Trump Channeling George Orwell

Donald Trump’s relationship with truth is reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.” Trump, it seems, believes that history is what strongmen or aggressors say it is, which may bear no relationship to reality. No matter how often he insists, without offering any evidence, that he won the 2020 election, his insistence can’t make it so. Truth is what is, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and neither royalty nor rascals can make truth blossom from a lie. After all, Trump tried mightily but unsuccessfully to do just that on January 6, 2021, and there is no reason to assume he wouldn’t try again if he deemed it necessary to retain power in 2028.

Trump’s version of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, bears no resemblance to the truth. When asked why he pardoned the rioters who attacked police officers and first responders, Trump insisted that those who he pardoned were victims who were “assaulted by our government.” “They didn’t assault,” he insisted. This was, of course, simply an outrageous prevarication. More than 140 officers were beaten that day, and more than 170 people pleaded guilty to attacking police officers. But according to Donald Trump, the rioters and the attackers were the innocent victims.

According to President Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin, started the war in Ukraine. This calumny is so outrageous that it is uniformly rejected throughout the free and sane world. While Trump is no bookworm, one novel one suspects he may have read is George Orwell’s celebrated 1984, in which lies repeated on a mass scale create reality from pure prevarication.

According to Trump’s Orwellian newspeak, President Zelensky attacked Russia and unleashed the tragic carnage in war-torn Ukraine. “He should’ve never started it,” Trump said of Zelensky. “You could’ve made a deal,” he pontificated, mocking reality. Russia, of course, attacked Ukraine three years ago, just as Russia ripped Crimea away from Ukraine a decade ago. Trump is blatantly abetting Putin’s aggression by laying the blame for the war in Ukraine on Zelensky.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are pretty popular in Russia, their free-enterprise wealth notwithstanding. Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov says the Russian people like Elon Musk’s inventiveness, and they give Trump high points for having an open mind with respect to dealing with Putin. Trump, of course, believes that Russia is in the driver’s seat concerning any future negotiations between Putin and Zelensky. Trump responds favorably to people he thinks are playing with a strong hand and not so favorably inclined toward those in a weak negotiating position. Zelensky, who is understandably frustrated with Trump’s apparent coziness with Putin, believes that Trump exists in a Russian-created "disinformation space." Zelensky knows that Putin can play Trump to Ukraine’s great disadvantage.

Trump's Ukrainian peace plan reportedly demands a £400 billion return to the United States through control over Ukrainian natural resources, which are rich in rare earth, oil, and gas.

This week, Putin said, "No one is excluding Ukraine" from peace talks, although Kyiv certainly appears to have been excluded from meetings the United States and Russia conducted in Riyadh. It is much easier to imagine a close rapport between Trump and Putin than to conjure up closeness between Trump and Zelensky. Trump would, no doubt, like to rehabilitate Putin’s horrible reputation among our European allies. One suspects he could care less about Zelenski’s standing in Western Europe.

Creating new realities, if not fantasies through prevarication, is, of course, nothing new to Donald Trump. Remember, he insists that he beat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Now, it is true that politicians, like many others in public life, exaggerate their accomplishments from time to time. Trump’s penchant for prevarication, however, is pretty much in a class by itself.

According to Washington Post fact-checkers, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during the first two years of his first Presidency. The Toronto Star determined that Trump lied over 5,000 times, or about six times daily, between January 2017 and June 2019. Now, to be sure, politicians stretch the truth all the time; however, we’re not talking about routine political puffery here. We’re talking about wholesale, calculated lying.

Lying during Trump’s first term wasn’t a matter of carelessness but rather a matter of formulated misinformation. Steve Bannon, who in 2016, was Trump’s chief campaign strategist, counseled his client to lie with complete abandon, or as he put it, to “flood the zone with shit.” The idea is to fire so much misinformation at the public that no one can keep up with the torrent of lies, which gets us back to George Orwell’s 1984 and Donald Trump as Orwell’s “Big Brother” incarnate.

I, for one, believe that Donald Trump would pursue a third term if he and the Republican Party decide to conjure up a plausible faux legal basis to seek such a third term. Far-fetched? Not really. The loopholes in the two-term limit are considerable, and I don’t doubt for a minute that Trump and his inner circle are well aware of those loopholes. After all, the 22^nd Amendment merely states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Let that marinate for a moment or two…no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.

According to the 22^nd Amendment to the Constitution, a U.S. president cannot be elected for more than two consecutive terms. It reads, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once." Elections, however, are not the only circumstance by which one can accede to the Presidency or wield the power of the Presidency.

Listen to Ian Bassin, former associate White House Council during the Obama presidency. “Anyone who says that the 22^nd Amendment will deter Trump from trying for a third term has been living on a different planet than the one I’ve been living on.” Bassin, now the Executive Director of the advocacy group Protect Democracy, has good reason to worry. Anyone who has studied presidential succession knows there are ways around the prohibition against being elected President more than twice. Trump could run for Vice President with a pliant accomplice (running mate) running for President. Assuming the powers of the Presidency thereafter, and even the office of the Presidency, would be as easy as selling Trump sneakers, watches, or bibles to a fawning public.

There has probably never been so much written about Presidential lying as has been written about Donald Trump’s prevarications. Historian Douglas Brinkley says that presidents have always lied occasionally, but “none were serial liars like Trump.” Psychologist Donnel Stern says, "We expect politicians to stretch the truth. But Trump is a whole different animal" because Trump "lies as a policy” and "will say anything" to satisfy his supporters or himself. Anthropologist Carol McGranahan wrote in the American Ethnologist that Donald Trump is the most accomplished and effective liar to have ever participated in American politics. Norwegian journalist Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth, writing for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, says Trump was "delivering untruths on an unprecedented scale" during” his election campaign and Presidency.

One wonders how America’s youth feel about the American Presidency. It was once an office held in the highest esteem by most of our young people. One wonders.

Please share our weekly commentary with others.

Of Thee I Sing 1776. Subscribe here:

https://oftheeising1776.substack.com/subscribe

Recent podcasts have featured my commentary on Liz Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” as well as my commentaries regarding:

U.S. Representative Jim Jordan,

Brian Kemp and Those Republicans of Georgia,

The Trump Indictments,

The Fox Corp Settlement,

The CNN Trump Town Hall,

The Hunter Biden plea deal,

The New American Cult of Personality,

and my interviews with William Bratton, Retired Chief of Police in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston;

Rikki Klieman, Attorney, Network News Analyst, and best-selling author;

John Thoresen, Executive Director, Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center;

Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and founder of the Institute for Political Innovation;

Jazz artist Ann Hampton Callaway;

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon;

AI Data Scientist Lawrence Kite;

Ryan Clancy, Chief Strategist of No Labels;

Former Senator Barbara Boxer;

Former Senator Joe Lieberman;

and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

Novels by Hal Gershowitz