Entering the reality-distortion zone
Trump's truth-scrapping efforts reach deep
George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984” had a peculiar mission. Its job was not to spread truth at all, but rather to insure that history and current information aligned with the views and goals of the infallible Big Brother and his ruling party. When reality differed, the descriptions and accounts had to be bent accordingly.
Echoes of that approach abound today, it seems.
Take, for instance, what Washington, D.C. looks like. The district that Donald J. Trump sees is a dystopian spectacle of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” The capital, he tells us, has been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” along with “drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”
Presumably, the president is not referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob he incited at the Capitol or to the current mostly supine GOP members of Congress and the Senate. Certainly, he’s not referring to the district crime rates as reported by its police.
If one looks at the D.C. police reports, violent crime in the capital is dropping. Homicides fell 32 percent in the district between 2023 and 2024, to 187 last year, the lowest tally since 2019. And the murder rate is down again about 11 percent this year, with 100 recorded so far. Indeed, per capita, D.C. doesn’t even crack the list of the 30 most dangerous cities in the U.S.
To Trump, as with Big Brother and other would-be tyrants, however, reality is not what data tells us. It is, instead, what Trump conjures up in his own mind. Indeed, independently developed data is, to him, an inconvenience that should be suppressed. And incendiary language must reflect the reality of his fevered imagination.
Independent information gets in the way of Trump’s efforts to dispatch federal troops to whatever scene he deems appropriate, for instance. Thus, immigration is an “invasion” a term that justifies the development of detention camps and roundups on the streets by masked authorities. Thus, military forces can be stationed on Los Angeles streets to suppress a “rebellion,” even if a major general involved doesn’t seem to see that.
And independently generated data gets in the way of Trump’s vision of an economy now on the way to a “golden age.” When a Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggested that hiring slowed in July and was weaker than expected in the prior two months, Trump took umbrage at the figures and so fired the bureau director. He moved to install a Heritage Foundation lackey who has suggested deep-sixing monthly jobs reports and presumably will generate shinier numbers.
When people outside of government, moreover, don’t sing his tune, Trump argues for finding new crooners. Thus, he now is pressuring Goldman Sachs to can Jan Hatzius, the firm’s longtime chief economist whose views on the economy-draining effects of tariffs mirror those of many other economists. Trump took to Truth Social to say that firm chief executive David Solomon should “go out and get himself a new Economist.”
Reality bending by Trump and his minions entered a new realm with the president’s deployment of 800 National Guards in D.C. and his seizure of the police department there, as well as his attack on the nation’s preeminent Wall Street firm. These big stretches by Trump could amount in the end to little more than headline-grabbing stunts designed to distract us from the ways his staffers are burying Epstein scandal information.
But Trump’s deflection and misinformation efforts aren’t all that new. Consider the administration’s moves to rewrite American history in national parks and historic sites with a March executive order mandating that such sites not “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” but instead emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”
No matter whether it’s true or not, unflattering information is not welcome in the America Trump is making great again.
And this reality-twisting, whether economic or cultural, seems likely only to deepen. The White House now plans to review exhibits by the Smithsonian Institution to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” as one lickspittle wrote. The effort will “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”
Propaganda, in other words.
One can only wonder how this will play out in a couple Smithsonian facilities that have been more thorough in efforts to fully describe our history, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian. Administrators may be hard-pressed to find a lot uplifting about the nation’s earliest years regarding Blacks and Native Americans, though they will surely be pushed to do so.
Of course, reality distortion is a familiar tack for many Trump toadies. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claims that Trump’s White House is the “most transparent in history.” So why, one wonders, is that White House removing transcripts of Trump’s comments from an official database – which would allow historians and others to easily check his tortured words against reality -- and instead is posting limited numbers of videos?
Writing as Orwell, BBC producer Eric Arthur Blair published “1984” in 1949. Blair was appalled by the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But his fictional “Oceania,” the superstate that was home of the Ministry of Truth, included the Americas and the British isles.
Some 76 years on, at least one political leader seems to be doing his best to make Orwell’s vision a reality — of sorts.
Good column, Joe! In a conversation with my bestie, who lives in San Francisco, right after Trump called in the National Guard, I asked her, "Do you get this? I mean, I get the ICE thing — round up all the nonwhite people and put them in cages — but what's this about?" And my bestie said, "Honey, this is about exactly the same thing."