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Warning: Trump will use Orwell's 1984 'chocolate ration' lie to bamboozle the base [1]

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Date: 2025-05-13

2025

Trump won the presidency partly by promising that tariffs paid for by foreigners would flood the treasury with dollars. He launched his program with initial tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which he soon put on hold. He then rolled out global tariffs on what he trumpeted would be “ Liberation Day .”

The stock market crashed. The money people freaked out. Moreover, even some MAGAs had reservations. So he postponed many of them for 90 days. But left a 145% tariff on the Chinese. Over the weekend, he caved on that and reduced tariffs to 30% — again for 90 days.

Since then, the stock market has recovered some lost ground. The April inflation report showed only modest price increases, and the job market has remained relatively robust .

I expect the administration will use these modest numbers to ‘prove’ that Trump’s handling of the economy is not as disastrous as people had warned. However, that will be pure chutzpah.

That ignores where the economy would have been had he done nothing. The stock markets would have been up — or at least higher than they are now. Job growth may well have been more robust. Moreover, inflation, instead of ticking up, could well have inched down.

More importantly, Trump has caved on most of his tariff promises — probably permanently, now that he has seen the reaction to his numbskull policies from financiers and people who buy things. I bet we hear no more about how tariffs will balance the budget.

He has walked away from one of his headline policies and blown a hole in his fiscal plans. He would sell tax cuts on increased revenue from trade penalties. Now he cannot. But the MAGAs will not hear that. Almost 80 years ago, an iconic author explained how this kind of thing works.

1984

The fundamental theme of George Orwell’s 1984 is how the authorities create a comforting alternate reality to replace the harsh truth. Sometimes it is by simple slogans. For instance, the classic triad:

War is peace

Freedom is slavery

Ignorance is strength

In other cases, the authorities rewrite history to remove inconvenient truths and people and make the present seem consistent with and an improvement over the past.

The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the government agency The Ministry of Truth (Minitrue in Newspeak), which, in Orwellian fashion, is the propaganda agency that creates the lies the state wishes to substitute for the truth.

Note: ‘Newspeak’ is the dumbing down of the English language to make it impossible to express higher or nuanced thought. Moreover, ‘doublethink’ is the ability of the propagandized citizen to hold two mutually contradictory thoughts and believe both to be true.

Which brings us to the chocolate ration in Winston’s home state, Oceania. Economic pressure made it necessary for the authorities to reduce the individual’s chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20. However, Big Brother had previously promised no such thing would happen. What is Minitrue to do? Orwell explains in Part 1, Chapter 4:

“For example, it appeared from The Times of the 17th of March that the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grams to twenty at the end of the present week. […] It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened” (Orwell 39).

Simple enough: Change the past. However, that still leaves the citizen aware that rations were reduced, even if Big Brother’s promise that there would not be a reduction is censored out of the record and replaced with a prediction that it would.

What to do? The answer is obvious. Create ‘alternate facts’. Deny that there was a reduction. As Orwell writes in Part 1, Chapter 5:

“And now, comrades, attention! Attention! The chocolate ration has been increased to twenty grammes a week. Doubleplusgood!” (Orwell 52).

Orwell revisits the technique of denying reality in Part 2, Chapter 5:

“In any case,” she said, “it’s only a few years since they were clapping in the streets at every chocolate ration. Why do they believe it was an increase?” […] “Because they’re told to,” he said” (Orwell 166).

2025

George Orwell wrote 1984 in the aftermath of Nazi propaganda and as people began to understand the true nature of the Soviet Union. However, the authoritarian techniques he outlined remain standard operating procedures for today’s generation of autocrats and dictators.

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