How Trump turned COVID into an Orwellian nightmare

Stephen H. Provost is a former newspaper editor, columnist and reporter. He’s the author of two books about Donald Trump: “Political Psychosis” and “Media Meltdown.” Both are available on Amazon.

There’s a narrative out there that Donald Trump lied to the American people about COVID-19 but told the truth, behind closed doors, to Bob Woodward.

But that’s not the case: He lied to Woodward, too.

Trump told the American people that COVID wasn’t a problem. Then, when it became clear that it was, he said it would miraculously disappear. That didn’t happen, either, although Trump has done his best to pretend that it has. And he’s endangered thousands of people in the process, by holding socially intimate rallies and condoning maskless mingling.

Doublethink

Denial is Trump’s stock in trade. But this goes beyond denial: It’s what George Orwell called “doublethink” — inducing his followers to accept clearly false statements. And not just accept them, enthusiastically endorse them.

“If one is to rule, and to continue ruling,” Orwell writes, “one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.”

In Orwell’s 1984, it gets as blatant as asserting that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. In Trumpworld, it means declaring that POWs aren’t war heroes, bankruptcies are a mark of success, refusing to pay taxes is a virtue, and clean energy is a threat to the environment (all those bird-killing windmills). It means “no one has been tougher on Russia” than Trump, the man who repeatedly excuses and enables Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.

But COVID provides the most blatant, and deadly, example.

In Trump’s alternate reality, the world’s most disastrous COVID response has, somehow, been the best. The math there is positively Orwellian. Instead of asserting that 2 + 2 = 5, he maintains that the millions of COVID cases and 200,000 deaths add up to success.

Roy Cohn

Trump didn’t learn this diabolical technique from Orwell, though. He got it from lawyer Roy Cohn.

Before becoming Trump’s mentor, Cohn made (and tainted) his reputation by defending Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It was McCarthy who ruined the lives and careers of American actors, writers and other artists after World War II with baseless claims that they were communist sympathizers.  

One of Cohn’s core principles was: “No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.”

In other words, losing equals winning. You can’t get more Orwellian than that… unless you’re Donald Trump, who actually lied to Bob Woodward about lying. He’s asserted, without blinking, that both his lie and his lie about the lie were true.

Lies about lies

Trump told Woodward, the author and Watergate investigator, that he’d downplayed the severity of the COVID threat intentionally, because he doesn’t want Americans to panic.

That was a lie.

This is a man who not only tolerates panic; he welcomes and embraces it. We should panic, he says, because Democrats want to destroy the suburbs, and protesters are really just out to loot and burn businesses. We should panic about mobs of immigrants marching toward the southern border — rapists and drug dealers and gang members who pose an existential threat to the “American way of life.” In the Deep South, circa 1950. Or 1850.

The difference: These accusations, like those made by Joseph McCarthy, aren’t rooted in reality; the coronavirus threat is. It’s not that Trump doesn’t want people to panic. He wants precisely that. But he wants them to panic over false threats — so they’ll ignore the real ones.

Panic isn’t something Trump wants to avoid: It’s his stock in trade.

And it works — at least with his base. Pew research found in August 2020 that Trump supporters are more likely to worry about violent crime than Biden backers, 74% to 46%, and the gap was even wider when it came to COVID: 82% of Biden supporters said it was a big issue, but only 39% of Trumpers did.

Trump as Big Brother

Trump’s gaslighting of his base, his ability to get them to believe him rather than their own eyes and ears, is so Orwellian, it’s uncanny. Consider these quotes from 1984.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” (That’s not the future for us, it’s the present: George Floyd.)

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” (There’s good reason to believe that Trump believes his own B.S. as a means of protecting his own massive ego.)

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” (If you say something’s tremendous often enough, people will start to believe it.)

“In the face of pain, there are no heroes” (an excuse to denigrate John McCain?).

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing” (the process by which he persuaded Republicans to abandon their principles for the sake of that power, while setting himself up as its purveyor).  

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” (Evidence means nothing; objective truth doesn’t exist, so lies can be substituted with impunity.)

Jim Jones redux

Trump isn’t the second coming of Hitler so much as he’s a wannabe Big Brother, and for 40 percent of the nation, he’s become just that.

He’s Jim Jones — remember him? The narcissistic, homicidal preacher whose faux populism led him to christen his so-called church “The Peoples Temple.”

Imagine Jones, resurrected and brought back from Guyana, then unleashed on a national scale. Instead of serving poison punch to kill 900 people, he’s served up lies about COVID-19 that caused thousands upon thousands of deaths.

He’s serving us all Kool-Aid, but unlike Jones, he’s developed his own natural immunity to it. He’s lied so often, he’s become the lie that can destroy us.