‘Dystopia come to life’: How George Orwell wrote the book on Trump’s America

This story is part of the May 17 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

As US Vice President J. D. Vance dressed down European officials over two days in mid-February for criminalising far-right speech, his outrage built to the unkindest cut of all. “This is Orwellian,” he trumpeted, “and everyone in Europe and the US must reject this lunacy.”

A day later, George Orwell reappeared – this time wielded against US President Donald Trump after his truth-mangling suggestion that Ukraine was somehow responsible for Russia’s 2022 invasion. Even a fellow Republican, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, couldn’t resist: “Putin started this war,” he posted on X, adding, “I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

And as Trump unleashed a torrent of norm-puncturing executive orders, so many references to 1984 have flooded the political conversation that it feels as if nearly half the electorate joined the same book group. After the White House took facts on a loop-de-loop, claiming that officials who revealed details of strike plans in Yemen on a Signal chat had not disclosed classified information, hundreds of people posted the same Orwell quote on social media: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” T-shirts with the same line are available on Etsy for as low as $US16. So is one with a fake Orwell quip: “I literally wrote a book to warn you all about this.”

Orwell is the long-dead British writer whom no one will let rest in peace. He remains forever current, thanks to his novels Animal Farm and, especially, 1984, easy-reading teenage favourites: one an animal fable that skewered Stalinist totalitarianism, the other a satire of an all-seeing, all-controlling ruling party epitomised by Big Brother. He was an inveterate democratic socialist, but his writing established him as a champion of fearlessly independent political thought and an enemy of political expression dominated by “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”, as he wrote in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language.

Warnings of language as a weapon of manipulation, obfuscation and oppression run through Orwell’s work. It is a reason you could be excused for hearing real-life echoes of scenes from 1984 emanating from Washington. Trump’s airbrushing of the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol as a “beautiful day” and the pardoning of violent rioters who, he said, had “love in their hearts” recalls one of Orwell’s quotes: “The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.” The bureaucrat who gleefully bragged that “we’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day” could have been deployed at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon on the search-and-delete mission for references to race, but in fact worked at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984.

US Vice President J. D. Vance criticised Europeans as “Orwellian” for criminalising far-right speech.Credit: Getty Images

In 1984, hate binds members of the Party, reinforced with Two Minute Hate sessions aimed at the televised mythical figure “Emanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People”. In the lexicon of Trump, his many enemies – law enforcement, judges, immigrants, the press – are “scum” and “vermin” and, yes, an “enemy of the people”.

Not long ago, it was the political right that was regularly trotting out the tall, gangly socialist. “We are living in Orwell’s 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America.” That was Donald Trump jnr posting on Twitter on January 8, 2021, the day his father was kicked off the platform following the January 6 attack. Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire who bought Twitter and helped fund Trump’s comeback, last year attacked diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying, “Always be wary of any name that sounds like it could come out of a George Orwell book.” That’s the same Elon Musk who now oversees the initiative he calls the Department of Government Efficiency.

So it has come to this. All seem to agree we might be slouching toward 1984, but not on who is most Orwellian. Orwell was indeed prophetic. Including, it seems, about his own legacy. He once wrote about another English writer whose politics have been wrestled over, Charles Dickens. In a 1939 essay, he lauded Dickens as a writer guided by morality and “always on the side of the underdog”. As if writing about the icon he would become, Orwell noted: “Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives.”

This has long been Orwell’s posthumous fate. “He fills a hole for anyone who wants to establish any kind of intellectual pedigree,” says John Rodden, a retired professor who has written extensively on Orwell. It is unlikely Orwell, as a writer of precision, would have approved of being slotted into every hole equally and simultaneously. But perhaps Orwell’s well-turned words have found their moment.

Who was George Orwell?

Orwell died in 1950 at age 46, three weeks before US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech declaring that he had a list of Communist sympathisers in the US State Department, setting off the witch hunts of the 1950s. Rodden points out that it was the first of many tumultuous events that scrambled political alliances and set off debates about who could claim Orwell’s moral authority. Orwell was anti-Communist, but would he have actually condoned McCarthy? Not being around to declare himself on the Cold War, Richard Nixon, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the internet or the Trump years, Orwell was never pigeonholed in the modern era and instead morphed into his very own, very handy adjective. Really, what can’t be deemed Orwellian?

In his book about Orwell’s novel, The Ministry of Truth, the British author Dorian Lynskey writes that 1984 became “shorthand for not just a grim future but also an uncertain present” – which basically covers all eventualities. At one point, the US-based right-wing John Birch Society made 1984 the last four digits of its headquarters’ phone number, while the Black Panthers taught Orwell at their school in Oakland, Lynskey noted.

George Orwell died in 1950, just months after 1984 was published.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Orwell’s applicability across political divisions can be traced partly to the fact that he was an undogmatic thinker, willing to shift his views based on personal experience. The son of a British civil servant in India who himself served as a young man with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, Orwell soured on colonialism and imperialism. A reporting assignment among the British working class helped turn him toward socialism. Even so, for decades after his death, the political right made claims on Orwell based on another ideological transition, this one sparked by his experience in Spain.

He went to Spain in 1936 to join the leftist campaign defending the Popular Front government against the fascist-backed forces led by Francisco Franco. It was a brutal dress rehearsal of sorts for World War II. For Orwell, the drama was twofold: he was shot in the neck and almost died; then Soviet-backed government forces violently turned on Orwell’s militia, with a vicious campaign of propaganda and imprisonment, accusing them of secretly supporting Franco. Orwell fled Spain and the Communists.

That set him apart from his fellow leftists in England. He struggled to find a publisher for his book about Spain, Homage to Catalonia, given its dark portrayal of the anti-Franco forces. He also broke with his pacifist allies on the British left after the 1939 non-aggression pact between the Nazis and the Soviet Union convinced him that England needed to enter the war against fascism. When he wrote Animal Farm during World War II, with Moscow aligned with the West against Germany, Orwell again had trouble finding a willing publisher for his dark take on the Russian Revolution.

A statue of Orwell outside the BBC’s headquarters in London is inscribed with his quote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And he did. He skewered capitalism – he called millionaires “rich swine” – but also took aim at his fellow socialists. His book based on reporting on the working class in England’s coal country contained an analysis of how socialists were out of touch with ordinary workers – a striking echo of a debate in today’s Democratic Party in the US. To many socialists, he wrote, the movement “means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them,’ the Lower Orders”.

This chiding of his political compatriots reflected what Lynskey called Orwell’s “liberal heart and conservative temperament”, which has given people on both the left and the right confidence over the decades that he might have evolved in their direction.

The Ministry of Trump

Though he never visited the US, Orwell’s independent, adaptable views have helped fuel the American version of the parlour game WWOT? – What Would Orwell Think? – which has entered a fresh and heated round.

The first executive order that President Trump signed – just hours after he was sworn in for his second term – was titled Ending the Weaponisation of the Federal Government. “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponisation of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” it read. “Therefore, this order sets forth a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponisation of the Federal Government against the American people.” Clearly, one American person was front of mind: the president himself.

Trump has made little secret that his four criminal indictments, his 34 felony convictions and jury findings that he sexually abused a woman and defamed her, plus his two impeachments, have earned prosecutors a special place in his hate. Rather than ending weaponisation, the order looked more like the beginning of his promised retribution. What followed has been almost daily actions aimed at lawyers, officials or others perceived as being aligned against the president. Security clearances and protections were cancelled for those deemed enemies. Law firms were restricted from government work. Career prosecutors and law-enforcement personnel were fired.

Donald Trump speaks at the headquarters of the Justice Department in March.Credit: AP

On March 14, he angrily vowed revenge when he took the lectern at the US Justice Department, which by long tradition and policies has maintained independence from the White House. It is now headed by three lawyers who served on Trump’s criminal and impeachment defence teams. At the event, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, called Trump “the greatest president in the history of our country” and pointedly said the department operates “at the directive of Donald Trump”.

If that is what Ending the Weaponisation of the Federal Government means, it does resemble the up-is-down doctrines of the mythical Oceania in 1984. “Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts,” Orwell wrote. “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.” One might imagine the president has on his night stand a dog-eared copy of 1984 alongside Project 2025 and The Art of the Deal.

Also on that first day of his second term, Trump signed an order titled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship. It began, “The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.” That robust defence of free speech lasted unchallenged until the afternoon of Inauguration Day, when new executive orders set off the Great Website Scrubbing, deleting words and expressions that might relate to diversity, equity and inclusion or transgender issues. Eventually, hundreds of words were disappearing. (“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” Winston Smith’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth gushes.)

This was before Trump threatened to cut funding to colleges that allow undefined “illegal protests”, or a Columbia student activist was arrested and threatened with deportation for what the government said was protesting in support of terrorism, or the president barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office for not calling a certain body of water by his chosen name.

The fight for the Orwellian high ground on free speech has become a pitched battle. “We are living in a world where the right truly believes that the ‘woke left’ is rewriting reality through its advocacy of trans rights and critical race theory,” says Laura Beers, a professor of history at American University and author of Orwell’s Ghosts. The left, she says, views the Trump administration as “Orwellian dystopia come to life” because “objective realities have increasingly ceased to be relevant, and truth and the law seem to be whatever Trump declares it to be”.

But Beers notes that “there is a huge difference between feeling social pressure to be ‘woke’ and the arm of the state forcibly suppressing speech it doesn’t agree with or punitively defunding institutions with which it disagrees.”

As much as Orwell valued free speech, she says, he valued “true speech” more. Writing during World War II, he noted in an essay called Looking Back on the Spanish War that central to German totalitarianism was a denial “that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists”.

“The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘it never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.”

In 1984, the ultimate power is the power to define truth. And it remains so. Simple arithmetic has not been altered. But the scientific consensus on climate change has melted away. By decree, there are two sexes and two sexes only. Unfavourable press coverage is “corrupt and illegal”. January 6 rioters have been “ruthlessly prosecuted”.

In Washington, there is a march to expand “executive power” – the power of the president – by edict, by threats, by humiliation and by legal theories yet untested. The man who battled the truth to try to stay in office in 2020 is being talked up by supporters for a Constitution-defying third term. As an enforcer for the Party tells a beaten-down and resigned Winston Smith in 1984: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”

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