On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an order reinterpreting the Fourteenth Amendment to deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to undocumented mothers. Federal courts blocked it within 72 hours, citing the 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The same day he directed the Pentagon to deploy active-duty troops to the Texas and Arizona border under a national emergency declaration that invoked the Insurrection Act. Both moves skip Congress.
Governing by Decree
Putin did the same after his 2012 return to the presidency, issuing decrees that restricted NGOs, reorganized election law, and militarized domestic police without a single Duma vote. Trump’s orders test whether American courts will tolerate a president who governs by decree when the legislature refuses to act.
In March 2023, China’s National People’s Congress voted 2,952 to 0 to delete the clause limiting the presidency to two consecutive terms, clearing Xi Jinping to rule past 2032. Trump praised that vote within days, calling Xi “a great gentleman” who “maybe should stay for life.” The parallel is not rhetorical.
The Xi Model
Trump’s campaign statements in 2023 and 2024 repeatedly framed Xi’s removal of term limits as smart management, while Trump told a Dallas rally in July 2024 that Christians “won’t have to vote anymore” after he fixes the system. His allies at the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 already drafted plans to reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants as political appointees, a step Xi took in 2018 to purge independent officials.
A post-2028 Trump maneuver would not require a vote. He has floated serving “beyond two terms” and refused in September to rule out staying in power past the constitutional limit.
Contesting the 2024 Result
On November 6, 2024, Trump declared from Mar-a-Lago that Democrats had “stolen” Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, despite losing each by over 100,000 votes. Within 48 hours, his lawyers filed suits in Wayne County and Philadelphia demanding hand recounts. He also phoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger a second time, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” and warning of “criminal exposure” if he refused.
By November 14, Trump had called Republican legislative leaders in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, urging them to appoint alternate electors under Article II. The script matched Vladimir Putin’s December 2011 response to United Russia’s losses in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Putin called the Duma results “falsified by foreign NGOs,” then jailed 600 protesters in Bolotnaya Square. Trump’s campaign paid $3.2 million to a “Stop the Steal 2024” effort.
The Budapest Method
Trump’s 2024 pledge to reissue Schedule F would strip employment protections from roughly 50,000 federal workers. In their place would come appointees screened for personal loyalty. Viktor Orbán did exactly this after his 2010 supermajority win. His government passed a new constitution. It lowered the judicial retirement age from 70 to 62. More than 270 judges were forced out. His allies then packed the newly created Kúria and the National Judicial Office.
Within three years, Hungary’s media regulator, dominated by Fidesz delegates, awarded frequencies to oligarchs close to the party. Critical outlets faced fines. A 2022 European Parliament report found Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy. The Budapest method is a practical approach, procedural, and Trump’s campaign materials cite it as a model.
A Shared Authoritarianism
At CPAC in Dallas on March 4, 2023, Trump shared a stage with Viktor Orbán, who told the crowd that conservatives “must take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels.” Orbán’s government had already rewritten Hungary’s election laws, seized control of most broadcast media, and built a state-funded propaganda network reaching every Hungarian household. Trump praised the Hungarian model as “the way it’s supposed to be done.”
The set of parallel authoritarianisms has ended. A shared.
Ten months later, in January 2024, Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with a delegation that included Dmitry Rykov and Sergei Markov, two Kremlin-linked operatives who had pushed Russia’s line that the 2020 US election was stolen. The meeting lasted over two hours. In the same period, Xi Jinping’s foreign ministry amplified Trump’s claims of a “rigged” 2020 vote through state media channels reaching 180 countries.
