Orwell in the Age of Trump
What 1984 Can Still Teach Us
I’ve recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s bleak and brilliant vision of a society where truth itself becomes a casualty of power. What struck me this time wasn’t only the imagery — the telescreens, the Party slogans, the suffocating atmosphere — but how disturbingly close so much of it feels to our present moment. It’s tempting to ask the obvious question: if Orwell were alive today, watching the Trump presidency unfold, what would he make of it?
The easy answer is to say, “This is Orwellian.” And in some ways it is. But I think Orwell would push us further. He would not be satisfied with a label. He would ask what lies beneath the spectacle: how is language being twisted, how is memory being reshaped, and what does this do to ordinary human beings trying to make sense of their world?
Orwell wrote 1984 in 1947–48, isolated on the remote island of Jura, gravely ill yet determined to finish what he knew would be his last novel. The world around him seemed to be sliding into a new kind of danger. Stalin’s Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe; Mao’s revolution was about to transform China; fascism was still a fresh wound; and even in the supposedly free West, wartime rationing, censorship, and conformity lingered. He feared that totalitarian methods — propaganda, surveillance, the manipulation of memory — might become the default machinery of modern politics. 1984was not a prophecy but a warning: “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
That warning still resonates. If we look at today’s world, the techniques Orwell described are on display in different forms. In Russia, Vladimir Putin floods the public sphere with disinformation and rewrites national history to legitimise his rule. In China, Xi Jinping has fused digital surveillance with Party orthodoxy to tighten ideological control. In North Korea, Kim Jong-un presides over a hereditary cult of personality where every scrap of reality is bent around the ruling family. And in the United States, Donald Trump has shown how even in a democracy, truth itself can be destabilised by sheer repetition, by branding unfavourable facts as “fake news,” by creating a reality tailored to followers’ loyalties.
Of course, there are differences. Stalin and Mao relied on one-party states and secret police. Xi commands the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in history. Trump, by contrast, relied on social media, rhetorical assault, and a cult of personality rather than institutional control. Yet the underlying impulse is familiar: to undermine independent sources of truth until only the leader’s version remains credible.
Why do leaders do this? Orwell would remind us that it is never just about one thing. For some, the motive is survival: control the narrative and you remove threats. For others, it is ego: the need to appear infallible, to see one’s reflection in history. Sometimes it is dogma: the Party’s mission defines reality, and truth must be adjusted to fit. And often it is also about money and influence, since bending reality can protect networks of wealth and patronage. Whatever the mix, the effect is the same: language and memory become battlefields, and human beings are left unsure of what is real.
There is, in this, a kind of playbook. Control the media. Undermine the courts. Capture the security forces. Rewrite the past. Flood the present with propaganda. We see versions of these moves in dictatorships and in democracies under strain. In closed regimes, they are applied bluntly and systematically. In open societies, they appear more piecemeal — lawsuits against journalists, endless attacks on judges, the weaponisation of social platforms. But the endgame is similar: weaken the guardrails of truth so that power faces fewer obstacles.
And yet Orwell would also insist on something else: resistance is possible. 1984 is terrifying, but it is not hopeless. The very act of remembering, of speaking plainly, of insisting on evidence, is a form of rebellion. What gives the novel its enduring power is not only the horror of Big Brother but Winston Smith’s stubborn need to believe that two plus two makes four, that the past is not infinitely malleable, that love and human decency still matter.
So what would Orwell make of Trump, or Putin, or Xi, or Kim? I think he would see them as different manifestations of the same danger he warned us about in 1949: the temptation to bend reality until power defines truth. But he would also remind us that the antidote is still within reach. Clarity of language. Honesty of memory. The courage to see what is in front of our eyes and to say it out loud.
Orwell wrote against time, knowing he might not live to see the impact of his work. He died in January 1950, just months after 1984 was published. But his warning outlived him. If we take it seriously, it is not simply to say “Trump is Orwellian.” It is to recognise the pattern, in every place it appears, and to defend the fragile human thread that Orwell believed was still worth saving.