Donald Trump and the Orwellian Mirror: Doublethink, Big Brother, and the Erasure of Truth
George Orwell’s 1984 paints a world where truth is a malleable tool, wielded by the Party through slogans like "War is Peace," the omnipotent figure of Big Brother, and the systematic erasure of "unpeople" down the "Memory Hole" (Orwell, 1949). As Donald Trump steers his second term in March 2025, his administration’s policies - spanning immigration, foreign relations with Israel and Russia, and the rewriting of historical narratives - mirror these dystopian mechanisms. From deporting millions to cementing Israel’s carte blanche, brokering a sham ‘ceasefire’ with Putin, and scrubbing marginalized groups from history, Trump’s governance prioritizes projection over reality, bending facts until they align with his image. This article explores how Trump embodies Orwell’s warnings, reshaping truth to serve power.
Doublethink: War is Peace in Trump’s World
In 1984, doublethink allows the Party to hold contradictory beliefs: war as peace, ignorance as strength, and enforce them as truth (Orwell, 1949, p. 35). Trump’s foreign policy reflects this paradox with striking clarity. Take the Russia-Ukraine conflict: on March 18, 2025, Trump held a 90-minute call with Vladimir Putin, emerging to claim a "ceasefire" breakthrough (Sky News, 2025). Yet the agreement was flimsy: Putin committed only to a 30-day pause on attacks against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, not a full ceasefire, and demanded an end to Western military aid, a condition Kyiv rejects. Within hours, 45 Russian drones struck Kyiv and a hospital in Sumy, where over 100 patients had to be evacuated (The Guardian, 2025). Trump’s response? Silence. This is doublethink incarnate: peace is trumpeted as bombs fall; a victory proclaimed over a reality of violence. Ukraine faces territorial losses: Crimea, Donbas, and potentially more under Putin’s terms, yet Trump will likely sell this capitulation as a diplomatic masterstroke, reshaping defeat into triumph.
Yemen offers another lens. Trump, who campaigned in 2024 on ending "endless wars," now oversees intensified U.S. strikes against Houthi targets. BBC News reported fresh airstrikes in Yemen on 16 March which reportedly killed 53 people, including 5 children (BBC News, 2025.) In his 2024 election victory speech, Trump proclaimed, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” J.D. Vance declared Trump to be the “candidate of peace” (Counterfire, 2024.) The contradiction is jarring: a peacemaker presiding over war, his rhetoric clashing with reality. The U.S. justifies these strikes as counterterrorism, tied to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, but Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the bloodshed mirrors Orwell’s paradox. War is peace when the narrative demands it.
Israel completes the trifecta. Trump has never criticized Israel, with Benjamin Netanyahu saying about Trump, “You are the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House” (The Times of Israel, 2025.) The U.S. supplied $4 billion in military aid in 2025, including precision-guided munitions used in a March 15 Gaza airstrike that killed 400 Palestinians (US Department of State, 2025). Trump claims to broker peace, yet his administration’s self-proclaimed unwavering support enables Israel’s escalations. This is doublethink: backing war while claiming harmony, a narrative sustained by erasing inconvenient facts, such as 1.9 million displaced Palestinians (Human Rights Watch, 2024.)
Big Brother’s Fluid Alliances: Enemies and Friends Rewritten
Orwell’s Big Brother rewrites history to suit shifting alliances: an enemy becomes an ally, and the past adjusts accordingly (Orwell, 1949, p. 78). Trump’s relationship with Putin exemplifies this fluidity. Since his first term, he has avoided condemning Putin, famously praising him as "very, very strong” at the 2018 Helsinki summit (CNN, 2018). For reasons such as this, concerns surrounding Trump’s involvement with Moscow persist, as discussed in our previous article, ‘The Art of the Steal: The Illusion of Independence and the Reality of Russian Ties.’ The March 18 call underscores the apparent power balance of the Putin-Trump special relationship: Putin dictated terms - a 30-day energy pause, no Western aid to Ukraine - while Trump apparently agreed to an ice hockey game between American and Russian players, according to the Kremlin (Reuters, 2025). This bizarre flourish distracts from the reality: Ukraine’s sovereignty erodes, and Russia, once a Cold War adversary, is recast as a partner. The Sumy bombing hours later, exposed the ‘ceasefire’ as a sham, yet Trump’s narrative holds: peace through alignment with a dictator.
Domestically, Trump’s administration rewrites history with equal zeal. In March 2025, the Pentagon removed references to Navajo Code Talkers - Navajo whose native language was encoded in WWII and thwarted Japanese intelligence - from military websites, part of a broader rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs (Axios, 2025). The Tuskegee Airmen and servicemen from 761st Tank Battalion, Black units that defied segregation to win key battles, have seen their mentions scrubbed from service records and military archives (For the Win, 2025). This aligns with Trump’s push for a unified, less diverse American story, erasing contributions that challenge a sanitised past. Critics see Orwellian intent: these groups, once celebrated, are now "unpeople," their legacies vanished as if they never existed.
Unpeople: Immigrants and the Memory Hole
In 1984, "unpeople" are those the Party expunges - physically removed, historically erased (Orwell, 1949, p. 46). Trump’s immigration policies cast millions in this role. Since January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched a deportation campaign targeting undocumented immigrants, aiming to remove them within four years (US Department of Homeland Security, 2025.) Trump’s rhetoric fuels visceral fears of immigrants: at numerous rallies in the lead-up to the 2024 election, he called immigrants "blood thirsty criminals," “the most violent people on earth” and that some migrant groups are genetically predisposed to committing crimes (Politico, 2024.) This is a dehumanizing echo of Big Brother’s propaganda.
This erasure extends to legal immigrants. In March 2025, Trump threatened to revoke Temporary Protected Status for 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s invasion, reversing Biden-era protections (Forbes, 2025). Once welcomed, they face expulsion, their presence retroactively delegitimized. These shifts render them "unpeople," their contributions - work, home lives, community ties - erased, history rewritten to suggest they were always outsiders.
Conclusion: Orwell’s Warning in Action
Ultimately, Trump thrives on projection. The Ukraine ‘ceasefire’ is a win in headlines, not reality; deportations ‘cleanse’ America in speeches, not fact; historical erasures craft a past that never was. Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past" (Orwell, 1949, p. 44). Trump’s Memory Hole swallows immigrants, Navajo Code Talkers, and Ukraine’s agency. His truth - peace through war, purity through expulsion - prevails by erasing what doesn’t fit.
Trump’s second term is 1984 in practice: doublethink sells war as peace, Big Brother rewrites alliances, and unpeople vanish. Whether calculated or instinctive, this Orwellian mirror poses a challenge: can a public drowned in manipulated narratives still see reality? As Yemen bleeds, Sumy burns, and immigrants fade, the answer hangs in the balance, but the parallels are chillingly clear. Orwell warned of a world where truth becomes whatever the Party says it is, a prophecy Trump seems to fulfil with every airstrike framed as peace, every deportation as purification, every rewritten history as gospel. His legacy may not just be policy, but a template: power through perception, reality optional.
This dystopia isn’t abstract. The Sumy hospital’s ruins, the Navajo Code Talkers’ vanishing citations, the immigrant families torn apart. They’re tangible, documented, yet subsumed by Trump’s narrative machine. In 1984, the Party’s strength lay in its monopoly on truth; Trump’s lies in his ability to make truth irrelevant. The ice hockey game with Russia, absurd yet symbolic, captures this: a distraction, a projection, a rewrite of war into sport. If Orwell feared a future where facts bowed to power, Trump’s America suggests it’s already here, not through totalitarian control, but through a relentless flood of half-truths and erasures that drown out dissent. The Memory Hole isn’t a furnace; it’s a news cycle, a rally chant, a policy shift. And as long as the public accepts - or simply tires of resisting - the Orwellian mirror reflects not just Trump, but us.
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