Reading “1984” in the Age of trump

      I first read George Orwell’s “1984” my early twenties. I focused on the main characters, Winston Smith and Julia, and their illicit romance. I hoped they would not get caught by Big Brother’s Thought Police. Yet I sensed they were doomed and their love would be crushed.

      And that is exactly what happened.

      I also believed Big Brother’s control over practically all aspects of people’s lives in Oceania represented, in exaggerated fashion, the Soviet Union as I knew it during the Cold War. The dystopic world presented in “1984” was unrelated to the free and democratic United States.I recently read “1984” again as a 70-year-old and very different aspects of Orwell’s masterpiece captured my attention. I was fascinated and deeply disturbed by how the Ministry of Truth systematically manufactured lies about history that became accepted truths until they, also, were transformed into falsehoods.

      My interest peaked when O’Brien, a Party leader, explained to Winston that if he wanted to be sane, then he must accept and wholeheartedly believe that 2+2=4 may be true, but 2+2=5 or 2+2=3 may also be true. In fact, 2+2+4 and 2+2=5 and 2+2=3 may all be true at the same time! Manipulation of the truth to coerce how people think struck me as the most important feature of “1984.”

      Why did I react so differently to reading “1984” now as opposed to when I was a young adult decades ago?

      We live in the Age of Trump. His attempts to bend truth and reality to his liking remind me of Big Brother and the Party in “1984.” Trump’s recasting January 6, 2021, is Example No. 1. We all (including prominent Republicans) watched horrified as Trump’s MAGA minions stormed the Capitol and smashed its windows, assaulted police officers, paraded a Confederate flag through the Rotunda and threatened to lynch the vice president and to kill the speaker of the house. Images of the insurrection were embedded in our memories.

      And yet, within weeks, Trump proclaimed his MAGA thugs acted like patriots when they tried to destroy our democracy. Republican “leaders” parroted Trump’s alternate reality/revisionist history and insisted the insurrectionists were “peace-loving tourists” persecuted by the criminal justice system as “political prisoners.” Trump completed his transformation of January 6, 2021, by pardoning and absolving over 1,500 followers as one of his very first acts after he returning to the presidency with its power.

      Trump aggressively seeks to create a history that reflects his whims. He declares war on DEI and tries to erase the history of African-American and Native American valor in World War II. Hard-working immigrants become killers and violent gang members without a shred of evidence supporting such distortions.

      Trump insists tariffs make life better than at any time in America history when a trip to the grocery store indicates the opposite. And Trump presents as gospel truth that he did not lose the 2020 election even though he received 7 million fewer votes than President Biden, and scores of investigations, the hand recounting of ballots and numerous court decisions, from the Trump-friendly Supreme Court among others, issued decisions ruled that no voter fraud occurred.

     Both Big Brother and Trump practice an epistemology of lying that uses falsehoods to create and maintain an alternative reality favorable to their interests. There may be a difference in degree between the Age of Trump and the grim world of “1984,” but not a difference in kind. The parallels are striking and frightening.

      Trump discredits inconvenient facts as “fake news” or a “hoax.” In “1984,” the ironically-named Ministry of Truth constantly replaces names and events in official records to eliminate all traces of past facts–and people–no longer useful in the present.

      Trump calls journalists the “enemy of the state” if they report facts he does not like. Big Brother creates state enemies as the focus of frenzied, mass hysterical hate weeks. Trump insists the Department of Justice must prosecute political opponents without a basis in law. Big Brother uses the Ministry of Love (more irony from Orwell) with its nightmarish Room 101 to torment and destroy persons like Winston and Julia as deviants from Party doctrine.

      The Party in “1984” defines sanity as accepting that 2+2 could be 3 or 5 as well as 4. Trump demands that his supporters agree with him (at least in public) that Joe Biden did not beat him in 2020 even though all the facts prove the opposite.

      The chilling similarities between “1984” and the Age of Trump explain why I had such a different experience reading Orwell’s novel now than when I was a twenty-something. “1984” is a book for our times. We should read it while we still can.

Allen Wall is an attorney living in Chicago.  He is the author of the manuscript, ‘The 50th Reunion:  A Story of Race, Class and Self-Discovery,’ for which he hopes to find a publisher in 2026.