Who will Orbán blame? The answer, dear reader, is: you. And me. And anyone inside or outside Hungary reading or distributing material critical of the Hungarian government.

On March 30, the Hungarian Parliament, which is controlled by Orbán’s party, Fidesz, voted to cancel all elections, suspend its own ability to legislate, and give the prime minister the right to rule by decree—indefinitely. None of these powers is needed to fight the coronavirus. None of them fixes the existing problems in Hungarian hospitals. All of them will help the Hungarian government push through other measures. Almost immediately, they were used to pass controversial edicts on museum construction and theater management, and to prohibit transgender people from legally changing their sex—issues without the remotest relevance to the pandemic. The government also wants to use its new powers to pass a decree classifying all information about a major Chinese railway investment in the country, the single largest infrastructure investment in Hungarian history. Once again, this has nothing to do with fighting the virus but it will conveniently keep the details of the business deal, and the names of the businessmen who benefit, out of the public view for 10 years.

Like many others, I tweeted criticism of this de facto coup d’état. The next day, some of those who searched for Anne Applebaum and Hungary received, as one of their top Google results, this message from the Hungarian government’s English-language propaganda site, abouthungary.hu: “Coronavirus Protection Act: The importance of saving Hungarian lives is clearly not a priority outside Hungary.” Meanwhile, József Szájer, one of the leaders of Hungary’s European parliamentary delegation, sent out a letter to foreign colleagues—members of a pan-European alliance of center-right parties with which Fidesz is aligned—accusing them of lacking concern for Hungarian lives. “Please,” Szájer wrote, “do not hinder us by unfounded criticism in the midst of our fight!” His use of hinder is extraordinary, for it implies, again, that foreign criticism will somehow harm Hungary’s battle against the coronavirus.

Not coincidentally, this is the same kind of language used by Zoltán Kovács, Hungary’s serially dishonest press spokesperson—think Kellyanne Conway with facial hair—when he speaks about Hungary’s small but still vocal political opposition, as well as critiques from abroad. “We’re in a state of emergency, by the way,” he sneered in a posted comment. “Lives are at stake.” For that reason, he wrote, the “gross distortion” of the “facts” about the situation is “biased and irresponsible.” State-controlled media have gone further, openly labeling the government’s opponents as proponents of the virus.

Why does this matter? Because although Hungary is a small country, it is one whose creeping authoritarianism is widely admired. In early February, I wrote about the rapturous reception that Orbán had received at a conference of self-declared nationalist and far-right intellectuals—American, Israeli, and European—in Rome. I fully expect his tactics to be imitated: Anybody who disagrees with my emergency laws is trying to spread illness is something we will hear again. So is Whichever mistakes we made in the past, we are not responsible for them now. Indeed, I suspect that we will hear that sentiment again and again. In the United States, President Donald Trump has already blamed an extraordinary array of actors, from state governors to Barack Obama to China, for mistakes made by himself and his administration.