In George Orwell’s classic, the proles swallowed up all the newspeak propaganda from Big Brother, and Brian Reade fears too many people today are falling for the US president’s blatant reality twisting
This week may have seen Europe engulfed in an existential crisis but at least it gave us the Phrase of the Year.
I doubt anything uttered in 2025 will carry the same weight as the words Volodymyr Zelensky used to define where Donald Trump’s mind resides: in a “disinformation space”.
Because it’s not just the US President whose brain can only function when fuelled by fantasy. Take the falsehoods about Zelensky being a dictator who started the war with Russia, which drew the Ukrainian leader’s ire.
Everyone paying the slightest attention knew instantly that Trump was spouting Putin’s perverted narrative yet Boris Johnson leapt to his defence by claiming that his one-time pal’s outbursts “are not intended to be historically accurate”.
So, we had a pathological liar covering for a pathological liar who was regurgitating the worldview of a pathological liar. And the millions who share the same politics as these current, or former, leaders of Britain, America and Russia buy into it without question.
Fiction is now the new truth. Not since Nazi fake news generator Joseph Goebbels claimed that, “if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, have we seen reality-twisting so blatantly employed. And it feels as bizarre as it is dangerous. Because the lies are being peddled, embraced and regurgitated with utter conviction.
Trump’s Toady-In-Chief, Elon Musk, backed up his master by telling millions on his platform X that “despised dictator” Zelensky ran a “massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers”.
On Tuesday’s Newsnight, Victoria Derbyshire asked Carla Sands, a former Trump ambassador to Denmark now VP of the America First Policy Institute, how the president’s deputy, JD Vance, had the gall to talk about the collapse of free speech in Britain at the same time as cuddling up to Putin who jails anyone who speaks against him.
She replied: “There are more people in jail in the UK because they spoke what they thought was right than there are in Russia.” The entire BBC studio burst into laughter but I just went cold.
Because I’m currently re-reading George Orwell’s 1984 and I can’t recall feeling more in the world that he prophesied. One that communicates in “doublethink” and where the “proles” swallow all the “newspeak” propaganda from Big Brother.
Nobody is immune from living in a disinformation space as we know in Britain, where our country’s economic prosperity has nosedived thanks to the liars who sold a false Brexit. But Trump is taking lying to a different, terrifying level.
This week’s uncritical backing of the murderous dictator Putin, who only last week was a pariah among Free World nations, prompted euphoria among pro-Kremlin propagandists with TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov arguing “why not create a military coalition of Russia and America and divide Europe to hell?”
Probably the most chilling reality is that nobody is allowed to speak truth to Trump’s power for fear of being punished.
Keir Starmer flies to Washington next week, apparently in the hope of acting as a bridge between America and Europe. With past presidents that may have been feasible.
With Trump, being a bridge means laying down and letting him walk all over you. Which, out of fear of being ostracized and punished, Starmer will no doubt do.
Sadly, that’s no lie.
