Donald Trump is a totalitarian, mimicking the rage of most 20th-century dictators. He lacks subtlety, and his word salad is, well, an inelegant salad. Reading his Truth Social texts reveals the intensity of his lies and fantasies. If it existed, Orwell might have called the Internet something akin to truth social, which perfectly encapsulates the reverse meaning of the words.
Orwell understood getting people to coalesce around hate and anger was easier than mustering support for excellent and valuable concepts about democracy. Trump's core support comes from people unhappy with the changing demographics in America. However, many will cite specific reasons: crime and gun ownership, tax rates, jobs, and immigration letting people pour across the southern border. As the workforce becomes more representative of today's America, it stokes resentment as their children now have competition for entry-level jobs.
Trump's every speech or tweet defines grievances. His advice on immigration and related issues comes from Stephen Miller, a 39-year-old whose outspoken right-wing views were distasteful in a California school where he was intensely unpopular and then marinated in right-wing dogma while in college.
Miller demonizes immigrants regardless of their legal status in the USA. He plans to round up immigrants, put them in detention camps, then, without judicial review, expel them. His plan appears to differ from what the nazis did in Germany: we do not think they intend to kill immigrants. Given today's spy satellites and global communications systems, hiding this would not be easy.
The Orwellian aspects of Trump were apparent to me before he ran for president. As a reporter and news executive, I've followed his career closely since the mid-1970s. In the 1980s, someone authoritatively told me he was a fraud in New York City financial circles. For decades, he has conned suppliers and contractors using the legal system to avoid or reduce costs he had agreed to pay.
Nothing he has said or done since has diminished my belief that, in old age, he wants to be the Dictator of North America (a warning to Canada). His approach to the real estate business signified his imperviousness to rules or authority. This attitude is at the root of a nearly half-billion-dollar fine for shady business practices in a New York State court this year. He just posted a $90.1 million bond in another losing civil case for defaming a woman a court judged he had raped.
Trump listens to Miller because Miller tells him what he wants to hear. A Vanity Fair magazine story recounted Miller looking at photos of children separated from their parents at the Mexican border. Miller recommended the USA's zero-tolerance approach to immigrants. A source said, "Stephen enjoys seeing those pictures at the border." When asked about the policy, Miller described it as "a simple decision."
This tug-of-war between fascism and democracy has multiple players. In the last three decades, dramatic changes in spreading information have eroded the line between fact and fiction. Trump weaponized fiction and lies, stating them often and loudly. Exactly the policy devised in the 1920s by Joseph Goebbels, teaching Hitler how Nazi propaganda could help capture leadership in Germany.
Today's vast quantity of media offers ideologically slanted fragments. Mainstream media, with standards and fairness at its core, is less widely read and trusted than in the past. Many People consume social media and electronic messages that hide motive and fairness. The Internet provides what you ask of it, which narrows what people are learning. In 1905, poet and philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Two decades ago, Trump's style and statements would have drawn ridicule as outlandish. Consider his invocation of the specter of gangs and Antifa terrorizing the streets or predicting a new "Liberation Day" for his supporters. Trump's rhetoric is both scattered and extreme. Yet, these statements with neutral or semi-neutral treatment are more troubling: This normalization of falsehoods desensitizes people to their dangers.
The strategy is clear: rally his base by depicting a crisis that only he can solve. (His initial COVID virus, which he made up, cost thousands of lives ) Most science advisors sat quietly, too afraid or embarrassed to contradict the president at nationally televised meetings.
George Orwell wrote "1984" to warn people of the negative impact if they allowed their government to exercise total control. That was his takeaway from observing World War II. We then witnessed it in the Soviet Union's Cold War effort to control multiple nations. Why would we want it here in America, except that Trump doesn't just want to be Big Brother, but wants to be Big Daddy and Big Mommy?
Dying of tuberculosis in 1949, Orwell finished the book on a remote island he had purchased with the proceeds from his best-seller book, Animal Farm. Today, 40 years after the date of publication, the USA faces a state of affairs that fairly compares to what Hitler created in Germany in the 1930s. Propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, and perversions of truth have become essential aspects of Trump's rage and anger.
The Zeitgeist of that period has been recreated here at home. In 2020, he said outlandish things, warning that Biden would "confiscate your guns" and "destroy your suburbs." He predicted that the economy would sink into a depression worse than the 1930s Great Depression and that the "stock market would crash." He predicted that older Americans would have "no air conditioning during the summer, no heat during the winter, and no electricity during peak hours," and that Inflation wouldn't end.
Trump's ability to project his worst failings onto others is world-class. His confusion while speaking, mixing up names, dates, and events, is astonishing. Still, with few exceptions, media reporters cut him a break by not pointing out the absurdity or lack of truth in what he says. Concurrently, fake media at home and abroad use sophisticated agitprop and falsehoods to support Trump, whom they view as a right-wing partner of Russia, China, and other nations with dictatorial governance.