Donald Trump is doing anything he can to hold on to his base ― even employing propaganda tricks straight out of 1984.
On Tuesday, the President spoke at a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Kansas City and told his followers to forget about anything else other than what he tells them.
“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” he said.
The line fits with other famous lines of purposeful deception, such as Obi-Wan Kenobi’s “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” in “Star Wars: A New Hope,” and the Wizard of Oz’s admonition, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
However, ThinkProgress chillingly notes that Trump’s demand directly correlates to the “final, most essential command” of the ruling totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984: “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
Trump decided to jump headfirst into that belief by telling the crowd, “We don’t apologize for America anymore. We stand up for America. We stand up for the patriots who defend America.”
Jake Tapper noted on Twitter that those comments came eight days after he blamed the U.S. for poor relations with Russia.
When Trump wasn’t engaging in what the novel calls “newspeak,” he lashed out at the media in attendance.
“Don’t believe that crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he said.
Trump then called CNN “the worst,” and accused NBC of having its reporting created “by the lobbyists and by the people that they hire.”
You can see the segment below:
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the name of the language used by the state of Oceania in the novel 1984. It is called newspeak, not truthspeak.