He now openly promises donors that under his next term, any student who protests will be “thrown out of the country.” A deportation program for dissenters. He targets foreign students today, domestic ones tomorrow. It is the natural evolution of his instincts: from tweets threatening the press to openly discussing mass arrests, sweeping deportations, and the use of military force against civilians. He lacks the patience for methodical repression, preferring the immediate gratification of shock and awe.
Viktor Orbán takes a more refined approach. Where Trump is crude, Orbán is calculating. Where Trump lashes out, Orbán constricts. He does not need to crush dissent in the streets when he can suffocate it with legal and economic pressure. His latest masterpiece is the “Sovereignty Protection Act”, a deceptively mundane-sounding law that allows the government to investigate and punish so-called “foreign interference.” The language is conveniently vague enough to encompass any criticism of the government. Protests? Funded by George Soros. Investigative journalism exposing corruption? Western propaganda. Political rivals? Secret agents of Brussels. His government does not outright ban dissent—it simply labels it illegitimate, forcing opposition groups into endless legal battles, draining them of resources, exhausting them into irrelevance.
The beauty of Orbán’s method is that it rarely looks like direct repression. Protests are allowed but are made functionally meaningless. Independent media still exists but is starved of funding, deprived of advertisers, and drowned out by a state-controlled propaganda machine. Elections still happen but under conditions so rigged that they barely qualify as democratic. The brilliance of his model lies in its ability to mimic democracy while gutting it from the inside. He has mastered the art of democratic illusion, keeping just enough formal institutions intact to maintain plausible deniability while ensuring that the opposition never gains real ground.
For a dictator in training, the lesson here is clear: force may be necessary, but laws are the real weapons. Use them wisely.
Vladimir Putin is not one for subtlety. For him, dissent is not a nuisance—it is a direct threat to be extinguished. Protests in Russia are met with overwhelming force. Opposition politicians are jailed on dubious charges, their offices raided, their supporters harassed, their allies poisoned. If legal suppression fails, there is always the more permanent solution. Boris Nemtsov, a vocal critic, was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015. Alexei Navalny, the face of Russia’s opposition movement, survived an attempted poisoning in 2020 but wasn’t so lucky in 2024, dying in prison under mysterious circumstances. These deaths weren’t accidents. They were warnings, exercises in power meant to remind everyone else what happens to those who step out of line.
Putin prefers to turn dissent into treason. His government’s infamous “foreign agent” laws brand any critic as a puppet of Western interests. Under the latest expansion of this law, even individuals can be designated foreign agents if they are deemed to be acting “under foreign influence.” The definition is so vague that it could apply to anyone who criticizes the government while owning a smartphone made in the West. He does not need mass executions to maintain control; the lingering fear of persecution is enough. Opposition leaders know they are being watched. Protesters know that attending a rally might land them in jail. Journalists know that reporting the wrong story could be their last. Fear is an indispensable tool, and few wield it better than Putin.
If Orbán’s approach is a slow suffocation and Putin’s is targeted elimination, Adolf Hitler represents the extreme endgame—where repression evolves into mass extermination.