Orwell’s prescient description in his book ‘1984’

To the editor,

In a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention on July 24, 2018, President Trump famously — or notoriously — said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Trump and his sycophants in the White House and in Congress want us not to believe what we saw happening in real time on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists attacked police officers and invaded the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump wants you to believe that all those insurrectionists were “extremely loving and friendly people,” patriots who were simply displaying their love for their country and their fellow Americans and “did nothing wrong.” He wants you to believe that it was a day of peace, “a beautiful day.”

Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, too, does not want us to believe what we are seeing with our own eyes in real time and in video recordings and reading in reports from highly reputable sources. At a congressional hearing on June 3, 2026, Rubio denied that he had ever seen President Trump sleeping at cabinet meetings, even while California Congressman Ted Lieu showed several videos in which Trump did appear to be sleeping. Similarly, at those same hearings, Rubio rejected findings by public health researchers and humanitarian organizations that hundreds of thousands of deaths have been associated with the disruption of humanitarian aid. Although on May 21, 2025, at another congressional hearing, Rubio asserted that “no one has died” as a result of the cutoff of humanitarian aid, journalists and many others have seen with their own eyes the deaths from disease or starvation of children and mothers in African nations whose lives could have been saved if humanitarian aid had still been in place.

These words from the novel “1984,” by George Orwell, might have been written today about the attempts by Trump and his minions in the White House and Congress to destroy the concept of truth:

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable — what then?”

MIRIAM LEVINE
HELBOK