How Fast Each Autocracy Consolidated

Peru did it in a night. Hungary took a decade. Trump is fourteen months in and the clock is still running. Five elected leaders, one measure: how long each took to make their government unremovable.

1 min read · pulled from Orbán Took a Decade. Trump Is Running the Same Game Plan in Months.

How fast each autocracy consolidated

United States Other autocracies

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The bars show, very roughly, how long each leader took to turn an elected government into one that could not be voted out. Hover or tap any bar for the specifics.

A deliberately rough comparison for scale, not a precise metric—"consolidation" means something different in each country, and the American case is still in progress. The point is the order of magnitude: what took a decade or two elsewhere is being compressed into months.

This chart is one piece of a longer argument. The full essay walks through why Peru, Hungary, Turkey, and Russia each thought it couldn't happen to them, and what's different about the American version — mainly that it's running on infrastructure none of them had. Read the full essay →

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The full essay this is drawn from Lock in power ← All essays