A reasonable rule is that once you begin making an argument ad Hitlerum—comparing some malevolent politician to Hitler or some malignant movement to the Nazis, or declaring a brutal (but non-eliminationist) war a genocide comparable to the Holocaust—you have lost the plot. The facile but extreme analogy is the first resort of the unimaginative alarmist. To this we should now add the argument ad Orbánum, namely, the view that the Trump administration is just like that of the creeping, well-nigh unstoppable, and irreversible corrupt authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán. In this view, the Hungarian prime minister’s version of illiberal democracy was coming for America, and would probably win—indeed, might have already won. In the wake of Orbán’s smashing electoral defeat on April 12, in a country whose experience of electoral democracy is recent and whose authoritarian past is dark indeed, the argument ad Orbánum looks pretty flimsy. Effective dictators do not usually lose elections, and when they do, they deny it and hold on to power anyway. Genuine fascists—not those merely cosplaying the role—send squads of …