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Before Trump, There Was Franco. The Playbook for Silencing Journalism Is Old.

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:53:35 GMT

Last week we examined the first technique in the strongman’s playbook: capture the courts. Without a judiciary willing to say no, everything else becomes possible. This week, we move to the second technique. It follows the first almost immediately, because it has to. You cannot hold power indefinitely if people can still read accurate accounts of what you are doing with it.

The second technique is rewiring the media.

Not destroying it. Not necessarily shutting every newspaper and radio station on day one. The goal is subtler and more durable than that. The goal is to make independent journalism so difficult, so dangerous, and so financially precarious that it gradually disappears on its own, while a parallel media ecosystem grows up around you that amplifies everything you want amplified and buries everything you want buried. By the time citizens notice that the information environment has changed, the change is already complete.

Every authoritarian leader of the twentieth century understood this. The methods varied considerably depending on the technology of the era, the structure of the media market, and the political situation. The underlying logic never varied at all.

This is the second installment of The Strongman’s Playbook. It is a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.

If you subscribe now, you can follow the full series as it unfolds and read the previous series, The Fall, in the archive. Ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story.

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Mussolini moved on the Italian press within two years of taking power. By 1923 he had introduced press legislation requiring that editors be registered with the state and could be removed if their publications were deemed harmful to national interests. That language, “harmful to national interests,” was intentionally vague. It had to be. Vague language is more effective than specific prohibitions, because journalists and editors cannot know exactly where the line is, so they err far on the safe side.

Mussolini in Milan, 1930 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-09844 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

By 1925, the system was formalized. A fascist journalists’ association controlled who could work. Editors who published material the regime disliked were replaced. Owners who objected were pressured, bought out, or found that their other business interests suddenly attracted unwanted official attention. Within a few years, Italy had a nominally free press in which almost nothing critical of the regime appeared. The papers still published. They ran sports coverage, cultural pages, and advertisements. They reported the news that the government wanted reported. The form of a free press remained. The function had been removed.

This is the Mussolini template: use licensing, registration, and economic pressure to reshape the press from the inside rather than abolishing it outright. Abolition looks like what it is. Reshaping looks like regulation.

Perón in Argentina had the advantage of radio, and he used it more aggressively than any Latin American leader before him. Radio Belgrano became in effect the voice of Peronism. It broadcast the regime’s version of events, Evita’s speeches, and the emotional content of the Peronist movement directly into Argentine homes. This was not propaganda in the crude sense of obvious distortion. It was something more sophisticated: the saturation of the information environment with a particular emotional register, a particular set of heroes and villains, a particular way of understanding Argentine history and identity.

Perón addresses the crowd (Peronismo 21, Public domain)

At the same time, Perón dealt with the print press through a combination of methods that would become a template for the region. Newsprint was a scarce commodity in postwar Argentina, and the government controlled its allocation. Papers that criticized the regime found their newsprint allocations cut. Papers that supported Perón found the supply reliable. This is an almost elegant form of media control because it is deniable. The government never told any newspaper what to write. It simply managed the supply of paper.

The opposition newspaper La Prensa held out longer than most. It was one of the most respected papers in Latin America and had been publishing since 1869. Perón eventually had it expropriated in 1951, handing it to the General Confederation of Labor. The message to every other media owner in Argentina was clear. Hold out long enough and you lose everything.

What Perón built was not a state media system in the Soviet sense. He built a hybrid: a few fiercely loyal outlets, a cowed and self-censoring mainstream press, and the elimination of the most determined independent voices. The result was an information environment in which Peronism felt omnipresent and inevitable and opposition felt marginal and slightly illegitimate. That feeling, once established, is very hard to dislodge.

Franco’s approach in Spain was the most systematic of the twentieth century European examples, partly because he had more time to perfect it. He came to power after a civil war, which meant he inherited a press that he could remake from scratch in the areas he controlled, without the need to gradually transform existing institutions.

Francisco Franco during the first meeting of his recently formed government in 1939 (Wide World Photos/ Archival by La Presse)

The 1938 Press Law, passed while the civil war was still being fought, established state control over the press as a foundational principle of the Franco regime. All newspaper editors had to be approved by the state. Content was subject to prior censorship in the early years, and then to a system of guidelines and directives that editors were expected to follow without being told explicitly what to write. Self-censorship became the norm. It is cheaper to maintain than direct censorship and more durable, because it operates inside journalists’ heads rather than requiring a censor in every newsroom.

Franco also understood the value of using the press not just to suppress criticism but to build a mythological version of recent Spanish history. The Civil War was reimagined as a crusade against communism and godlessness. The Republican side was portrayed as a foreign-influenced aberration. A generation of Spaniards grew up with a version of their own history that had been systematically constructed to justify the regime that had won. This is the longer game of media control: not just suppressing inconvenient facts in the present, but reshaping the past so that the current power arrangement seems natural and inevitable.

I think about Franco’s Spain when I read about the current debates in America over school curricula, over what version of history is taught, over who gets to decide what the Civil War was actually about or what the civil rights movement really achieved. These are not equivalent situations. But they are recognizably related techniques. Control what people believe happened in the past and you shape how they understand what is happening now.

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Marcos in the Philippines combined all the previous techniques and added the speed that martial law made possible. When he declared martial law in September 1972, one of his first acts was to shut down independent newspapers and television and radio stations. Not gradually. Overnight. In the days following the declaration, soldiers arrived at newsrooms. Publications ceased. Broadcast licenses were revoked.

Ten years later: President Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Imelda Marcos, and Ferdinand Marcos in Cross Hall during a State Dinner for President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in 1982 (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)

What replaced them was a media system in which Marcos and his allies owned or controlled the major outlets. His cronies held the broadcast licenses. The newspapers that reopened did so under new ownership arrangements that ensured editorial compliance. The Philippine Daily Express was effectively a regime paper. Television stations broadcast what the government wanted broadcast.

What is instructive about the Marcos case is what happened when martial law was eventually lifted and some press freedom nominally returned. By then, a generation of Filipino journalists had been trained under a system of total control. The habits of self-censorship, of checking before publishing, of understanding which subjects were safe and which were not, did not disappear with the formal lifting of restrictions. They had become professional norms. Rebuilding an independent press culture after a decade of martial law proved far harder than rebuilding the formal legal framework.

This is a lesson that tends to get missed in analyses of authoritarian media control. The damage to institutions is visible and can in principle be reversed. The damage to the culture of journalism, to the expectations and habits of journalists themselves, is much harder to see and much slower to repair.

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The technology has changed enormously since Mussolini drafted his press legislation in 1923. But the underlying logic of what strongmen do to the media has not.

The contemporary version does not primarily require licensing journalists or allocating newsprint. It works through a different set of mechanisms that are better suited to the current media environment, and in some ways more effective precisely because they are harder to identify as censorship.

The first mechanism is financial. Independent journalism is expensive and its business model has been in crisis for two decades. Advertising revenue has migrated to platforms. Subscriptions are harder to build than they once were. A government that wants to pressure independent outlets does not need to cut their newsprint supply. It can manipulate the advertising market, direct government advertising to friendly outlets and away from critical ones, encourage friendly businesspeople to acquire media companies, and create regulatory uncertainty that makes investment in independent journalism unattractive.

The second mechanism is legal. Defamation suits, even ones unlikely to succeed, are expensive to defend. A government with friendly courts can use the legal system to impose costs on outlets it dislikes without ever winning a case. The threat of litigation is itself a form of pressure.

The third mechanism is what the media scholar Tom Nichols and others have called flooding the zone. You do not need to make people believe your version of events. You need only to make them uncertain about what is true. If every story about government wrongdoing is immediately met with counter-narratives, alternative explanations, and accusations that the reporting itself is biased or politically motivated, a significant portion of the population will simply conclude that the truth is unknowable. Uncertainty is almost as useful as belief.

The fourth mechanism is the construction of a parallel media ecosystem. Loyal outlets, friendly podcasts, social media accounts, and influencers who amplify the regime’s preferred narratives directly to audiences without going through the filter of independent journalism. This ecosystem does not replace independent media. It competes with it, frames it as the enemy, and provides an alternative information environment for people who want one.

I have watched all four of these mechanisms operate in the United States over the past decade. Some of this predates the current administration. Some of it has accelerated dramatically. The result is an information environment that would have been recognizable to someone who studied what Perón built in Argentina in the late 1940s, even though the technology is completely different. The form changes. The function stays the same.

What did independent journalism actually require to survive authoritarian pressure in the twentieth century?

The cases where it survived longest shared a few characteristics. It needed economic independence from the state and from businesses with close state ties. It needed legal protection that the courts were willing to enforce. It needed a professional culture strong enough to maintain standards under pressure, and brave enough to publish what needed to be published even when publishing it was costly.

It also needed audiences who valued it enough to sustain it. This is the factor that tends to get least attention. A press that citizens do not read, trust, or support financially cannot survive pressure from governments and business interests determined to weaken it. The survival of independent journalism is not only a problem for journalists and media owners. It is a problem for everyone who depends on accurate information to make decisions about their own lives and their own democracy.

Mussolini understood that. Perón understood it. Franco spent thirty-six years making sure the Spanish press shaped what Spaniards believed about their own history. Marcos shut the newsrooms within hours of declaring martial law because he knew that what journalists publish in the first days of a crisis can determine whether the crisis becomes a turning point.

They were all right about the importance of the press. They just drew the wrong conclusion from it.

The right conclusion is the one that the Spanish journalists who relaunched independent newspapers in the late 1970s drew, and the Argentine journalists who rebuilt La Prensa after the fall of Perón drew, and the Filipino journalists who rebuilt their profession after Marcos drew. Independent journalism is not a luxury that democracies can afford to let weaken. It is one of the structural supports that holds the rest of the building up.

When you see it being pressured, financially squeezed, legally harassed, and rhetorically delegitimized, you are watching the second chapter of the strongman’s playbook. The first chapter already happened last week.

Part 3 is next. We move to the business elite.

Stay inspired,

Alexander

This is the second installment of The Strongman’s Playbook — a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.

If you missed the previous series, The Fall, it is all in the archive: ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story — how power is seized, and how it is eventually lost.

If you know an American who is watching the news and wondering how this is supposed to end, send them Part 1. The courts are where the story begins.

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Notes and sources

Mussolini’s press legislation and the fascist journalists’ association: Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism 1919-1945, Palgrave Macmillan — https://www.jstor.org/stable/2126520
Perón and Radio Belgrano, newsprint allocation as press control: James Brennan, Peronism and Argentina, Scholarly Resources — https://journals.library.wustl.edu/lawpolicy/article/1396/galley/18231/view/
La Prensa expropriation, 1951: Robert Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina, W.W. Norton — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Prensa_(Buenos_Aires)
Franco’s 1938 Press Law and censorship apparatus: Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography, HarperCollins — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francoist_Spain
Marcos and the overnight shutdown of Philippine media, September 1972: Alfred McCoy, Closer Than Brothers, Yale University Press — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_under_Ferdinand_Marcos
Philippine Daily Express as regime paper under Marcos: Nick Joaquin, Manila, My Manila, Vera-Reyes — https://www.philstar.com/the-freeman/opinion/2022/09/21/2211152/martial-law-under-1935-1973-1987-constitutions
Media capture and the contemporary information environment: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, Oxford University Press — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-expertise-9780190469412
Press freedom under authoritarian regimes, comparative analysis: Freedom House annual press freedom index — https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press

🎙️ Watch: The Strongman's Playbook Starts With the Courts — Always

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:20:14 GMT

Earlier today, I published part 1 of a new series: The Strongman’s Playbook. It is about the techniques authoritarian leaders use to make their power permanent once they have won office.

In this video, I share a few thoughts on what stood out most. The transcript is below for those who prefer to read.

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Transcript

The Strongman’s Playbook starts today in The Planet. Ten installments. Ten techniques. We begin with the one that always comes first.

Before the press. Before the army. Before the elections. It’s the courts.

Courts are the only institution that can say no to an executive and make it stick. That is why every authoritarian leader who has lasted long enough to make his power permanent moved on the judiciary first.

Perón did it in Argentina in 1947. Peronist legislators impeached four of the five sitting justices. The Senate removed them. The charges were thin. And that was not the point. The point was to show every judge in the country who was really in charge.

Orbán did it differently. He waited for a parliamentary supermajority. Then he lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62. Hundreds of experienced judges were pushed out at once. He packed the Constitutional Court. He pushed through a parallel system of administrative courts for politically sensitive cases. By the time the EU understood what had happened, it was mostly done.

Marcos in the Philippines used martial law. He declared it in 1972. He used emergency powers and military tribunals to sideline his Supreme Court in national security cases. He then steered a constitutional convention into ratifying a new constitution that gave him sweeping powers. The courts that remained worked within the boundaries he had drawn.

Mussolini took a more patient route. He kept Italian courts nominally independent for years. But he built a parallel structure alongside them. The Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, established in 1926, handled political crimes outside the ordinary judicial system. By the time ordinary courts might have pushed back, the Special Tribunal had already dealt with everything that mattered.

Different methods. Identical logic. The goal is never to destroy the courts. It is to make them irrelevant.

FDR tried court-packing in 1937 and failed. He wanted to expand the Supreme Court to fifteen justices after it struck down several New Deal programs. Congress rejected the plan. Even members of his own party voted against it. The courts held. And that failure matters, because it shows this is not inevitable.

What does this mean for the United States today? The American judiciary is not being dismantled. But it is being pressured and, when possible, worked around. Judges who rule against the administration face public attacks and calls for impeachment. The administration has pushed the boundaries of compliance with court orders. And judges appointed during Trump’s first term are already hearing cases that will shape what the second term can do.

This is not Perón’s purge. It is closer to Orbán’s method. Patient. Incremental. Technically legal at each step.

The historical lesson is consistent. Once courts are captured or neutralized, everything else accelerates. The press, the opposition, the elections. Every other technique in the strongman’s playbook depends on having already dealt with the courts.

Americans are living through the opening chapter of this story. Where it goes depends partly on whether the courts continue to hold.

Part 2 is next. We move on to the media.

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Every Strongman's First Move: How Trump Follows a Pattern History Knows Well

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:00:37 GMT

In the previous series, The Fall, we examined how authoritarian regimes end. Ten case studies, from Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to the synthesis of what history teaches about democratic recovery. Readers kept asking a version of the same question: how did these regimes get so entrenched in the first place? That question is for this series.

The Strongman’s Playbook is about the techniques authoritarian leaders use to make their power permanent once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work. You will draw your own conclusions about where you have seen this before.

This is the first installment of The Strongman’s Playbook. It is a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.

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Every strongman who has held power long enough to make it permanent began in the same place.

Perón moved first. Within two years of taking office in Argentina, he had done what no democratically elected leader had managed before: he purged the Supreme Court. In 1947, Peronist legislators impeached four of the five sitting justices, and the Senate removed them from office. The charges were flimsy. That was not the point. The point was that every judge in Argentina now understood who was in charge. Perón replaced them with loyalists. For the next eight years, the courts did not stop him. They helped him.

This is where authoritarian consolidation always begins. Not with the press, not with the military, not with elections. With the judiciary. Courts are the one institution that can say no to an executive and make it stick. Without independent courts, a president can do almost anything and call it legal. So the courts must go first.

The technique varies. Orbán in Hungary did not need an impeachment. He simply waited until he had a parliamentary supermajority, then changed the rules. He lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, which pushed out hundreds of experienced judges at once. He packed the Constitutional Court by expanding its size. He pushed through a new system of administrative courts for politically sensitive cases, structured in ways critics saw as favoring his government. By the time the European Union understood what had happened, it was mostly done.

Marcos in the Philippines chose speed over subtlety. When he declared martial law in 1972, he used emergency powers and military tribunals to sideline the Supreme Court in national security cases. He tightened his grip on a constitutional convention that had already begun, and under martial law it ratified a new constitution that gave him sweeping powers. The courts that remained in place worked within the boundaries he had drawn.

Mussolini was more patient. He kept Italian courts nominally independent for years while quietly undermining them. He created parallel structures: a Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, established in 1926, which operated outside the ordinary judicial system and handled political crimes. By the time Italian courts might have pushed back against the fascist project, the Special Tribunal had already handled everything that mattered.

Different methods, identical logic. The goal is not to destroy the courts but to make them irrelevant to the exercise of power.

I think about this pattern when I watch what is happening in the United States today. The American judicial system is not being dismantled. But it is being pressured and, when possible, worked around. Judges who rule against the administration face public attacks and calls for impeachment. The administration has pushed the boundaries of compliance with court orders, relying on aggressive interpretations of executive power to justify contested actions. Judges appointed during Trump’s first term are already hearing cases that will shape what the second term can do.

This is not Perón’s blunt purge. It is closer to Orbán’s method: patient, incremental, technically legal at each step, and devastating in its cumulative effect.

The historical record on this is consistent. Once courts are captured or neutralized, the other dominoes fall faster. A press you can sue without legal risk. Political opponents you can prosecute without fear of acquittal. Elections you can shape without judicial oversight. Every other technique in the strongman’s playbook depends on having already dealt with the courts.

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FDR tried it and failed. In 1937, after the Supreme Court struck down several New Deal programs, Roosevelt proposed expanding the court to up to fifteen justices, which would have let him appoint six immediately. The plan was called court-packing, and Congress rejected it. Even members of his own party voted against it. The backlash was severe enough that it damaged his second term. The courts held.

That failure matters. It shows that court capture is not inevitable. It requires either enough political support or enough institutional weakness. In Hungary, Orbán had a supermajority and moved fast. In Argentina, Perón had a compliant legislature and a population exhausted by instability. In the Philippines, Marcos had the army.

The American situation is different. The courts have pushed back. Some rulings have gone against the administration. The Supreme Court, shaped by Trump’s own appointments, has not become a rubber stamp. But the pressure is constant, and the methods being used are not random. They follow a pattern that history has seen before.

Every strongman starts with the courts. The ones who succeed make them compliant before the public understands what has happened. The ones who fail, or who face a democratic recovery, usually face it because the courts held long enough.

That is the first lesson of the strongman’s playbook. Control the judiciary, and everything else becomes manageable. Lose the judiciary, and every other power grab becomes contestable.

Americans are living through the opening chapter of this particular story. Where it goes depends partly on whether the courts continue to hold.

Stay inspired,

Alexander

This is the first installment of The Strongman’s Playbook — a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work. If you missed the previous series, The Fall, it is all in the archive: ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story — how power is seized, and how it is eventually lost.

If you know an American who is watching the news and wondering how this is supposed to end, send them Part 1. The courts are where the story begins.

New subscribers get 20% off the first year.

Subscribe now: 20% off the first year

More from Alexander Verbeek:

✍️ More: where I publish 🧭 Morning Compass and 🎙️ Morning Comments

🎙️ My Morning Comments are short videos where I dive a little deeper into the story that stood out most that morning.

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The Curious Wanderer

Storytelling, mostly about travel, experiences, and history. I write The Curious Wanderer for people who like to move through the world slowly and look at it carefully.

If that sounds like you, please subscribe to my smallest and most personal newsletter below. There is a paid option for those who want to support the writing directly.

Subscribe: 20% off for the first year 🎒

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Notes and sources

Perón’s Supreme Court purge: Mark Falcoff and Ronald Dolkart (eds.), Prologue to Perón: Argentina in Depression and War — https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/high-courts-and-economic-governance-in-argentina-and-brazil/politicization-and-the-political-court-in-argentina/48DCFC102F0E4373BDA10BEA9AAB41DB
Argentine impeachment process and political charges: Washington University Journal of Law and Policy — https://journals.library.wustl.edu/lawpolicy/article/1396/galley/18231/view/
Orbán’s mandatory retirement age for judges: European Commission infringement proceedings — https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_13_1112
Orbán’s judicial reforms, Constitutional Court packing: Comparative Judicial Council, EUI — https://cjc.eui.eu/data/data/data?idPermanent=471&triial=1
Marcos and martial law, 1972: Wikipedia overview with sourcing — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_under_Ferdinand_Marcos
1973 Philippine Constitution and ratification dispute — https://www.philstar.com/the-freeman/opinion/2022/09/21/2211152/martial-law-under-1935-1973-1987-constitutions
Mussolini’s Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, 1926: University of Milan — https://expertise.unimi.it/resource/item/1405548?language=en_US
FDR’s court-packing plan, 1937: Federal Judicial Center — https://www.fjc.gov/history/timeline/fdrs-court-packing-plan
Pressure on US courts under Trump’s second term: Courthouse News — https://courthousenews.com/court-watchers-give-scotus-poor-marks-as-trump-bulldozes-judiciary-in-2025/

How This Ends: What Ten Revolutions Teach Trump's America

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:32:35 GMT

This is the tenth and final part of The Fall. It is time to answer the question those Americans asked on a Portuguese trail in March 2026, the question that started this series: how does this end?

I have spent nine installments looking at how authoritarian regimes have ended elsewhere. Portugal 1974. The Philippines 1986. East Germany and Czechoslovakia …

Ukraine Had Two Revolutions and One Lesson Trump's America Cannot Afford to Ignore

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:29:57 GMT

This series examines how authoritarian regimes fall. It looks at the moment just before collapse — the crack, the day when something that seemed permanent suddenly was not. That focus has a natural boundary. It ends when the transition begins, or when the transition fails. What comes after is a different story.

Ukraine after February 2022 is that differe…

🌎 Inside the Mountain: I Visited What Europe Is Building for the War It Hopes Never Comes

Alexander Verbeek — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:36:02 GMT

The Candlelight Revolution: What Trump's America Can Learn from South Korea.

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:34:55 GMT

On the evening of October 29, 2016, something happened in Seoul that had not happened anywhere in the world for a long time.

People brought candles.

Not hundreds of people. Not thousands. Thirty thousand Koreans gathered in central Seoul on that first Saturday, holding small lights in the dark, calling for their president to resign. The following Saturday…

How Chile Voted Out a Dictator in 1988: Lessons for Trump's America

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:44:58 GMT

On the night of October 5, 1988, Augusto Pinochet sat in his office and looked at the numbers.

They were not the numbers he had expected.

For fifteen years, Pinochet had ruled Chile with unchallenged authority. The 1973 coup that brought him to power had been brutal. Thousands were killed or disappeared. Tens of thousands were tortured. An entire generati…

The Balcony Moment: What Ceaușescu's Last Speech Teaches Trump's America

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:05:35 GMT

I started in 1989 in southern China.

Nine months into a long journey, nearly out of money, I had spent New Year’s Day somewhere in what was, unmistakably, communist territory. From China, I made my way to Beijing, where I spent ten days collecting visas and hunting for a train ticket. I found one — fifty dollars, which was all I had left — that would car…

From Prague 1989 to Washington 2026: What Trump's America Can Learn From the Velvet Revolution

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:47:13 GMT

In December 1990, I attended a Christmas service in Prague.

The revolution had happened fourteen months earlier. The last Soviet-backed government had fallen in November 1989, Václav Havel had gone from prison to president in six weeks, and this was the city’s second free Christmas. I knew, standing in that church, that I was witnessing something. The em…

The Crowd That Toppled a Dictator — and the Warning Trump's America Needs to Hear Now

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:44:24 GMT

This year marks forty years since millions of Filipinos stood on a highway in Manila and faced down a dictator without firing a shot. The anniversary has been marked with ceremonies, retrospectives, and a quiet, bitter irony that history does not always distribute fairly: the president of the Philippines today is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son and namesake o…

Hungary's Victory Is Real. And So Are the Lessons Trump Will Draw Before the Midterms.

Alexander Verbeek — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:52:33 GMT

I was putting the finishing touches on yesterday’s newsletter — Part 2 of this series, about Portugal 1974 — when my phone lit up. A WhatsApp message. Twenty seconds later, another.

Orbán was out.

I sat there for a moment. Then I went back to the keyboard and rewrote the opening and closing of a newsletter that was 99% finished. While I was writing a series called The Fall, a real fall was taking place. I published it within the hour, with a smile I could not quite hide.

That piece went out with Portugal at its center and Hungary at its edges — a live backdrop I had not planned for. The response from readers through the night was extraordinary. The word that appeared most in the comments was hope. Not relief. Not satisfaction. Hope. Americans writing from across the country, drawing a line from Budapest to Washington and asking what comes next.

This is what comes next. Part 3 is the piece I promised: how Orbán built it, why it fell, and what the wreckage tells us about the model that Trump and his circle spent years admiring and borrowing from.

What Orbán built

To understand why last night matters beyond Budapest, you need to understand what Orbán actually constructed over 16 years. Not the caricature. The system.

He came back to power in 2010 with a two-thirds parliamentary majority — enough to rewrite the constitution, which he did. He then used that rewritten constitution to reshape the judiciary, the electoral system, and the media. Each change was individually defensible. Cumulatively, they produced something new: a European Union member state that Freedom House classified as only “partly free.”

The judiciary first. Orbán packed the constitutional court with loyalists, lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges to push out those already serving, and created new oversight bodies staffed by Fidesz appointees. By the end, the courts were not independent. They were managed.

The media next. Independent outlets were bought up by oligarchs close to the government and folded into a single pro-government media conglomerate. State advertising was redirected to friendly outlets and withdrawn from critical ones. The few remaining independent voices operated under constant legal and financial pressure. When the last major independent radio station lost its license in 2020, hundreds of journalists marched in silence through Budapest.

The electoral system last, and most carefully. Constituency boundaries were redrawn to favor Fidesz strongholds. Voting rules for ethnic Hungarians abroad — a reliable Fidesz constituency — were made easier. The threshold for opposition parties to enter parliament was raised. Fidesz did not need to win a majority of votes to win a majority of seats. The system was calibrated to make that unnecessary.

American readers will recognize the pattern. The sequence is not identical to what is happening in Washington. But the direction — courts, media, electoral rules, all adjusted toward the same destination — is not unfamiliar.

The European Council on Foreign Relations, in an analysis published before the election, called it plainly: the “Orbánisation of America.” Republicans studied Budapest. They visited, they took notes, they adapted. Steve Bannon was among the first. He was not the last.

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The international network

Orbán did not build this alone, and he did not keep it to himself.

He became, over the past decade, the connective tissue of a global authoritarian network. Trump. Putin. Bolsonaro. Meloni. Le Pen. The relationships were not incidental. They were strategic. Budapest hosted CPAC — the American conservative conference — as an annual event. Tucker Carlson broadcast from there. Orbán addressed the gathering and was treated as a prophet.

The relationship with Trump ran deepest. Orbán backed Trump in 2016 when backing Trump was still a gamble. Trump called them both “black sheep.” When Biden won in 2020, Orbán stayed close to Mar-a-Lago and waited. When Trump returned in 2024, Orbán was among the first international leaders at the table.

The relationship with Moscow was different in character but equally consequential. Orbán maintained energy dependency on Russian gas long after the invasion of Ukraine made that dependency a political liability across Europe. He blocked EU sanctions packages. He vetoed Ukraine aid. His government shared information from sensitive EU meetings with Russian intelligence — a revelation that shocked even those who had low expectations of Budapest’s loyalty to the alliance.

Project 2025 — the blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term — drew explicitly on the Hungarian model. Capture the administrative state. Replace civil servants with loyalists. Control the information environment. Use the power of incumbency to make the next election harder to lose. The Hungarian proof of concept was the point. It showed that it could be done inside a democracy, with elections still happening, without the crude violence of a traditional coup.

How he fell

Apply the five triggers from Part 1 of this series and Hungary 2026 tells a clean story.

The economic crisis was the foundation of Magyar’s campaign. Hungary had experienced three years of stagnation. Inflation had eaten into living standards. The country had become one of the poorest in the European Union — a remarkable deterioration for a state that had grown steadily through the 2010s. The Orbán bargain — accept the erosion of your rights and we will deliver prosperity — stopped working when the prosperity stopped.

Elite fracture arrived in the form of Magyar himself. He was not an outsider. He had spent more than two decades inside Fidesz, working for the government and state enterprises. His ex-wife was a minister. He knew the system from the inside, which is precisely what made him credible when he turned against it. A corruption scandal in early 2024 involving a presidential pardon in a child abuse case gave him his opening. He took it.

Mass mobilization was sustained and geographic. Magyar spent two years traveling Hungary almost without pause — six stops a day in the final weeks, focusing deliberately on provincial towns and villages where Fidesz had always been strongest. He was not preaching to the converted in Budapest. He was going where the votes were buried.

International pressure cut both ways. The European Union had frozen roughly 17 billion euros in funds for Hungary over rule-of-law concerns. That hurt the government and deprived it of the money it needed. Brussels did not topple Orbán. But Brussels made him more expensive to support.

And then there was Vance.

JD Vance flew to Budapest on April 7, five days before the vote, stood on stage with Orbán, and told Hungarians that Trump was watching. It did not help. By multiple accounts it actively hurt. Voters already tired of Orbán’s closeness with Washington’s hard right did not need an American vice president arriving to remind them of it. The foreign endorsement did not protect the incumbent. Record turnout delivered a popular vote margin of around 13 points. The system Orbán built to make losing nearly impossible was not built for a gap that size.

Why Magyar won and what we don’t yet know

Many Hungarians voted against Orbán rather than for Magyar. That distinction matters and my readers are right to hold it.

Magyar is a center-right politician. He is opposed to illegal migration. On LGBT rights, he has been deliberately silent — neither hostile nor supportive, avoiding the topic entirely as a strategic choice in a country where Orbán weaponized it for years. He is, by the accounts of those who have worked with him, not an easy man internally — reportedly the only person in his party who speaks to the press, tolerating neither dissent nor shared authority. Whether that reflects necessary discipline in a party built in two years, or a disposition toward concentrated personal power, we do not yet know.

The challenges ahead are enormous. Orbán spent 16 years filling every significant institution — courts, universities, the state audit commission, the electoral commission, the media regulator — with loyalists. Those people do not leave because an election changed the government. Magyar has a parliamentary supermajority, which gives him the constitutional tools to reform. Whether he uses them to restore genuinely independent institutions or to replace Orbán’s people with his own will determine everything.

The economy is in difficulty. The relationship with Russia on energy will be complicated to unwind. The frozen EU funds require Budapest to meet rule-of-law conditions that will take years to satisfy. The Ukraine policy is uncertain.

We are right to celebrate. But we should also be cautious about what comes next. As one of my readers noted in the comments, thinking of Iran 1979: revolutions remove what was there before. They do not automatically install what should come next.

One warning we should not skip

There is a conclusion being drawn in Washington today that is the opposite of the one my readers are drawing.

Orbán built the most sophisticated electoral protection system in the democratic world — redrawn boundaries, captured courts, state media, clientelism reaching deep into rural communities — and it still was not enough. The margin was too large to hold. Voters removed him anyway.

If you are watching from the White House, that is not a reassuring story. It is a warning about the limits of institutional capture alone.

Hungary under Orbán did not deploy anything resembling what ICE is doing in American cities today. There were no dawn raids on immigrant communities. No videos of people being taken from homes and workplaces are circulating on social media. No deliberate campaign of public visibility aimed at making entire communities afraid to appear in public, let alone at a polling station. Orbán’s repression was institutional and bureaucratic. It was real and damaging. But it operated differently.

The expansion of ICE — its budget, its personnel, its methods, its deliberate visibility — may not be primarily about immigration enforcement. A recent Brookings analysis finds that intensified ICE operations produce a direct chilling effect on civic engagement, with eligible voters withdrawing from public life because of fear. Local reporting on operations in Minneapolis and elsewhere describes communities polarized between those mobilized in opposition and those too afraid to participate at all. The net effect on turnout in affected neighborhoods is suppression.

Then there is the SAVE America Act. It passed the House in February on a near party-line vote of 218 to 213. It is currently stalled in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster threshold. But it is not dead, and Trump has made clear he considers it central to his 2026 strategy. A federal court already blocked his earlier executive order attempt to impose the same proof-of-citizenship requirement by decree, which tells you both that the legal fight is coming and that the administration will keep pushing by whatever route is available. The Brennan Center estimates more than 21 million voting-age citizens lack ready access to the required documents — disproportionately young, low-income, and voters of color.

Trump has said openly that if the bill became law, Republicans would “never lose a race for 50 years.” That is not a critic’s characterization. It is the stated goal.

Orbán tilted the playing field through institutional design. The field held until the economic pain became severe enough that voters crossed it in overwhelming numbers. The lesson a watching authoritarian draws from Budapest is not “perhaps I should moderate.” It is: make sure the margin never gets that large. Suppress the vote before it is cast.

I am not stating this as an established fact about intent. I am stating it as the most urgent question to hold alongside the celebrations in Budapest. History is instructing in two directions at once tonight — toward hope on the banks of the Danube, and toward something requiring clear eyes in Washington.

What this means for Trump’s America

The model failed its most important test. That is the sentence that matters this morning in Washington, even if no one there will say it.

Orbán built the proof of concept. He showed that a leader could dismantle democratic institutions from within, maintain the form of elections while draining their content, and stay in power indefinitely. Last night, the voters of Hungary ran the experiment to its conclusion. The economic stagnation that Orbán’s system eventually produced — the corruption, the captured institutions that served a narrow elite rather than the public, the international isolation that cost Hungary billions — created the conditions for his removal. The system ate itself.

This does not mean the same trajectory is inevitable in the United States. America’s situation is different in ways that cut in both directions — some institutions are more resilient, some forms of pressure more aggressive. Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, said this week that in some respects, Trump has already been more oppressive than Orbán ever was. That is worth sitting with.

But the MAGA strategists who studied Budapest will be studying it again today. The blueprint failed its architect. The question now is what they conclude from that — and what Americans conclude first.

Part 4 will examine the Philippines 1986 — the original People Power revolution, the model that inspired every peaceful mass uprising since, and what it teaches about the role of the crowd.

Stay inspired,

Alexander

I am an independent journalist based in Europe, and I write about democracy, nature, and the intersection of politics and society. The Planet 🌎 is a reader-supported publication for those concerned about democratic backsliding and environmental collapse. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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A new newsletter:

The Curious Wanderer: Travel writing, trail photography, and more personal updates from wherever I happen to be. This one is not like my regular newsletters; here you’ll find articles I used to publish only for my small, supportive community on Patreon. Publishing will be irregular. Sometimes daily, when I am traveling. Sometimes quiet for weeks when I am not, and focus on the other newsletters. It’s the most personal of all my channels.

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Yesterday, I published part 4:

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Notes and further reading:

On what Orbán built and the American connection: European Council on Foreign Relations, “The Orbánisation of America: Hungary’s lessons for Donald Trump” (October 2024). https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-orbanisation-of-america-hungarys-lessons-for-donald-trump/

John Kampfner, “Viktor Orbán Is Going Down Swinging,” Foreign Policy, March 5, 2026. https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/05/hungary-orban-election-magyar-campaign/

On the election result: “Election loss for Hungary’s Orbán has ripple effects for Trump,” Associated Press, April 13, 2026. https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/election-loss-hungarian-prime-minister-orbn-ripple-effects-131982673

“5 Hard Truths for Donald Trump in Orbán’s Big Loss,” Newsweek, April 13, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-orban-hungary-election-eu-nato-magyar-11818647

On ICE and civic participation: Brookings Institution, “Eroding the American Dream Through Federal Policy Shifts” (2026). https://www.brookings.edu/articles/eroding-the-american-dream-through-federal-policy-shifts/

Social Workers brief, “Immigration Policy and Election Interference: Converging Threats to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” https://www.socialworkers.org/Advocacy/Social-Justice/Social-Justice-Briefs/Immigration-Policy-and-Election-Interference-Converging-Threats-to-the-2026-Midterm-Elections

On the SAVE America Act: Brennan Center for Justice, “New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans from Voting.” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

Center for American Progress, “The SAVE America Act Explained.” https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-save-america-act-explained-how-the-new-show-your-papers-voting-bill-is-even-more-extreme-than-the-save-act/

On the series: This is Part 3 of The Fall. Part 1 laid out the analytical framework. Part 2 examined Portugal in 1974 and the Carnation Revolution. Part 4 will turn to the Philippines, 1986 — the original People Power revolution and the model that inspired every peaceful mass uprising since.

Orbán Is Gone. Trump's Closest European Ally Just Lost. Here Is What History Teaches Next.

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:07:35 GMT

As I was finishing this newsletter this evening, Hungary was voting. I added a brief note at the end saying we would have to wait for results. I did not have to wait long.

Tonight, Viktor Orbán conceded. After 16 years in power, after rewriting Hungary’s constitution, dismantling its judiciary, capturing its media, and turning a European democracy into w…

Trump's America Is Not Immune: What History Teaches About How Regimes Fall

Alexander Verbeek — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:43:44 GMT

A few weeks ago, while walking along Portugal’s Atlantic coast, I started talking with three Americans. They were hiking the Fisherman’s Trail, a long path through the wild coastline south of Lisbon. We chatted about the sea, the cliffs, and the small fishing villages. Eventually, our conversation turned to where we were from.

“How does this end?” one of them asked. She wasn’t asking about the trail.

What followed was a long conversation, the kind that only happens when you’re walking and there’s nowhere else to be. We talked about the economy, about protests, about soldiers, and illegal orders. I shared what I had seen in Europe over the years. They asked questions and shared insights into their own country that I, as a European, couldn’t fully understand from the outside.

Trail friendships are something special; before we parted ways, all three of them subscribed to The Planet. So, welcome. This series is partly the answer I kept thinking about after we said goodbye on that trail.

The question before the question

My previous series, After the Fall, examined five countries that survived authoritarian periods and then had to decide what to do with those responsible. Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the post-communist countries of Central Europe, and Portugal itself. What does accountability look like? What does a society owe its victims?

The response from readers was clear. Many of you asked the prior question: before accountability, before reconstruction, before anything, the regime has to fall. And how does that actually happen?

That’s what this series is about.

The Fall looks back in time. It asks what history can teach us about the moment just before collapse—the crack, the day when a regime that seemed permanent suddenly was not.

I want to explain why this matters for Americans today. The United States in 2026 is not a failed state. Its institutions are damaged but not destroyed. Courts still work, the media still reports, and civil society is still active. But there is a real shift toward authoritarianism, and the signs are clear. The question those Americans asked on the trail was not paranoia—it was recognizing a pattern.

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Five triggers

Political scientists who study how regimes collapse have found a set of common triggers. Erica Chenoweth at Harvard has conducted detailed research on hundreds of resistance movements over the last century. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, mapped out the patterns that come before a collapse. Their work, and others in the field, show that no single trigger is usually enough. Regimes tend to fall when several triggers happen at the same time.

The first is an economic crisis. When a regime can no longer deliver basic material welfare, its social contract breaks down. People accept a great deal when they feel economically secure. When that security disappears, the bargain collapses. This is not just about poverty. A middle class that expected stability and gets instability is more dangerous to a regime than a poor population that has never known anything else.

The second is elite fracture. Every authoritarian regime depends on a coalition: business leaders, military officers, party officials, and media owners. As long as that coalition holds, the regime holds. When members of the inner circle start calculating that the regime is a liability rather than an asset, cracks begin to form. Defection at the top is often the first visible sign that a regime is in trouble.

The third is mass mobilization. Street protests alone rarely topple a government. But sustained, large-scale, peaceful protest changes the calculus for everyone else. It signals to elites that the population will not simply accept what is imposed. It signals to the military that following orders to suppress crowds comes with a price.

The fourth is military defection. This is often the decisive factor. A regime can survive economic crisis, elite fracture, and mass protest if the security apparatus remains loyal and willing to use force. When soldiers and officers refuse orders, everything changes. Portugal 1974. The Philippines 1986. East Germany 1989. In each case, the security apparatus either defected or stood down. That was the moment.

The fifth is international pressure. Isolation, sanctions, loss of diplomatic recognition, and economic exclusion. No regime operates in a vacuum. When the international community withdraws support, the pressure on internal actors to break ranks increases.

These five triggers rarely operate alone. What the historical record shows is a threshold: when three or more converge simultaneously, regimes that looked permanent fall within months. Sometimes weeks.

Looking at America in 2026

I’m not going to predict what will happen to the Trump administration. History doesn’t follow a set schedule.

But I can describe what is visible.

Economic anxiety is no longer abstract. Over the past weeks, Americans have been paying sharply higher prices at the gas station, a direct consequence of Trump’s military adventure in Iran. Tariffs, inflation, market volatility, the disruption of long-standing trade relationships — the material reality of ordinary life is getting harder. Americans who expected stability are getting instability. The economic trigger is not fully activated. But it is pushing.

Elite fracture has begun. It is early and partial. But the midterm elections are approaching, and against the backdrop of an unpopular war, the calculus for Republican politicians is shifting. Some business leaders who initially accommodated the administration are recalculating. Some officials have resigned or been fired for insufficient loyalty. Defection is not yet significant. But the pattern is recognizable, and the midterms may accelerate it considerably.

Mass mobilization is underway. The No Kings protests have been sustained and geographically widespread. The absolute numbers are impressive. But here in Europe, watching from the outside, I notice something the American press rarely says plainly: as a percentage of the total population, those numbers fall well short of what we saw in some of the successful uprisings I closely followed in European capitals. American protesters often cite Chenoweth’s finding that 3.5% of the population participating in sustained civil resistance has historically been sufficient to bring down a regime. That threshold has not been reached. Reaching it, or something close to it, is what historically makes the difference.

Military loyalty is contested. The administration has worked hard to install loyalists in senior military positions and remove those seen as insufficiently committed. During our conversation on the trail, I mentioned a moment that crystallized this anxiety: a video released by six Democratic lawmakers with military and intelligence backgrounds, including Arizona senator and former Navy captain Mark Kelly, that calmly reminded service members, ‘Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders.’ The response was instantaneous and furious. Trump labeled the video ‘seditious’ and ‘punishable by death,’ his defense secretary opened an investigation into Kelly that could lead to a court‑martial, and the Justice Department began probing the group now dubbed the ‘Seditious Six.’ Regimes that are confident of military loyalty don’t need to spend so much energy securing it. That effort tells its own story.

International isolation is accelerating. The relationship with Canada has deteriorated to a point that would have been unthinkable five years ago. The claim on Greenland, a NATO ally’s sovereign territory, produced a rupture with European partners that has not healed. Trade wars and withdrawal from international agreements have produced something new: an America diplomatically alone in a way it has not been in living memory. These are not small things. They cut the ropes that have long anchored American power internationally.

None of these triggers has reached critical mass. And they have not yet converged. But all five are in motion.

What this series will examine

In the next few weeks, I’ll look at each major case study one by one: Portugal in 1974, the Philippines in 1986, East Germany in 1989, Czechoslovakia in 1989, Romania in 1989, Chile in 1988, and South Korea in 2016-17.

I’ll also look at the failures: Hungary in 1956, Belarus in 2020, and Iran in 1979, where the revolution led to something worse than what came before. This last case is especially important given the current relationship between the United States and Iran. These examples matter as much as the successes. If the Trump administration collapses, it doesn’t guarantee a healthy democracy. History shows that many countries have simply traded one kind of authoritarianism for another.

Each case study will look at which triggers were present, which were missing, what the turning point was, and what lessons, if any, might apply to America in 2026.

I want to be clear about the limits of comparing history. The United States is not Portugal or East Germany. I won’t claim that a few quick comparisons can capture what makes America unique—they can’t. History doesn’t give us a step-by-step plan. It gives us patterns, and those patterns help us see where we are.

The Americans I met on that trail had watched what their country had become, and they wanted to know whether history offered any reason for hope.

I believe it does. But hope alone is not a strategy. Understanding how regimes fall is.

If my American friends are reading this now: hello. This one’s for you :-)

Stay inspired,

Alexander

I am an independent journalist based in Europe, and I write about democracy, nature, and the intersection of politics and society. The Planet 🌎 is a reader-supported publication for those concerned about democratic backsliding and environmental collapse. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now: 20% off the first year

A new newsletter: The Curious Wanderer

The Portuguese trail where that conversation happened — the cliffs, the fishing villages, the wind off the Atlantic — is the subject of my travel writing in The Curious Wanderer. I walked the Fisherman's Trail in March 2026 and still write about it in detail: the landscape, the history, and the people I met along the way. If the Portugal in this piece made you curious about the place itself, that's where to go next.

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For those who want More

A quick word about More, my other newsletter. If you enjoy these stories and ever want to go deeper, that’s where the rest of it lives. A few recent examples:

Do you remember the hummingbird video? More explains why those colors aren’t pigment at all — it’s physics. Stacked nanostructures in the feathers act like a natural optical instrument, shifting from magenta to black to brilliant pink as the angle of light changes. The male times the flash deliberately.

Do you remember the baby bird that looked like a toxic caterpillar? More goes into the full science: Batesian mimicry in birds is nearly unheard of, and this chick pulls it off with both appearance and movement — bobbing slowly like a living insect — while surviving a predation risk of 80%.

Do you remember the border collie that found a pencil by smell alone? A reader sent me something even more extreme: the same breed locating a car key thrown into water. More explains exactly what the dog’s nose is reading in the air above the surface.

Do you remember the swan video from the Bishop’s Palace in Wells? More tells the full story. The bell on the gatehouse has been rung by swans since the 1850s. The current male, Gabriel, learned it within days of arriving and now teaches the cygnets each season — social learning, passed down through generations.

Do you remember the Nazaré waves? More explains what creates them: a submarine canyon 170 kilometers long and 5,000 meters deep that funnels and amplifies Atlantic swells until a normal four-meter wave arrives as thirty.

And if the Aristides de Sousa Mendes name in The Planet’s After the Fall series meant something to you, More tells the full story. In June 1940, he defied Salazar’s explicit orders and signed visas for everyone who needed one — thousands of Jewish families, royal families, stateless people — working around the clock for days. He saved more people than almost anyone else in that war. Portugal buried his story for decades. He died with nothing.

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Notes:

On the five triggers and regime collapse:

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). The source of the 3.5% finding and the most rigorous statistical analysis of civil resistance campaigns across the twentieth century.

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018). The essential framework for understanding democratic erosion from within. Chenoweth’s more recent Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a shorter and very accessible companion.

Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start (Crown, 2022). Walter focuses on a different endpoint than regime collapse, but her analysis of the conditions that precede democratic breakdown is directly relevant to the framework in this piece.

On authoritarian resilience and why regimes survive:

Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2012). A rigorous examination of how authoritarian regimes maintain power — essential background for understanding what has to give before they fall.

On the American situation specifically:

Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (Doubleday, 2020). A European perspective on why educated people choose autocracy. Personal and analytically sharp.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017). Short, direct, and draws heavily on European historical experience. Written in the first Trump term but more relevant now than when it was published.

On “After the Fall”:

To catch up with the previous series, start at the first of this series of five:

After the Fall, Before The Fall: Introducing The Curious Wanderer

Alexander Verbeek — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:08:49 GMT

Dear friends,

A quick aside from your usual Planet content: I just launched a new newsletter called The Curious Wanderer, and Planet readers have a particular reason to be interested.

We just finished the five-part After the Fall series, and I am now working on its natural companion — The Fall itself: how democratic regimes collapse in the first place. Th…

Trump's America Will End. History Shows What Comes Next.

Alexander Verbeek — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:50:05 GMT

Last week, I stood in a small military museum in Lisbon, in the barracks where Portugal’s dictatorship ended. April 25, 1974. There’s a minute-by-minute timeline on the wall that traces the entire day, from the first troop movements before dawn to the moment Marcelo Caetano, the country’s last dictator, accepted that it was over.

What I remember most is …

After the Fall: How Central Europe Purged Its Authoritarians, and Why America Won't Even Try

Alexander Verbeek — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:44:39 GMT

Trump Started an Illegal War. No Coalition. No Plan. Nobody Asked Europe.

Alexander Verbeek — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:44:51 GMT

Should America Just Move On After Trump? South Africa Shows Why Forgiveness Is Not Enough.

Alexander Verbeek — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:50:20 GMT

This is Part 3 of a five-part series examining how democracies hold their former leaders accountable. Part 1 explored the three paths countries take after authoritarian rule. Part 2 examined Argentina’s trials and Brazil’s conviction of Bolsonaro. Today: South Africa’s radical experiment in choosing truth over punishment.

I was 24 when Nelson Mandela wal…

The River That Came Back to Life

Alexander Verbeek — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 18:43:57 GMT

Most weeks, I write about politics and history for The Planet—usually on Thursdays. Last week, I published the second piece in a new series called “After the Fall,” examining what happens when authoritarian regimes collapse. I looked at Argentina and Brazil, two countries that have put their former authoritarian leaders on trial. That series continues n…