https://www.npr.org/2025/05/01/nx-s1-5340754/trump-authoritarianism-u-s-hungary-turkey-orban-erdogan-duterte-maria-ressa
Last year, David Koranyi attended his mother's 70th birthday party back home in Hungary, but the indirect route he took highlights the autocratic rule that grips his homeland. Instead of flying straight to Hungary, Koranyi flew to neighboring Austria and then turned off his phone and drove across the border where there was no passport control and he knew he could slip in undetected.
Koranyi runs an organization called Action for Democracy that has mobilized Hungarians overseas to vote back home, where political scientists say Prime Minister Viktor Orbn has tilted the electoral landscape toward his ruling party. The government says Koranyi threatens Hungary's sovereignty; pro-government media routinely call him an "enemy of the state."
"Friends and even embassies in Hungary ... told me that maybe it's better if I don't come back to Hungary anytime soon," says Koranyi, who was concerned Orbn's government might try to detain him.
Threats like this are one reason Koranyi came to America and became a citizen in 2022. So, he's been struck to see U.S. government agents stopping and aggressively questioning people including citizens, tourists and green-card holders returning to America.
They include Michigan lawyer Amir Makled, who was stopped at Detroit Metro Airport in early April as he returned from a family vacation. Makled, who said agents asked to search his phone, thinks he was targeted because he represents a pro-Palestinian protester at the University of Michigan.
"I'm not going to be a dictator"
"I never in a million years would have imagined that atmosphere of fear and that random searches at border crossings and looking into people's phones ... is something that I would live through in my life in the United States," says Koranyi, who lives in New York.
Countless people have left authoritarian countries for the promise of freedom and safety in the United States. NPR reached out to Koranyi and a dozen others to get their impressions of the Trump administration's first several months in power. Most but not all said some of the administration's tactics reminded them of those used by the regimes they fled.
In fact, a survey in February found that hundreds of U.S.-based scholars think the United States is moving swiftly from a liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.
"This is an elected government, obviously, but it is behaving as an authoritarian one, " says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is engaging in a rapid and systematic weaponization of the machinery of government and its deployment to punish rivals, to protect allies and to bully elements of the media."