“I heard one of the ministers on TV this morning, stating, ‘After Ambassador Pressman leaves, he should avoid Hungary in the future,’ ” a representative from Human Rights Watch said.

“I won’t be following that recommendation,” Pressman said, with a wry smile.

“Well, bring a burner phone,” Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist, said. It was gallows humor, but also good advice.

Each June in Budapest, Pressman hosted a Pride celebration on his lawn. The Hungarian government seemed to hate this, but there didn’t appear to be much it could do—there had been a large Pride parade in the streets of Budapest every year since 1997. Yet nothing in politics is static. Last month, the Hungarian parliament passed a law banning all Pride celebrations. Anyone disobeying the ban this June could be identified by the police with facial-recognition software.

Pressman recently moved back to New York and resumed his work as a partner at Jenner & Block, one of the law firms Trump has targeted with an executive order. (Unlike other firms, which cut deals with the Administration, Jenner & Block is fighting the order in court.) “Most Americans haven’t lived through a situation like this, so they have no idea what it means for powerful institutions to be captured by the state,” Pressman told me earlier this month. “They may assume they can keep their heads down for four years, make concessions, and then regain their independence on the back end. But history shows—and the Hungarian experience shows—that they would be mistaken.”

Castle Hill, on the west bank of the Danube River, is full of fortresses built during the Middle Ages. Tucked among them is a slender building constructed to include a five-hundred-year-old stone fortification. It houses the Danube Institute, a right-wing think tank funded indirectly by the Orbán government. In January, István Kiss, the director, invited me into his office, which was tastefully crammed with Impressionist-style paintings and leather-bound books. It was a busy time for him: he had been in Palm Beach for one of Trump’s Election Night victory parties, and he was invited back to Washington for the Inauguration, but he probably wouldn’t be able to go, because his wife was about to give birth. The government offers generous tax breaks to families with more than two children, a policy aimed at increasing the Hungarian birth rate, and this would be Kiss’s third. “Honestly, we might have stopped at two otherwise,” he told me. “But the incentives were quite appealing.” When he was a university student, he spent a week at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Alabama. “I discovered that I have some libertarian leanings, but my social conservatism is stronger,” he said. “The left is using the state for its purposes, so why shouldn’t we?”

In April, 2023, in a dungeon-like theatre space in the building’s basement, Kiss introduced an onstage Q. & A. with Christopher Rufo, a right-wing American activist who was in Hungary for a six-week Danube Institute fellowship. For years, Rufo had been pushing for an ideological overhaul of the entire American education system—a proposal that had once struck most politicians, even most MAGA Republicans, as a non-starter. But Rufo said that a version of this program was taking shape in Florida, where he was an adviser to Governor Ron DeSantis. It could be accomplished most directly at state-run institutions such as New College, where DeSantis had installed Rufo as a trustee. (Within months, the trustees had dismantled the gender-studies program and replaced the school’s president, a feminist English professor, with a former Republican politician.) Even when it came to private institutions, where DeSantis had less formal power, he still found ways to gain leverage—for example, by announcing that he would rescind tax breaks from Disney and, by extension, perhaps other “woke” corporations. “It’s essential to have someone that understands how to change institutions,” Rufo said, onstage in Budapest. He added that, during Trump’s first term, “the reality is that the institutions submerged Trump more than Trump reformed the institutions.”

When Trump returned to office, in 2025, he seemed determined to prove such skeptics wrong. Rufo, whose posts on X had caught Musk’s attention, went to Washington in early February, posting a photo from the Department of Education headquarters with the caption “Entering the inner sanctum.” (Rufo recently told me that he was an informal adviser to the Department of Education. A spokesperson for the department, when reached for comment, replied, “He does not advise DOE in any official capacity and should not be referred to as an advisor.”) Rufo told the Times that he hoped the government would withhold money from universities “in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” He didn’t have to wait long. On March 7th, shortly after Linda McMahon, the former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, was confirmed as Trump’s new Secretary of Education, the Administration threatened to cut off four hundred million dollars in federal funds to Columbia University, citing campus demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza. Trump may have been eager to pick a fight with Columbia because it was the only Ivy League school in his home town, or because it was the school he most associated with anti-Israel protests, perhaps having seen so many of them on TV. In any case, if there is one thing the President understands, it’s how to seed a compelling media narrative: an élite institution, full of foreigners and strange ideas, had taken root in his country’s biggest city, and he would not stand for it.

On March 13th, the Trump Administration sent Columbia a letter that might as well have been a ransom note. Before the university could even discuss getting its money back, it had to implement nine new policies, including banning face masks and empowering campus security guards to make arrests. On March 21st, it acceded to nearly all the government’s demands. “Columbia is folding—and the other universities will follow suit,” Rufo wrote on X. He told me recently, “It has been happening, honestly, way more quickly than I anticipated. It’s beautiful to see.”

Previous Presidents have used incentives to goad private institutions, but no modern President has so openly used executive spending as an extortion racket. Eighteen of the country’s top constitutional-law scholars, both liberals and conservatives, wrote an open letter: “The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing First Amendment-protected speech.” Yet the government has continued to do exactly that. (“President Trump is working to Make Higher Education Great Again,” a White House spokesperson told The New Yorker, in part. “Any institution that wishes to violate Title VI is, by law, not eligible for federal funding.”) Given how quickly some universities have capitulated, why wouldn’t the Administration use similar tactics to bully state governments, or Hollywood studios, or other entities that rely on federal money? Last year, Vance gave an interview to the European Conservative, a glossy print journal published in Budapest, in which he praised Orbán’s dominance of cultural institutions. By altering “incentives” and “funding decisions,” Vance added, “you really can use politics to influence culture.”

It will take a lot more than this to turn Columbia into a Potemkin university, or to drive it out of the country. C.E.U. was founded in the nineteen-nineties; Columbia was founded before the Declaration of Independence was written, and still has an endowment of more than fourteen billion dollars. In the coming months, though, smaller universities will surely be targeted, and some will presumably go bankrupt. (In February, with the stroke of a pen, Trump slashed the staff at two colleges run by the Bureau of Indian Education, and it barely made the news.) I visited Columbia earlier this month. Instead of passing through the main gate as usual, I had to stop at a checkpoint, where, between a couple of classical sculptures representing Science and Letters, some uniformed security guards waited to check my I.D. Two professors met me on campus. “They keep adding more of this Orwellian shit,” one told me, gesturing at a bulbous security camera above our heads. The other added, “After a while, unfortunately, you stop noticing.” One of them had studied democratic collapse in Europe and Latin America; the other was from India, where, under the competitive authoritarian Narendra Modi, academic freedom was under constant assault. Neither would say more, even off the record, until we walked away from campus to the edge of the Hudson River, where they would be less likely to be overheard or recorded. “It may seem paranoid,” one of them said. “But not if you’ve seen this movie before.”

The most influential independent media outlet in Hungary is a YouTube channel called Partizán, a name that evokes both advocacy journalism and anti-authoritarian resistance. It does its work not in the pine forests of Belarus but on the outskirts of Budapest, where it broadcasts from a soundstage in an unmarked warehouse. To get there one night, I walked past dilapidated brick buildings in an industrial area without sidewalks or street lights. My American street sense told me that I was about to get mugged, but in Central Europe it can be hard to tell the difference between imminent danger and shabby chic. Márton Gulyás emerged from the shadows and smiled, shaking my hand. “They filmed part of ‘The Brutalist’ in this parking lot,” he said, and led me upstairs.

In the studio, the mood was much warmer. Gulyás, Partizán’s founder and main anchor, took his place on set, wearing a hoodie, in front of a bank of vintage TVs. He had just finished moderating the channel’s flagship daily show—a two-hour live roundtable, analyzing the day’s news from a leftist perspective—and he was about to tape an interview with Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top foreign-policy advisers. I sat in a control room, where a few long-haired, effortlessly well-dressed employees made instant coffee. Partizán receives small donations from all over Hungary, and the control room was stocked with high-end equipment (a five-thousand-dollar video router, a cabinet labelled “HUMÁN-ROBOT INTERFÉSZ”).

Since 2010, the Hungarian media has been thoroughly compromised. There are a few news sites in Budapest that still do valiant investigative work, but most TV channels and newspapers with national reach essentially function as privately owned state propaganda. Again, though, the regime is careful to preserve plausible deniability. Unlike in Mexico or the Philippines, government agents in Hungary don’t kill or arrest hostile journalists. “They don’t walk into a newsroom and announce, ‘We are shutting you down because you published tough stories about us,’ ” Gábor Miklósi, a veteran investigative journalist (and the brother of Zoltan, the C.E.U. academic), told me. “They say, ‘This is the new owner, and the new owner has some ideas about how to improve the business.’ And the part they don’t have to say, but everybody knows, is that this new owner is an oligarch who happens to be very close to the Prime Minister.” For a decade, Gábor worked at Index, which used to be one of Hungary’s most reliable news outlets. After Orbán came to power, Gábor started to worry about editorial independence. But there wasn’t much meddling at first, he said, “so I convinced myself I should stay.” When he did start to notice some editorial interference, “it was mostly minor things”—a headline softened at the last minute, a story spiked for ambiguous reasons—“so you can never be sure. Maybe this particular case was a misunderstanding. Maybe I’m imagining things.” Around 2018, a company affiliated with Index was acquired by new owners, “lesser-known businesspeople tied to Fidesz oligarchs.” After this, the editor-in-chief was fired, and most of the editorial staff, including Gábor, resigned in protest. Now he works at Partizán.