Two plus two does not equal five
No matter what President Trump says
As the House impeachment hearings came to a close, I felt they grew increasingly surreal. Indeed, in a case of life imitating art, I thought the Republican defense of the president seemed to come out of the pages of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
In particular, when Ambassador Gordon Sondland said he “surmised,” based on the logic of 2+2=4, that President Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into the 2016 elections, the President’s defenders that seemed to insist instead that 2+2=5.
This preposterous and infamous equation is a central theme of “1984” voiced early in the novel when the protagonist fears that Big Brother would eventually “announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” And I couldn’t help but feel a similar fear as I listened to the president’s defenders disregard not only the president’s own words in the transcript of his conversation with the Ukrainian President but also the corroborating testimony of Ambassador Bill Taylor, Ambassador Kurt Volker, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and State Department official David Holmes.
Further, the Republican repetition of what top Russia advisor Fiona Hill testified were “false narratives” created by Russian intelligence in which “truth is questioned” seemed the equivalent of propagating that 2+2=5.
It seems that Trump wants nothing less than to rewrite the facts of the 2016 election to sway the 2020 election his way. By pushing “false narratives,” he attempts to cast himself as the victim of Ukrainian meddling on behalf of Democrats and to deny being the beneficiary of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. And the power to revise the past is precisely what Orwell feared: “Who controls the past controls the future.”
By controlling information, Big Brother revises the past, dictates the present, shapes “reality” and ultimately controls his subjects/citizens. In 1984, this propaganda technique is fittingly called “reality control.” Trump’s declaration of war on the media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” certainly seems one such attempt to control information.
Trump, similarly, resorts to what his counselor Kellyanne Conway coined as “alternate facts.” Trump even explained his strategy to overturn reality to his biographer, Michael D’Antonio: If “you stay with a position long enough, there’s a very good chance it would become correct.”
This propaganda technique explains Trump’s repetitive claim of a “perfect call” when he attempted to trade military aid for dirt on his political opponent; his brokenrecord claim of “hoax” and “witch hunt” to deny factual evidence and testimony in both the Mueller investigation and the impeachment hearings; his unsupported “deep state” conspiracy theories; and his bogus insistence that Ukraine interfered on behalf of the Democrats in the 2016 election.
In other words, Trump uses his high office to dictate a reality in which lies are truth. For example, at his political rallies, the president encourages supporters to chant, “Lock her up,” and “Send her back” against political opponents accused of imaginary crimes. In a chilling parallel, Big Brother uses the same tactic in “The TwoMinute Hate,” a rally during which citizens vent their frustrations and hatred upon a chosen “enemy.”
But the most incredible irony of Trump’s presidency imitating Orwell’s art is that Orwell’s novel is a cautionary tale to Western democracies about Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union. But now Orwell’s greatest fear may be realized, through a leader of the free world who believes in the “false narratives” propagated by a Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin.
Toward the end of “1984,” the novel’s protagonist says he doubts he can believe the absurdity of 2+2=5. But he’s told, “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
Although I suspect that the president’s defenders don’t really believe his lies — that they’re actually motivated by political expedience or angry contrariness — I do think (and you can call me insane) that anyone who does believe in Trump’s selfserving reality also believes that 2+2=5.