Ezra Klein at the NYT hosts a fascinating discussion with Zack Beauchamp, who recently wrote a piece in Vox called  “Trump Is Losing,” and Andrew Marantz, who recently wrote “Is it Happening Here?” in the New Yorker. The topic: whether Trump is winning in his quest to reshape American democracy, creating a strongman like government along the lines of what’s happening in Hungary. … After witnessing the administration’s latest we-don’t-like-your-politics attack on an institution and so many other outrageous actions, I’m with Marantz, who has studied Hungary under Viktor Orbán and who argues the evolution toward a form of autocracy isn’t a straight line from here to there, one heavy-handed assault on democracy after another. It’s more gradual and piecemeal, one many people don’t recognize as it happens because they’re not immediately effected. … The end result isn’t a clear-cut case of dictatorship replacing democracy, Marantz says. It’s more like a “hybrid regime,” part democratic, part autocratic, or what some call “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elements of democracy survive alongside strongman-style government. That’s where we’re headed, I fear, and I don’t see future presidents giving up the new powers that Trump has grabbed. New precedents aren’t easily reversed.