Trump's movement wants to rig elections so it can have 'super majorities' with only 'one-third' of voters: expert

The Conservative Political Action Conference this week is meeting in Hungary, where authoritarian strongman Viktor Orban is giving them pointers on how to take and wield power.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University and expert on Hungarian politics, tells Grid News in an interview that Trump supporters are hoping to replicate Orban's political success in the United States by rigging election rules so that they can effectively rule the country despite having the support of a minority of voters.

"Orban’s base is about the same size as Trump’s base: About a third of the Hungarian population will defend him no matter what," she explains. The rest of Orban’s victory is a combination of lying about the opposition, coming up with hot button issues that get the electorate riled up before the election, coming out with all of these social welfare benefits to essentially buy off parts of constituency and then rigged election rules."

The result, she says, is that Orban has "perfected the art of taking one-third of your public as a base and constantly locking in super-majoritarian power by rigging all the other rules."

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This is more of a challenge in the United States, however, which has a longer democratic tradition and a broad media ecosystem that prevents one party or faction from establishing permanent dominance over a prolonged period of time.

In Hungary, meanwhile, Orban has shut down critical media outlets, which would be a direct violation of the United States Constitution's First Amendment.

"Orban won reelection with a campaign slogan of 'peace and security,' promising Hungarians, 'I will not drag you into war, but the opposition will,'" says Scheppele. "Which was a lie about the opposition, but Orban controls all the media, so how was the opposition going to get their views out?"

Read the full interview here.