I Needed Some Good News This Week. Here It Is.

An autocratic takedown offers lessons for reclaiming American democracy

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and for once I want to spend our time together on something hopeful. A piece in the Times caught my eye this week, and I think you need to read it too.

First, a quick thank you. The response to our work this week was extraordinary: hundreds of you wrote in and shared our work with friends who needed to see it. Your subscription is the reason we exist.

Now, let’s get into it.

The Country That Just Beat Its Own Autocrat

This week the New York Times ran a remarkable piece by M. Gessen from Budapest, reporting on the inauguration of Peter Magyar, the man who just did what almost no one in our era has managed to do. He beat an entrenched autocrat at the ballot box and won decisively enough to start undoing the damage.

For 16 years, Viktor Orban ran Hungary the way Trump dreams of running America. He dominated the media, rewrote election laws to favor his own party, and built what observers called a “mafia state.” He’d seemingly achieved what political theorists call “autocratic breakthrough,” the point past which you supposedly can’t vote a strongman out.

CPAC held conventions there to study his methods. JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for him. And then Hungarians handed the opposition not just a win, but a constitutional majority.

Here’s what grabbed me, and why I think it matters so much right now. Gessen lays out the lessons of how it happened, and almost every one of them is something we can do.

Magyar didn’t build another “machine of power.” He built an army of ordinary people: 2,000 local organizing hubs, tens of thousands of volunteers, thousands more working phones in the final week. He traveled to 700 towns and villages, holding five rallies a day, because it turns out that people seeing a candidate in person, again and again, is a powerful antidote to media fearmongering. When you can’t out-shout the propaganda machine, you go around it, mailbox to mailbox.

Magyar refused to mince words. Where earlier opposition figures called Orban’s government “corrupt,” Magyar called it a criminal enterprise. He ran on cleaning it up. Post-election polling showed corruption, not the economy, was the number one reason voters turned on Orban.

People were moved by moral outrage. By the sense that something precious was being stolen from the nation itself. Sound familiar? And the grassroots that powered the win weren’t political operations at all. They were teachers, parents fighting for kids in state care, Pride organizers, ordinary people who’d been fighting their own fights. In our context, Gessen notes, that’s the No Kings rallies, the ICE-resistance networks, and the people already in motion in your own town.

There’s one more lesson that matches our moment. Magyar’s rise began when he exposed a child sexual abuse scandal that Orban’s government had tried to bury. In Poland — the only other European country to claw back its democracy this way — a similar cover-up played a central role. There’s something about these stories that shows people exactly what unaccountable power does behind closed doors.

Jeffrey Epstein is our version of this scandal.

Magyar didn’t win by being crueler or more vulgar than the man he beat (the way, say, Gavin Newsom sometimes tries to out-troll Trump on his own terms). He won by being aspirational. At his inauguration he invited a choir of Roma children, Hungary’s most discriminated-against minority, to sing in Parliament. Grown legislators wept.

He told the people who’d voted against him that the country belonged to them too. That there was “no left, no right, only Hungarians.” He raised the European flag back over Parliament but kept a nationalist flag flying beside it, because his message was that this was everyone’s country now.

When the new prime minister finally walked out to the crowd, people were so desperate to close the distance that men hiked up their pants and went splashing straight across the reflecting pool the old regime had built to keep them away.

“This is your house now!” Magyar shouted.

I think we forget, in the grind of bad news, that elections are winnable. That a democratic America is still in the fight.

An autocrat who looked permanent, who had every institutional advantage, who had the world’s illiberal movement cheering him on, lost. Enough ordinary people refused to accept that he couldn’t be beaten, and then organized like they believed it.

We are not powerless. We’ve never been powerless. The machine wants us to feel that way, because despair is what keeps it standing.

More Bright Spots From the Week

And it wasn’t just Hungary. Here at home, there were real wins this week worth holding onto. On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked Trump’s $1.8 billion “weaponization” slush fund, the scheme that would have funneled taxpayer money to January 6 rioters and MAGA loyalists. The judge ordered the administration to stop all work setting it up while the courts weigh whether it’s even legal.

It’s a pause, not a permanent kill, but it’s the system working exactly the way it’s supposed to. And it came after the fund had already sent even Senate Republicans into open revolt.

The bigger picture keeps getting brighter. A wave of new polling this week confirmed what Republicans are privately panicking about: Democrats hold a commanding lead heading into the midterms, with one PBS/NPR/Marist survey showing a 14-point edge on the generic congressional ballot and independents breaking for Democrats by more than 30 points. Even Fox News’ own poll has voters preferring Democrats by seven.

The enthusiasm gap is real. The affordability crisis is landing squarely on the party in power, and analysts are openly comparing 2026 to the Democratic wave of 2018. None of it’s guaranteed. All of it has to be earned, the Magyar way: door by door. But the wind is at our backs.

That’s the note I want to leave you with this Sunday. Not that everything is fine, because it isn’t, but that the people who tell you resistance is futile are selling you something. Budapest just proved them wrong.

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