Election Entertainment

   How a decade of political doublespeak has been rehearsing a future the novelist warned us about. D onald Trump almost certainly never read Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems safe to say, as many observers have, that the novel's more nuanced warnings never found their way to his desk. And yet the decades he spent on the political stage suggest that the lessons George Orwell encoded in that dystopian masterwork were absorbed not from the page but from experience—from watching how language, power, and public memory evolve in the hands of those who understand their value. The comparison is not simply about mendacity. Politicians have always lied. What Orwell diagnosed—and what makes his novel feel less like prophecy than mirror—was something more structural: the deliberate erosion of language as a medium of shared reality. That is a different thing, and a far more dangerous one. Consider the arc from President Kennedy to President George W. Bush, and then from ...