Congressional elections approached, the federal courts decided to allow those four states to go ahead anyway and use the illegal GOP maps for their congressional elections. When I played competitive sports, that’s what we called a “home town job” by the referees. Those four states contained nearly 10 percent of the seats in the House, and likely handed to Republicans the five to seven House seats needed for the GOP to win a House majority. This marked an outright defiance of representative democracy by Republican-appointed federal judges, and a warning sign about what may lie ahead.

Trump's attacks on the media, Orbán-style

And then there’s the US media, another battle scene of illiberalism. Trump has Orbán-ized that space too. Media lawyers scoffed when Trump sued two major news organizations for producing journalism he didn’t like; First Amendment experts laughed and said the lawsuits lacked any legal merit whatsoever. But no one’s laughing now.

Last month, CBS News and its parent company Paramount Global settled Trump’s lawsuit against them over a 60 Minutes interview he didn’t like with Kamala Harris. CBS paid Trump $16 million, despite doing nothing wrong besides practicing journalism. That settlement followed Trump’s $15 million settlement with ABC News in December 2024, over a minor misquotation by one of its hosts.

Most recently, Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the conservative Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over a story detailing a letter reportedly sent by Trump to celebrity pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has also sued smaller outlets, including the Des Moines Register and an Iowa pollster in December 2024, ridiculously alleging election interference. He has cut the funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR and PBS, which are pushing back by suing Trump, as is the Associated Press. According to an Axios analysis, Trump and his businesses have been involved in 34 media or defamation lawsuits since 2015. Trump’s lawsuits are vindictive retaliatory acts, weaponized missiles that are proving effective at harassing the media and creating a chilling effect around news reportage.

This is life in a python democracy. In short, Orbán has squeezed all important institutions to establish a new quasi-model of illiberal government in which he doesn’t need to use violent or thuggish tactics against his political opponents or grab power with the point of a gun. He has done it by manipulating the practices of Western democracy itself to control the fundamental institutions. He has used his electoral mandate to legally dismantle the constitutional systems he assumed stewardship over. Hungary under Orbán has devolved into a new perverse form of representative democracy that doesn’t care about voters, it only cares about power.

Now Trump is trying to do the same. From everything we can tell, this is the direction that Trump and MAGA are trying to go. This is not just your usual partisan bickering and gamesmanship over the rules and rituals of democracy. We are now approaching a whole new level of democratic hell akin to Dante’s Inferno:

“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

Human history has been through this kind of tragic trajectory before. This increasingly feels like a dangerous moment in the long life of American democracy. Trump’s muscular power play trying to overthrow the norms and standards of governance that, along with the laws themselves, ensure fairness, justice and respect for the law, are threatening to seep into the timbers and establish a new and deeply rotten “American Way.” Trump’s illiberalism in turn will establish a new model for the world that will make the political sphere an increasingly perilous place.

Only six months into his term, Donald Trump has the whole world holding its breath, waiting to see what the vengeful fallen leader who survived an assassin’s bullet, and now is wielding the reins of the imperial presidency like no one before, is planning to do. What is his end game? I’m not sure even the thin-skinned president himself knows.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776bsky.social @StevenHill1776