The Art of the Steal: Creating and Sustaining a Complete Alternative Reality

The Art of the Steal: Creating and Sustaining a Complete Alternative Reality

Victor Orbán did it slowly (over 16 years), amending the Hungarian constitution to increase his power, muzzling the press and forcing media to sell to his cronies, adopting police-driven repression against protestors and politicians opposing his mandates, pushing non-ethnic Hungarians out of the country, making billions with his family, nuzzling with Putin putting a wrench in the EU’s anti-Russian vectors, and blatantly redefining “illiberal democracy” to the delight of the American rightwing.

Orbán’s policies were codified in the US Project 2025 manifesto that became the backbone of Trump 2.0, in everything from brutal immigration policies, refusing to follow federal court orders, ignoring Congress, fostering white Christian nationalism, spending/tax cuts that slammed the economic well-being of most Americans, mounting blistering attacks on media as he favored media mergers and acquisitions that would replace neutral and liberal media with Trump-friendly reporting, indicting and prosecuting his political foes, making sure “Trump” was everywhere, feasting at the corruption trough, and erasing inconvenient historical realities from museum presentations to historical descriptors in our National Parks.

But eventually, Hungarians had enough, and in the last election, they decimated Prime Minister Orbán’s Christian nationalist and far-right Fidesz Party, a now marginalized and very unpopular political movement, that could not keep Orbán in power. Orbán had attempted to redefine “correct thinking” in his culture war against what he believed was his nation’s biggest enemy: anything liberal or even at the center of local political thought. Inconvenient facts were erased, and anyone objecting to these revisionist falsehoods was declared an enemy of the state and treated accordingly. Trump 1.0 was a mild tiptoe into ultra-right revisionism. Trump 2.0, following the Project 2025 Orbán-like manifesto, tried to replicate Orbán’s 16-year agenda in under two years… with similar accelerated negative reactions, internationally and domestically.

The big difference between Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s America was our massive military capacity… and perhaps Trump’s “I passed the dementia cognitive 30-question test with flying colors” ego… even bigger than Orbán’s. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill generated a very dangerous deficit increase via his tax cut for the rich, tanking medical affordability for millions of Americans in the process. Surrounding himself with “loyalists without competence”, “yes” men and women backed by a MAGA-controlled Congress which quivered in fear at being “primaried” out of office if they dared to defy cult-leader Trump, mediocrity and downright ignorance replaced a flawed but reasonably effective prior government.

But Trump’s hypersonic fall from grace, a self-inflicted coup de gras, began with his “I know better than my own genuine military experts” in accepting the failed, never-ending war admonitions – which had been rejected by every recent US president despite the Israeli PM’s efforts to persuade – Bibi Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran was a nuclear weapons threat (without actually having one) and that a joint military attack on Iran would be short, sweet and highly effective.

After all, Trump’s military genius was able to “shoot to kill” very small helpless, fast-boats, purportedly carrying drugs, in the East Pacific and the Caribbean, and extract Venezuelan Drug Lord/President Nicolás Maduro using our Special Forces, letting Cuba know it was next. These miniscule triumphs seemed to convince Trump and his ventriloquist dummy, Major Pete, of their supreme military expertise, which led to a voluntary leap into Netanyahu’s custom designed pool of inescapable quicksand.

Our military leadership, even the ones who were not fired, knew the risks, the impact that a closure of the Strait of Hormuz would have on oil and gas prices everywhere, that Iranian missiles could reach regional US military bases, and that this religious zealot-controlled nation would never surrender, accepting massive civilians losses as the cost of their rule. As our experts believed in 2018 when Trump terminated the functioning UN-sponsored nuclear containment treaty with Iran, Tehran still did not have a nuclear weapon … and with the earlier B2 bombing damage, was nowhere likely to have one anytime soon.

The economic havoc, the rapid rise of oil, gas, fertilizer, etc. prices are profound, and experts have warned that the war’s damage to oil fields, dozens of refineries and the shipping infrastructure would keep those prices high for potentially years even if the war ended tomorrow and the Strait were open wide. Add this obvious mistake to Trump’s misunderstanding that tariffs were economic depressants, de facto sales taxes, that not only slammed American consumers but were bully tactics that alienated our closest allies, perhaps beyond redemption. Sidestepping the Supreme Court’s rejection of most of Trump’s tariffs, Trump is now threatening Europe with a more than doubling of agreed tariffs. It never ends.

But Trump’s failures just seem to multiply; his latest in his “follow your ego, think later… if ever” response to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s chastisement of Trump’s being held into a stalemate by a Iran – super-weapons vs drones: pulling 5,000 US troops out what maybe our European/Middle Eastern most important series of bases. Our central military medical base, even our regional command focus and bastion against Russian aggression – Germany – may be our most important overseas situs for American military power.

The Trump administration tells us that our economy is strong, that prices will tumble soon, that our allies and enemies alike will succumb to our demands and that America’s “might makes right” policy will prevail. All false. Unless the just-announced Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana vs Callais, allowing partisan gerrymandering with virtually no limits but even the slightest reference to “race” is constitutionally unjustified, is able to justify a blatant mid-term election steal (which is possible), Trump’s MAGA candidates will at least loose the House and probably the Senate. Southern states are accelerating redrawing congressional election maps in a desperate attempt to keep Trump’s alternative and objectively false reality as the continuing law of the land. Meanwhile Trump and family are milking their relationships to make more billions before they are tossed from office.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as a practicing lawyer for decades, with respect for what was once a nation of laws and the US Constitution as it was envisaged by our Founding Fathers, I am appalled and ashamed of how Trump has managed to change our country into his personal (failed) fiefdom.