The Orwellian parallels of the Biden-Trump era in America

In the late-1960s I enrolled in a collegiate Comparative Literature class that contrasted George Orwell’s ‘1984’ to the anti-Vietnam rioting and political sentiment at the time. The government control of viewpoints in America, along with surveillance and manipulation of truth, very much resembled Orwell’s masterpiece.  Our government was then engaged in warrantless surveillance of such notables as Martin Luther King Jr., the Beatles John Lennon, and the anti-Vietnam war activists, civil rights leaders, and journalists who were on Lyndon Johnson’s enemies list.  Unarmed kids were shot down at a Kent State war protest in early 1970.

The protagonist of “1984” is Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the fictional Party in the imagined superstate of Oceania. In Oceania the government controls every aspect of life, including what is truth and what memories a citizen is allowed to retain. Merely thinking negative thoughts against the Party was a ‘thoughtcrime’.   Those committing thoughtcrimes were to self-report.  Speaking thoughtcrimes aloud made a citizen a dissenter.  Dissenters could be ‘vaporized,’ meaning an arrest, erasure from existence and the records of their life destroyed.  It was Oceania’s ultimate death penalty.  Winston was part of the Ministry of Truth.  Initially compliant, he begins to rebel as he grows disillusioned with the Party’s oppressive grip.  His primary rebellion was a secret affair with another thought criminal, Julia.

A symbol of the Party’s total control was its manipulation of the chocolate ration. The Oceania government announces a supposed increase in each citizen’s ration, only to reduce it shortly after. This manipulation is the Party’s ability to dictate reality.  To object is to face torture and then to be vaporized.   Citizens accept an untruth to be true without question because that is what they are conditioned to do.  Through relentless propaganda, even the most absurd shifts in policy, — that a smaller chocolate ration is healthier — are accepted truths by the Party.  

In the 2024 campaign, the Democrats called Trump “another Hitler,” and his MAGA followers “garbage”.  While many thought this to be hyperbole, many assumed Trump was another Hitler because that’s what the Democrat Party leaders claimed.  Some GOP personal remarks against Harris labeled her a “DEI hire” and her cackle-like laugh as an “insane Joker laugh.”

To Democrats who never see their party leaders as wrong, along with Trump using billionaire Elon Musk to make drastic cuts in government, why wouldn’t the “Hitler” label take root?   Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced in April 2022 they were creating without congressional authorization, the “Disinformation Governance Board.”  Its purpose was to combat “misinformation.”  Does it sound a bit like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth?

The government, being the Dux Operationum of bad information under Biden, would define misinformation.  Want to guess how the fox would define the henhouse?  Do our duly elected Congresspersons decide now what misinformation is?  How can we count on Congress for the truth when lying is sometimes a redundant bipartisan exercise?  

The idea that an Oceania-like government doesn’t apply to us because we are a two-party nation is folly. Contemporary politics can lead to the same or similar result. For example, during the Biden administration, the forgiveness of approximately $189 billion in student loan debt for 5.3 million borrowers sparked angry debates, especially among those taxpayers who didn’t go to college, and those former college students who repaid their loans.  

In “1984”, the Party rewrites history to maintain power, erasing inconvenient truths and punishing dissent. So did Biden – alleging the eleven millions undocumented persons crossing our porous southern borders didn’t mean the border wasn’t “secure”.   Another modern example or rewritten history is Houston surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim.  Biden’s DOJ alleged Haim disclosed medical HIPPA records of children being secretly and surgically altered as transgender people at a Children’s Hospital.  Haim got the Texas legislature to ban such surgery.  However, Biden’s DOJ did not dismiss the HIPPA litigation against Haim.  Trump had to do it and did.

Political submission in Orwell’s dystopia required all good citizens to refrain from questioning the government.  We’ve seen this preference in both the Biden and Trump administrations.  Questioning Big Brother is tantamount to betrayal. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, critics claimed that Democrats questioning his leadership  or cognitive fitness was damaging the Democratic Party.  Allegations of media bias and selective reporting, being narrative controls, such as portraying Vice President Kamala Harris as a historic and strong candidate even though she had never received a single primary vote for President in 2020 abounded.  Such narrative controls are like Orwellian double-speak crimes.  

The most recent Orwellian logic comes from our neighbor Colorado.  This land of scenic peaks, and legal weed is now, apparently, the latest frontier in experimental authoritarianism.  If a Colorado parent dare raise an eyebrow at a son wanting to be a daughter or refuses to call their child any name not given to the social security administration at the child’s birth, parents are slapped with the label child abuser.  How wonderfully progressive.  There is nothing so Orwellian as to declare parents domestic terrorists.

While Orwell’s Oceania dealt with dissenters by torture and the erasure from history, the Oceania’s Party retaliation is not much different from Hillary Clinton’s claim that fellow Democrat Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian asset during the 2020 Democrat Presidential primary.  While Clinton did not provide evidence for her claim, it was part of a broader effort by Biden’s allies to help Biden’s campaign undermine the more progressive movement within the Party to avoid Mideast wars.

Pardons and the Transfer of Power

Origins of the pardoning power of high government officials are ancient.  Let’s start with Pontius Pilate’s pardon of Barabbas instead of Jesus.  Orwell’s critique of authoritarian systems also applies to the use of executive clemency. On his final day in office, President Biden issued a series of pardons, including to some of his family members and associates, and people with ties to his political network, including figures from his administration. Critics likened this move to shielding allies from scrutiny, raising concerns about the politicization of the clemency power in a manner similar to Orwell’s authoritarian systems, where the Party is always right.

Similarly, when President Trump took office he used his clemency powers to pardon January 6 defendants, highlighting differences in how each administration wielded its authority.  Biden announced his pardons in the last month of his Presidency – indeed, even the last hours of January 19^th.  Nobody knew of his clemency ideas until after the election.  Trump indicated openly and throughout the 2024 election season to whom and why he would issue pardons.  I didn’t like Trump’s pardoning of violent J-6 defendants, but I could see that better than Biden’s reducing death penalty sentences of federal murderers to life in prison – simply because Biden disagreed with federal law.  If Trump’s clemency issues had affected the campaign, Harris would have gotten more votes.  Critics of both presidents argued that these actions exemplified the growing politicization of clemency, further eroding trust in government institutions.

Hoping for a Balanced Future

As 1984 illustrates, and as other American presidencies like John Adams, Woodrow Wilson’s, and LBJ’s have shown, unchecked power leads to government oppression and the erosion of truth.  Biden and Trump are both capable of being listed among these previous Presidents.  In modern America, the polarization of political parties and the weaponization of government agencies risk creating a reality where political goals supersede accountability to the citizens.  Such temptations are found in every government and every president.  Parties face the temptation to rewrite history and settle scores, but the survival of democracy does in fact depend on how well they resist these impulses.  Biden didn’t resist it much.  Trump’s term is into its earliest stages, his end result is still in doubt.

As we’ve seen in the last eight years of Trump 1.0 and Biden, if the feds want to make our lives miserable, they can.  In some of his speeches, Trump in 2024 wants his DOJ to comply with the rule of law.  Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has repeated that mantra.  We’ll see. 

For the foreseeable future—two years at least—Washington is a one-party company town, humming like a well-lit casino where the house always wins. The GOP owns it all: the Senate, the House, the Executive Branch, and Democrats claim the GOP can get the Supreme Court to change the weather on cue.  

Trump opened this term by turning DOGE loose, promising to put Big Government on a crash diet. Great. Fine. Hell yes.  Cut the flab, torch the paperwork, have the Pentagon corral all the lobbyists, line them up along the Potomac, and open fire. But somewhere between the Rose Garden and the Twitter feed, the whole thing came off the rails.  Instead of tightening the screws on his shaky tariff policy or monitoring the twitchy pulse of the stock market, the man is now thinking out loud to the press whether the 22nd Amendment – two term limits for Presidents — actually means what it says. 

Trump has history by the throat if he just sticks to working on bloated agencies and carving the budget like a Thanksgiving turkey.  Trimming the size and expenditures of government would put him on track for sainthood in the Church of Fiscal Responsibility.  No one has balanced a federal budget since Bill Clinton was running the country, and his mind at that time wasn’t entirely on his work.  Only Silent Cal Coolidge, after inheriting Wilson’s post-WWI budget, flat-out reduced the federal budget from $3.1 billion to $2.9 billion.  Coolidge said, “I am for economy. After that, I am for more economy.”  Presidential budget cuts require Congressional support.  Other presidents since Coolidge who tried to cut budgets saw Congress add to them.  Trump’s first term sent a budget to Congress with budget cuts, but Congress failed to enact them, keeping the spending levels up there.

Resisting the temptation to wield the powers of his office and the Department of Justice as instruments of vengeance will not come easily to Mr. Trump.  The resistance against such temptations was nearly nonexistent with Mr. Biden.  The dismantling of bloated budgets and the pruning of unneeded agencies may well define how history remembers Mr. Trump. Unlike Lincoln, Mr. Trump wouldn’t need to win a civil war to get his monument.