'The Orban Playbook': Trump Assault on Media Matters Seen as Dire Warning to Other Critics

U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies have been waging legal war for months against liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America, and a report from The New York Times on Friday claimed that the organization is now in dire financial straits as it's been racking up millions in legal expenses.

According to the Times, Media Matters has incurred legal expenses of $15 million in its efforts to defend itself against lawsuits from X owner Elon Musk, as well as investigations launched by the Federal Trade Commission and two Republican state attorneys general. The expenses from the lawsuits have also had the add-on effect of making donors to the organization "skittish," writes the Times, and the organization has had to slash its staff in half.

To make matters worse, even victories in court for Media Matters bring it little reprieve given that Musk, with his limitless resources as the world's wealthiest man, will file appeals that will force the organization to shell out even more legal fees.

John Hopkins University economist Filipe Campante, who regularly writes about authoritarian threats to democracy, commented on Bluesky that the plight of Media Matters is linked to Trump's other efforts to clamp down on the free press, such as his lawsuit against CBS News that resulted in parent company Paramount agreeing to pay out $16 million shortly before the Federal Communications Commission signed off on its $8 billion merger with studio Skydance.

In fact, he likened the Trump administration's current actions to those of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has successfully strangled independent media in his country over the span of several years.

"This, yet again, is competitive authoritarianism in practice," wrote Campante. "The speed of the collapse in the media environment is something I had not foreseen... weaponization of lawsuits, persecution by regulators, donors scared away. It's the Orbán playbook, on steroids."

And Campante isn't the only expert making comparisons to Orbán.

Gábor Scheiring, a former Hungarian member of parliament who is now an assistant professor of comparative politics at Georgetown University Qatar, told CNN's Brian Stelter on Friday that Trump's strategy for taming the news media is almost the exact same strategy he once saw Orbán employ. Scheiring zeroed in on CBS' recent announcement that frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert would have his show canceled next year as particularly Orbán-esque.

"Most of Orban's tactical weapons to take over the media resemble the moves that led to Colbert's cancellation," he explained. "The legal warfare, the lawsuit against CBS, the regulatory capture and threats, the financial pressures, the sale of the parent company, and the new owner's apparent friendliness to Trump."

Scheiring added that Orbán was able to achieve this result by isolating media owners and picking them off one by one to ensure they never forged a sense of solidarity with one another.

"Media owners, both foreign and domestic, largely capitulated individually rather than mounting collective resistance, which enabled Orbán's systematic capture strategy," he said.

Even media moguls ideologically allied with the president haven't escaped his wrath, as Trump filed a lawsuit against right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch earlier this month after the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal published a story detailing an obscene birthday card the president allegedly gave to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.