Orwellism and Trump

I. Dorian Lynskey, "The Ministry of Truth," Doubleday, 2019.
p. 261 - "Donald Trump is no Big Brother. Nor, despite his revival of such toxic phrases as 'America First' and 'enemy of the people,' is he simply a throwback to the 1930s. He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the  discipline , intellect or ideology. A more apt comparison from the real world is Joseph McCarthy, and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him."

"During Trump's campaign against Hilary Clinton it was hard to watch the candidate whipping supporters into a cry of 'Lock her up!' without being reminded of the 'Two Minute Hate' and Orwell's description of the Party mindset: 'continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories and self-abasement of the Party.' Trump's slogan, ' Make America Great Again,' calls to mind Orwell's reference to a hundred percent Americanism. The president meets most of the criteria of Orwell's 1944 definition of fascism: something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist.' "

"Orwell contended that such men can only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy citizens' need for justice, security and self-worth, but Trump's victory required one more special ingredient. He did not seize power through a revolution or coup. He was not potentialed (sic) by a recession or a terrorist atrocity, let alone a nuclear war or a fertility crisis. His route to the White House passed through America's Versionland."

"The consequences of so many Americans' abdication from reality has been disastrous, During the 2016 election campaign, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, flooded social media with fake news stories designed to generate confusion, cynicism and division. One of the memes read: 'The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.' "

p. 263 - "America's epistemological crisis was Trump's golden opportunity. He could only win the 2016 election because a significant number of Americas were effectively living in a parallel reality."

p. 264 - "It is truly Orwellian that the phrase 'fake news' has been turned on its head by Trump and his fellow authoritarians to describe real news that is not to his liking, while flagrant lies become 'alternative facts.' " "Trump creates his own reality and measures his power by the number of people who subscribe to it: the cruder the lie, the more power its success demonstrates. Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani accidentally provided a crude motto for Versionland USA when he snapped at an interviewer, 'Truth isn't truth!' " "During a speech in July 2018, Trump himself said: 'What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.' Another line from 'Ninety Eighty-Four' went viral -- a real one this time: 'The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.'  "

p. 265 - "At the end of Trump's first week in office, the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik apologized for previously thinking that Orwell's warning was too crude for the modern world: 'One is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism -- and that it was essential that it rests on lies told so often and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous, but more exhausting then repeating it... People aren't meant to believe it; they're meant to be intimidated by it. The lie is not a claim about specific facts; the lunacy is a deliberate challenge to the whole larger slice of sanity.' " 

II. Trump's Executive Order On Jewishness
American Jews are not and have never been a nation unto themselves. They are an ethnic group within this republic. Classifying political speech about Jews according to national origin is confusing, unclear, and really scary. Trump has very little understanding that being against a policy of the Israeli government is not de facto anti-Semitism.

It is easy to envision a situation in which legitimate criticism of Israel,including criticism by Jews, is determined to be  anti-Semitic, and could risk the funding of the very institutions we need in order to foster productive discourse. Colleges that do have these conversations are likely destined to become Israeli ones, but making Jews a separate nationality doesn't help the cause. Grouping Jews as no other religious group has been in this country, making Jews clearly "dual citizens," raises the trope of dual loyalty.

The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement that has    generated intense controversy on college campuses. Title VI bans discrimination on race, color or national origin in programs and activities for which colleges and universities receive  federal funding. Trump's executive order will extend the ban on funding to discrimination based on anti-Semitism.

The left-leaning Jewish group, J-Street, said in a statement that the order "appears less designed to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech and to crack own on campus critics of Israel. We feel it is misguided and harmful for the White House to unilaterally declare a broad range of nonviolent campus criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic, especially at a time when the prime driver of anti-Semitism in this country is the xenophobic, white nationalist far-right."

Even James Loeffler, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, who generally supports the Trump action, says: "Everyone recognizes that Jews are a complicated amalgam of ethnicity and religion, and treating them as a kind of quasi-racial group can have negative consequences." Professor Loeffler shares the concerns of those who believe the executive order could be used to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those who would voice controversial political speech about Israel and the Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He says: "Clearly, given the administration's political position on this issue, it's not unrealistic to see this as coming out of that context." 

ADDENDUM:
*President Trump told the American Israeli Council: "A lot of  you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're  brutal killers, not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me -- you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas. I can tell you that. You're not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away!"