Orwell and the Trump Regime

by Veritas Fulgens

 Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
 And darkened lands of the earth.
W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

It is astonishing that in the few weeks of the new administration 1984, a novel Orwell intended as a dark parody of life under Soviet communism, has come to resemble our own collapsing democracy.  In Orwell’s novel Big Brother has absolute power, crushes all opposition and plans to be Dictator for Life.  The purpose of government is not to serve the people, but to secure power for the leaders: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. . . . Power is not a means; it is an end. . . . The object of power is power.”  Big Brother demands absolute loyalty and total submission, threatens to punish anyone who opposes him and to destroy those who disobey.  The elite two percent in the Inner Party are corrupt officials who accept and support the dictatorship, and are rewarded with extraordinary power and privilege:  “The most bigoted adherents of the Party are the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”  All this seems frighteningly familiar to us now.

In Trump’s regime respected officials and senior military men are suddenly fired and made to disappear from public life.  International alliances and customs are overturned, institutions of longstanding destroyed, and the Republican majority in the House and Senate abjectly submit.  We are not yet enslaved nor impoverished, like Orwell’s proles, but the gap between billionaires and the rest of us gets wider. The parallels between 1984 and the current government are so close that it seems like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 used it as a source.

One sci-fi element of 1984 is continuous surveillance from the telescreens in every flat and office.  Omnipresent posters warn BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.  The Thought Police actively suppress Thoughtcrime: “You had to live –did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”  Not so different from now. Security cameras are almost everywhere and nothing on our cellphones or computers is totally private.  AI can be used to impersonate us, our personal information can be accessed without our knowing it.  Sex life is rigidly controlled in 1984.  In many American states abortions are now illegal, and medical treatment is regulated by non-physicians.  Any care for sex-assignment is forbidden in many parts of the U.S.

Big Brother keeps the population ignorant and terrified.  The streets are patrolled by “gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms armed with jointed truncheons.  The prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph,” rage and self-abasement.  Agents of ICE dressed and masked in black have arrested students on the street.  The violent neo-fascist Unite the Right who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, supported Trump.  The Proud Boys, another white supremacy group, were among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  They were convicted of their crimes but Trump, once elected, pardoned them.  His use of violence and intimidation is worthy of Big Brother.  His Secretary of Education’s main task is to completely eliminate the Department of Education.  Even the most powerful law firms and prestigious universities threatened by Trump have caved into his threats and demands.

If fear does not deter dissidents like Winston Smith, the main character in the novel, torture persuades him.  Winston is elaborately tortured by the mysterious Party operative O’Brien.  The Ministry of Love specializes in “tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.”  Torture has been used in Guantánamo, rape and violence are widespread in many American prisons.

Capital punishment is a common public spectacle in 1984.  Winston remembers that “some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the Park that evening.”  Syme, soon to be “vaporized” and become an “Unperson,” sadistically recalls an execution: “It was a good hanging.  I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking.  And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out. . . . That’s the detail that appeals to me.”   Several U.S. states have revived executions, often with prolonged and cruel effects.

In 1984 the regime actively destroys truth and so does Trump.  Since his lies—echoed on his social media site and by far right TV and radio channels—are more effective than truth, no one expects him to tell the truth.  This is the most disturbing feature of his presidency.  In “Satire III,” the 17th-century poet John Donne wrote that veracity was difficult to discover and preserve: “On a huge hill, / Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will / Reach her, about must and about must go.”  Orwell’s Winston, a sad parody of a journalist, spends his life rewriting the past by translating ordinary words into meaningless Newspeak: “the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened.”  He could rewrite Big Brother’s speech to make him predict the event that had already occurred.  Trump tries to rewrite the past by first denying and then obliterating his own criminal activities.  His Secretary of Defense descends from considering wars throughout the world to deciding which books have unacceptable words and must be removed from U.S. military academies.

Both Big Brother and Trump rule by proclamation.  When the economy fails, the Ministry of Plenty announces to the struggling masses, “the standard of living has risen by no less than twenty percent over the past year. . . . The Tenth Three-Year Plan’s quota for bootlaces has been overfulfilled by ninety-eight per cent.”  As the stock market plunges, Trump calls his plan for economic disaster “Liberation Day.”  He promises that tariffs will reduce income taxes, not helpful to people who have lost their government jobs and have no income to tax.  Meanwhile, he spends millions of dollars, while condemning government excess, flying from Washington to play golf at Bar Virago.

The state in 1984 is sustained by powerful and overwhelming propaganda, by

the systematic distortion of truth and enforcement of lies.  “The Ministry of Peace concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty was responsible for economic affairs.”  The proles are forced to believe that 2+2=5; that WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.  Party discipline forces them “to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white.”  Trump also specializes in rewriting history on his absurdly named Truth Social website.  He claims that his criminal convictions were fraudulent; that the 2024 presidential election was stolen; that the January 6 riots were legal; that Ukraine started the war by invading Russia; that the disastrous Signal breach of security, in which the high officials sounded foolish, was nothing more than a “glitch.”

Big Brother deliberately introduces massive confusion and chaos.  He destroys all the war plans by suddenly changing sides during the endless conflicts, and proclaims after years of propaganda that Oceania, Winston’s country, “was not after all at war with Eurasia.  Oceania was at war with Eastasia.  Eurasia was an ally.”  In precisely the same way, Trump suddenly changes support from allies to enemies.  He alienates Canada and Mexico; becomes hostile to NATO and Western Europe; shifts allegiance from Ukraine to Russia; and votes with North Korea and China in the U.N.

In 1984 a feature of daily life is the collective orgy of vituperation in Two Minutes Hate.  When this is prolonged to Hate Week, “the Hate rose to a frenzy.  People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting the tops of their voices.”  Trump’s speeches also vilify his enemies and encourage mob hysteria, hatred and disdain.  He blames immigrants, as Nazis blamed the Jews, for all social evils.  He falsely claims that immigrants were released from prisons and insane asylums in their own countries, form violent criminal gangs, steal our jobs and eat our pets.  Like a totalitarian ruler, he treats people like human waste, authorizes their mass arrests and deports them to foreign prisons.  Orwell’s “Facecrime” now means looking like a dark foreigner.

Trump also exalts himself by attacking a once-formidable political dynasty.  He takes control of the Kennedy Center in Washington to glorify his own image, and appoints the unqualified quack Robert Kennedy, Jr. to wreck the health care system, with no concern for the thousands who’ll die as a result of his destructive policies.  Trump delights in ruining the Kennedy name.

Just as O’Brien does the dirty work of Big Brother, Elon Musk does the dirty work of Donald Trump.  He takes the blame for the Great Purges, for firing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying vital government agencies responsible for health, education, air traffic control and environmental safety.  Ruthlessly cutting overseas aid will cause millions of deaths in poor countries.

In 1984 Emmanuel Goldstein, declared an Enemy of the People and the main victim of Hate, provokes a mixture of fear and disgust.  Once long ago, he “had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and had then engaged in counter-revolutionary activities.”  He is now condemned as “the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity.  All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.  Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies.”  Joseph Biden, once a powerful figure, is Trump’s Goldstein and whipping dog.  Trump obsessively mocks him every day and blames him for every fault and error in his own regime.  He even claims that Biden is responsible for the Signal leak because he failed to attack the Houthi pirates in Yemen.  Trump, hopelessly unqualified to be the most powerful man in the world, follows the playbook of 1984.

On February 7, 2025 Senator Adam Schiff of California wrote to me explaining his view of Trump’s motives.  He is trying “to seize control of every aspect of government and remake it in his flawed image, transforming America into a one-party, one-man state, and all so that they can plunder the Treasury to enrich themselves.”  His goal is to recreate the totalitarian state in 1984.  Readers should buy the novel now before it is banned.