I have written quite a few posts about Donald Trump. I wrote this one a month after his 2017 inauguration. The second was written almost four years later, after the 2020 elections, when the results were known and the consequences were clear. Today, we are 1.5 years into his second term. Quite fun to re-read something written almost ten years ago.

The blame

This one is about false interpretations. One cannot and should not fight against false interpretations of a novel. A novel cannot be interpreted falsely by definition. But since this one provides a strikingly sharp picture of present anti-Trump hysteria, why not?

Sales of George Orwell’s novel 1984 soared after Donald Trump first took office as president of the USA. If it were only traditional media like The Guardian, The Telegraph, Observer, The Sun, The Washington Post, Independent, The Times of India, USA Today, The New York Times, and many others that would see in this phenomenon a sign of Orwell’s dystopia in Trump, I would call it predictable. But such a comparison also spread on social media. People obviously recognized harsh, direct, and often poorly thought-out language as a repetition of the famous “newspeak” from Orwell’s novel.

A 2025 comment:

Sales of the novel have a solid baseline from 1980 onward, with spikes in 2013 and 2017 and more recently in 2022, most probably due to the Russian war.

No collectivism – no newspeak

At first, when I encountered this misunderstanding, I just shrugged, because it seemed inconceivable to me that anyone could not understand what is described as a serious threat behind the “newspeak” of Orwell. I could not imagine that masses and intellectuals could not understand that newspeak has no power at all if not uttered by a collectivist/totalitarian leader. I could not understand how a sane person could not recognize so many instances of newspeak uttered by various progressive sources. How come they do not understand that it is only a special totalitarian position secured by intellectuals that are always first to support a collectivist dictator, that transforms one particular harmless newspeak into a dystopian one described in 1984?

A 2025 comment:

While Trump’s economic policies oscillate between conservative attempts and mercantilist, progressive measures aimed at protecting the local economy against the same measures other countries, like China, Canada, and Europe, have used to protect their industries in the past, his measures against progressive intellectuals are pretty straightforward. He proved to be as anti-Orwellian as possible.

True collectivists

But then the answer lies in the last sentence itself. Intellectuals who heavily support the newspeak of so many collectivistic institutions like the WHO, IPCC, various churches, and even scientific institutions can not stand the unmasked individualism of Donald Trump. It is a funny paradox that his newspeak has no chance of becoming Orwellian, precisely because the collective of intellectuals and Hollywood will not support his threatening individualism. He cannot, in principle, become an Orwellian character.

We, as human beings, all try to develop newspeak —a discourse, memetic fields — that can reproduce faster, more accurately, and more abundantly than competitors’. We all construct reality with words. Or, to be more accurate, as genes use us for their reproduction and selection of fittest genes, memes use us for similar reproduction on the memetic level. As long as such memes seek support (reproduction) only on a memetic level, even those that contradict reality most cannot cause much harm. It is only when memes are enforced by collective power that 1984 emerges.

A 2025 comment:

No comment.

A weak dictator?

But what about the fact that Trump has the authority to convert memes into actions? Does that not prove that he can make all people think what “his memes” think?

Fortunately not. He can enforce certain memes as laws, but that would influence thinking only if supported by brute force. 

As already said, some institutions fight for humanity in the name of humanity/collective that is trying to achieve such Orwellian dystopia, but not Trump. He said and is saying many nonsenses, uttered many contradictions, and might even enforce some counterproductive laws that would come from his non-diplomatic and often poorly advised memetic environment. Still, such stupidities are not only evolutionarily harmless but predictable and even necessary.

A 2025 comment:

What is seen today is that Trump decided to face the progressive intellectual hysteria with brute force. During his first term, he obviously recognized that it was too late to persuade the communists who had successfully invaded schools, universities, research in the social sciences, multinational organizations, and culture, in accordance with Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony doctrine. So I should rephrase my statement from eight years ago: fortunately, he recognized that some human phenomena cannot be solved memetically.

True dictators

The memetic construction of reality has to be erratic, like the genetic construction of species, which is full of errors. It is the result that proves (or disproves) that memes are synchronized with reality and that genes are winners within surviving species and bodies. In the environment of a free market of memes (or genes), even false ones are harmless. In a forced market like totalitarian speech infringement or collective genetic experiments, only one meme-complex, one gene, becomes a winner. And that is a real threat that the 1984 story is about.

What really frightens me is mass hysteria provoked by intellectuals. I can understand the backlash from traditional media, since they finally realized they no longer hold the power to steer the collective mind as they did before the expansion of social media. But I do not understand Hollywood, scientists, and laypeople. Is their mind really so much infected by collectivist memes that they blame those opposing Orwell’s dystopia as being Orwellian? Apparently, it is.

And this is terrible news for all of us who care about individual freedoms.

A 2025 comment:

The above statement makes sense, but only until a particular agency prevailed so very much that it became institutionalized. The memetic construction of reality in such a case cannot be erratic anymore. When political correctness becomes institutionalized, then errors are taken as criminal offenses. That is precisely the case in the majority of contemporary Western societies. To support “hite” or “chritian” ideology became a criminal offense, not only in the US but in Europe, perhaps even more. Mass hysteria of intellectuals became institutionalized. 

Commentary on November 29th, 2020

After four years of Donald Trump presidency, it is obvious how well aged my post from 2017. Not only could Trump impose his memes in the fashion of 1984, but he even failed to counterbalance the newspeak of the so-called liberal media, Hollywood, and intellectuals. His voice was consistently so basic, so anti-intellectual, so rude, so unflattering, so direct, that we can only define it as a prime example of anti-Orwellian language. 

As it is so often the case, Orwellians win. They blamed Trump for something that they themselves have been committing already, and they will also in the future against anyone who would dare to attack their 1984 empire.

A 2025 reply:

Trump indeed failed to address the progressive disease in his first term. (It is a disease, since it threatens to eradicate a Western civilization.) Let us see what am I going to add after his second term. Looking forward.

•