In early 2017, Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, an adviser to our organization, Protect Democracy, who’d spent roughly a decade living in Hungary during the rise of Viktor Orbán, offered us a warning: beware that the newly elected American president might copy Orbán’s autocratic technique of using the regulatory state to punish media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Prime Minister Orbán did this to great effect. The barrage of audits, investigations, and regulatory harassment he directed at his media critics, coupled with orders that his government agencies direct public advertising dollars only to media sufficiently loyal to him, drove independent media from the field. Orbán didn’t neutralize the media overnight. It happened gradually and in plain sight.