When the New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz first heard that the Conservative Political Action Conference, the flagship event of the American conservative movement, was being held in Hungary, he thought it might be a joke. “A lot of people have worried for a few years now that the Republican Party is becoming more ambivalent about certain bedrock norms of American democracy,” Marantz told David Remnick. “To openly state, ‘We’re going to this semi-authoritarian country’ . . .  I thought it was maybe a troll.” But C.P.A.C. Hungary was very real, and the event demonstrated an increasingly close relationship between American conservatives and authoritarians abroad. Viktor Orbán wins elections and claims a democratic mandate, but his legislative maneuvers and rewrites to the constitution have rendered political opposition increasingly powerless. Marantz finds the admiration for him by many in America unsettling. “I couldn’t really imagine a Putin-style takeover” of power in America, Marantz says; but “this kind of technical, legalistic Orbán model” seems all too plausible.

Two hearings this week laid out the stark implications of President Trump’s efforts to stay in office. On Tuesday, members of the House Select Committee on January 6th heard testimony about attempts to deliver “fake” slates of electors to Congress. State election officials and poll workers spoke, in powerful terms, about the intense vitriol and harassment they were subjected to by Trump supporters, simply for doing their jobs. On Thursday, the Committee explored President Trump’s pressure campaign at the Justice Department to get top officials to go along with false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. As Evan Osnos wrote for The New Yorker, “Trump’s political formula has rested on a dark genius at leveraging the powerful against the vulnerable, a tribe against a dissenter, the mob against the foe—and he nearly succeeded in using that recipe to overturn the election that he lost.” In the third installment of a special series for the Politics and More podcast, three members of The New Yorker’s Washington bureau—Osnos, Susan B. Glasser, and Jane Mayer—take us through the big developments at the hearings this week.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has shown himself uniquely skilled at attracting attention beyond the borders of his home state. Just this month, DeSantis blocked state funds for the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium after players voiced support for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. He’s also continuing a fight to punish the Disney corporation for criticizing Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. An Ivy League-educated anti-élitist firebrand, he is willing to pick a fight with anyone—reporters, health officials, teachers, Mickey Mouse—to grab a headline. DeSantis “practically radiates ambition,” the staff writer Dexter Filkins tells David Remnick. “He sounds like Trump, except that he speaks in complete sentences. . . . He’s very good at staking out a position and pounding the table and saying, I’m not giving in to the liberals in the Northeast.” Yet, despite having been anointed by Donald Trump in his primary election, DeSantis has refused to “kiss the ring,” and many see DeSantis as a possible opponent to Trump in a 2024 Republican primary.

This week, the House select committee held two more hearings to review its astonishing findings on the events of January 6, 2021, featuring testimony from onetime enablers of President Donald Trump: Bill Barr, the former Attorney General, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s former campaign manager. These hearings are revealing the extraordinary drama that was unfolding that day, not just on the Capitol lawn but also in the top ranks of the government, where Vice-President Mike Pence was being coerced to overturn the election. As Susan B. Glasser put it in her column for newyorker.com this week, “On Thursday, the House committee devoted its hearing to attempting to explain Trump’s scheme to pressure Pence—which unfolded in a series of inflammatory Presidential tweets, angry phone calls, and bizarre White House meetings that were a mix of constitutional-law seminars and live reënactments of ‘The Godfather.’ ” In the second installment of a special series for the Politics and More podcast, three members of The New Yorker’s Washington bureau—Glasser, Evan Osnos, and Jane Mayer—take us through the big developments at the hearings this week.

A widespread view that cities have become less safe in recent months is transforming local politics. Eric Adams became Mayor of New York City on a tough-on-crime platform. Anxiety about public safety has also played a significant role in the ongoing Los Angeles mayoral race. In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin—a reform-minded district attorney—was recalled by voters by a significant margin last week. Boudin had instituted a number of progressive reforms, from liberalizing bail policies to reducing jail populations through diversion programs. But those changes were buried by the perception that the city had descended into a state of chaos. His recall has been cast as a referendum on crime and on the public’s attitudes toward progressive criminal-justice policies. What were the voters in San Francisco blaming on Boudin? The New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells recently wrote about Boudin’s recall. He speaks with the New Yorker senior editor Tyler Foggatt.