This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán recently lost power after 16 years of autocratic rule. The defeat was so enormous that the opposition party, led by Péter Magyar, swept past all Orbán’s various bulwarks designed to maintain power, winning the two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament necessary to amend the constitution.
Magyar immediately set to work planning attacks on the various Orbán power bases, like restoring judicial independence and breaking the control over the media held by Orbán allies. This will be necessary to unlock billions in European Union funding, and to restore democracy to Hungary.
Should Democrats win the midterms this year and then the presidency in 2028, they will face a similar task. The Trump administration and the broader MAGA movement has done untold damage to the American government. Fixing the problems on a permanent basis will require a program of de-MAGAfication.
But how? A recent article in the Journal of Democracy discussed the problems Donald Tusk’s government in Poland is having trying to clean up a similar authoritarian mess left by the prior Law and Justice party, deeming it a “post-illiberal trilemma.” The government sought “quick, effective, and unimpeachably legal solutions to illiberalism,” the authors write, but “it could often fulfill at best only two of these three conditions at once … A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract in the short term without resorting to the same methods that established them in the first place. Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook.”
Any kind of rupture with an authoritarian system is going to involve, well, rupture.
Of these three conditions, “unimpeachably legal” is the least important by a wide margin. Any kind of rupture with an authoritarian system is going to involve, well, rupture. It isn’t necessarily “capitulation” to the “illiberal playbook” to give them a taste of their own medicine—should the American revolutionaries in 1776 have stuck to strictly legal forms of protest? That holds double for the term “unimpeachably,” which suggests the kind of bending over backwards to perform scrupulous legality that in practice means letting rich, powerful defendants violate court norms and orders. The prissy, self-aggrandizing processes of former Attorney General Merrick Garland helped Trump run out the clock on all his prosecutions for the attempted putsch on January 6th.
A full program of de-MAGAfication would require a book-length project. But for the purposes of this article, I will focus on two of the largest pustules of MAGA corruption, which come from very different ends of the societal spectrum: the Supreme Court, and X, the website formerly known as Twitter.
MAYBE “DEALING WITH A RELATIVELY LOW-TRAFFICKED SOCIAL MEDIA SITE” doesn’t sound high-minded enough for a program of democratic renewal. But much of the catastrophe of the second Trump administration can be attributed to hyper-online brain rot.
Recall that during the 2024 campaign, the Heritage Foundation infamously published Project 2025, a psychotically right-wing vision of a future Republican term. Democrats naturally made it a centerpiece of Kamala Harris’s election campaign. Yet in certain key areas, the second Trump administration has been much, much worse than Project 2025. That document did not remotely countenance eliminating USAID—a major component of American diplomatic strength and power projection for decades—but Elon Musk’s DOGE did exactly that (illegally, for that matter). Tens of millions of people, most of them African, lost access to American-provided food, much of it for severely malnourished babies, or medication for people with tuberculosis, HIV, diarrhea, or other diseases.
One estimate found that as of February 2026, Musk had caused the deaths of something like 780,000 people, 518,000 of them children. A peer-reviewed study in The Lancet examining the past success of USAID programs estimated that should Musk’s illegal cuts persist through 2030, 14 million people will die.
Why? The most convincing answer I’ve seen is that Musk started listening to Mike Benz, a rabidly antisemitic conspiracy theorist, on Twitter/X and podcasts. Benz pushes a particular lunatic view, stemming originally from the Lyndon LaRouche cult, that USAID is part of a shadowy conspiracy to incite “color revolutions” around the world. Musk seemingly heard Benz on Joe Rogan’s show, followed him on X, and swallowed his nonsense wholesale. When Musk boasted that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper” in a post on X, he was quote-tweeting Benz.
That is nothing unusual for X, which has become a central organizing hub for movements of insane fascists around the world. Musk—when he isn’t throwing Nazi salutes at public events—has restructured the platform’s algorithm to force-feed right-wing propaganda on every user and increase the followings of far-right accounts. He has personally boosted far-right parties and politicians in Germany, France, Italy, Britain (where he has also helped incite race riots), and elsewhere. His system of sharing revenue with people who pay for his blue checkmark has inflated a class of fake MAGA accounts run by entrepreneurs in poorer countries who cook up AI propaganda slop for credulous American conservatives.
Trump administration staffers are quite obviously heavily influenced by, if not recruited directly from, right-wing X subculture. They act and speak in an ironic, transgressive, extremely online way that is unmistakably a product of that platform. Many Trump administration policies, like the mass murder of Venezuelan fishermen, seem to be primarily done to generate content for X. Vice President JD Vance is following many outright white supremacist accounts on X and echoing their language.
I conclude that for the next president, the first, most straightforward, and arguably most important task is to destroy X. It is not only a clear and present danger to American democracy and national security, it is the organizing hub of the global fascist movement. Shut it down, and a great blow will be struck for human freedom.
All that is needed is to enforce the law. For instance, X is almost certainly violating an FTC consent decree about user data privacy, and its AI chatbot Grok is violating laws about deepfake generation and publication—including one law signed by Donald Trump!—as well as other even more serious laws about the creation of child pornography.
The next president could also target Musk himself. Shutting down a congressionally authorized agency, as he publicly boasted about doing to USAID in writing, is a serious crime that strikes at the heart of the American constitutional order. Musk is also almost surely violating his high-level security clearance by reportedly developing a serious ketamine habit or communicating in secret with Vladimir Putin. Revoke his clearances, and you’d likely topple his whole business empire.
But should that somehow fall short, NSA hackers should be dispatched to take X down on national security grounds. If anyone has deserved the business end of the American security state, it’s Elon Musk, one of the most evil men in world history. At time of writing, the USAID destruction puts him at about half of Pol Pot’s murder toll; if the 14 million figure mentioned above is reached, Musk will have matched or even exceeded that of Hitler and Stalin, depending on the estimate.
GIVEN THE BEHAVIOR OF THE REACTIONARY SUPREME COURT MAJORITY over the last several years, we should assume that they will automatically overturn any successful conviction of Trump or Musk, regardless of the crime, as well as any policy initiative that harms conservative power. No other conclusion can be drawn from Trump v. U.S., which bailed Trump out from his insurrection prosecution and formally placed him above the law, thereby eviscerating most of Articles I and II of the Constitution at a stroke.
The most obvious way to break the reactionary majority would be to add additional seats to the Court. That would be in keeping with tradition and precedent. The Constitution says nothing about how many justices must sit on the Court, and the number has been changed many times before by statute.
However, it would also be a clumsy and potentially impermanent solution. The heart of the problem with the Court is that a system of very strong judicial review and lifetime appointments to the bench implies tyrannical power, by definition. When five justices can strike down laws based on their say-so, with no recourse or even requirement that the argument make any sense, that is ruling by decree. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts has made increased use of the so-called “shadow docket,” in which decisions invariably favorable to Trump are simply published without explanation or a hearing. Add in the fact that (absent unexpected illness or injury) justices can choose when to retire, and thereby effectively choose their successors, and the Court is a truly self-sealed system of unaccountable power.
Only tradition and circumspection have held this power in check in the past, and not all that well. Trump v. U.S., for instance, is only marginally less legally preposterous than Bush v. Gore, which handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush. Each decision was nothing more than a partisan majority enacting their preferences by fiat, while making an utter hash of the law and the Constitution.
If judicial review is not to be abolished entirely, as is the case in most other democracies, I’ve come to favor a reform idea recently proposed by Justin Briley in Liberal Currents. He would double the number of circuits and district courts—thus alleviating the severe backlog of cases at those levels—and have the Supreme Court drawn from the entire federal judiciary at random for each individual case.
This would solve the problem of a self-sealed system of power, and it would greatly reduce the temptation for justices to enact their partisan preferences through faux-legal argle-bargle. With the knowledge that a judge will only get a chance to make Supreme Court rulings occasionally, there will be a strong incentive to rule in a way that fits with law and precedent, so it will stand up to scrutiny. And rather than responding to Republican cheating with Democratic counter-cheating—which naturally invites counter-counter-cheating—it would make the system facially fair for everyone, thereby increasing the reform’s chances of persisting over time.
Whether it’s adding seats or some other reform, the most important task is to break the power of the traitorous majority on the Supreme Court. This will enable not just shutting down the fascist plague vector of Elon Musk’s X, and establishing a major legal tribunal to prosecute all the other MAGA crimes of the second Trump administration (which probably number in the millions at this point), but also structural reforms to shore up American democracy, such as statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, a fresh Voting Rights Act with a ban on partisan gerrymandering, and so on. (Abolishing the Senate filibuster will also be necessary for this, but that’s a subject for another article.)
It’s important to emphasize that kicking the legs out from under MAGA will not get rid of conservatism as a political tendency. Indeed, such a thing is difficult to imagine. Theocrats, war hawks, haters of government, and good old selfish rich people will always be with us. But we’ve had a conservatism that wasn’t this paint-blisteringly insane as recently as Trump’s last term. Abolish the madness factory that is X, end Republicans’ ability to rule by decree through the Supreme Court, and—after a hopefully prolonged period in the political wilderness—they might start to come to their senses.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
