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Orwell, Trump, and Tariffs [1]
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Date: 2025-05-12
Orwell turns out to have been a prophet after all. My English teacher at South Hills High School in 1969, Mrs. Betty Sloan, nailed it, even though more than half the class was glazed over and didn’t read the book.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'
Trump, in his infinite wisdom and superior intellect, always had this specific plan in mind, to threaten China with 145% tariffs, then to drop that to 85%, brilliantly resulting in China working with Congress negotiating a 90-day delay on these tariffs so they can finally call make a deal with the His Majesty the great and powerful leader and superior deal-maker, the proclaimed king of cheap bronzer himself, Trump.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Trump didn’t cave! He was always planning to push the overwhelming tariff percentage until a ‘concept of a deal’ was proclaimed. American industry was never harmed with these wonderful tariffs! Prices will be lower and the shelves will be full! Americans and American industry will be winners! New factories will open in weeks! Jobs will be plentiful! Credit rates will plunge and we’ll all be happy and rich forever!
And there we have it: the lie becomes truth, and just in case any of us dare to say otherwise, well, they’re quite willing to suspend habeas corpus.
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(Of course this is nothing at all new, repeated throughout history; Mrs. Sloan was teaching in the time of Nixon’s lies about Vietnam and his obsession that the global communist conspiracy was behind every political comment that didn’t support his “policies” and lies. After all, many of us in her class were just a year away from our draft notice and she was old enough to have been an adult during WWII and Korea.)
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