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The definition of "power" in America today is best encapsulated by a sentence written 70 years ago: This sentence was written by an Englishman named Eric Arthur Blair, who had

found some success several years earlier with the publication of a scathing anti-Communist barnyard allegory that he published under the pseudonym George Orwell. His new dystopia —

terrifyingly explored in _1984_ — was not aimed at a political party in particular (contextually, it was a reaction to both Nazism and Stalinist communism). Instead, his slim novel was a

grim excavation of political inevitability. "It would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted _1984_ as another description of Stalinist barbarism if he does not see that

it means us, too," warns Erich Fromm in an afterward of the book, which sold out online last week amid widespread concerns surrounding the new Trump administration. Orwell has long been

hailed as a visionary, with _1984_ popping up on bestseller lists with an unnerving frequency since it was first published in 1949. The prophetic novel weighed on the minds of some of the

20th century's greatest artists: David Bowie wanted to make a musical out of it (it became _Diamond Dogs_) and Terry Gilliam reinterpreted it as the fantastic cult-classic _Brazil_. It

has been debated and dismissed, hailed and despised, and taught in classrooms the world over. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis

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delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. I am hardly the first person to

say that Orwell's masterpiece is a must-read that holds stark lessons for our current age, although perhaps it is slightly less obvious in the Trump era than it was during _1984_'s

most recent run up the bestseller lists, during the NSA leaks of 2013. With a searing blue eye on the mass-market paperback's cover, _1984_ is synonymous with the surveillance state.

Its most quotable line is "Big Brother is watching you." Is it any wonder that in 2013, amidst stunning revelations of U.S. government snooping, _The New_ _Yorker_ wondered,

"So are we living in _1984_?" In truth, though, _1984_ isn't so much about the government spying through "telescreens" as it is a warning about the power of words

and the malleability of truth. (That is the great irony of literature and philosophy — all truths must be conveyed in the least trustworthy of mediums: language.) With the stench of party

propaganda still fresh in the late 1940s, Orwell warned "all history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." Histories — and facts

themselves — were proven to be flexible. Two and two _does_ equal five, if the Party says it does. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia, if the Ministry of Truth declared it so.

Today, President Trump and his press secretary deal in "alternative facts" (in the truly Orwellian language of the supremely talented Grand Minister of Spin Kellyanne Conway),

half-truths, and outright lies. They peddle falsehoods that don't really matter ("This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around

the globe"), and others that really do ("In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted

illegally"). Conway even dismissed the Women's March protesters in a kind of modern-day Newspeak for being "misinformed." In President Trump's America, there is no

indisputable truth — other than what President Trump says is the truth. As Orwell teaches, "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the

past." In our present, Trump alone is the arbiter of what is real and true, what happened and what didn't. Don't trust your lying eyes. Trust Trump. As a result, just a week

into Trump's presidency, Americans are already practicing what _1984_ calls Doublethink, the blind acceptance of contradictory truths or ideas. The president's inauguration speech,

for example, described what _The New York Times_ called a "uniquely dark vision of the United States" — a vision at odds with most Americans' realities. "Many of the

claims he used to paint his picture of 'American carnage' were false," _Think Progress_ wrote, citing President Trump's misleading descriptions of jobs, welfare,

infrastructure, education, and crime. More Doublethink: "When Trump repeats the ridiculous story about the three million illegal voters — a story that no one who knows, that not a

single White House 'staffer,' not a single Republican congressman actually believes to be true — he does not really care if anyone believes it, even if, at some crazy level, _he_

does, sort of," _The New Yorker_ explained. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order banning travelers from seven predominately Muslim countries on the grounds that he was protecting

the United States from the threat of terrorism. But "no person accepted to the United States as a refugee, Syrian or otherwise, has been implicated in a major fatal terrorist attack

since the Refugee Act of 1980 set up systematic procedures for accepting refugees into the United States," CNN wrote. "Before 1980, three refugees had successfully carried out

terrorist attacks; all three were Cuban refugees, and a total of three people were killed." But as they did in _1984_, lies can easily become truth — at least in the minds of much of

the populace. "Reality is inside the skull," Orwell writes. In fact, "for the months leading up to the presidential election, and in the days since President Trump took

office, ultraconservative websites like _Breitbart News_ and _Infowars_ have published a cycle of eye-popping stories with misleading claims about refugees. And it is beginning to influence

public perception, experts say," as _The New York Times_ detailed. Take, for example, stories written by _Breitbart_'s Julia Hahn over the last two years: "Hahn has written

hundreds of inflammatory and misleading articles about immigrants — with headlines like 'Criminal Aliens Sexually Assault 70,000 American Women' and 'Muslim Immigration Puts

Half a Million U.S. Girls at Risk of Genital Mutilation,'" wrote The Southern Poverty Law Center. "Hahn has repeatedly cited information from the Center for Immigration

Studies — a purveyor of anti-immigrant propaganda that was caught [recently] promoting an article by a notorious anti-Semite." (Hahn is expected to take a job in the White House soon.)

There must always be an enemy; Oceania has always been at war. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever," _1984_ warns. This much is

now clear: The Trump White House _is_ the Ministry of Truth. In Trump's first week, the dissemination of facts was strategically muted out of the Environmental Protection Agency, the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture. How long does it take to forget climate change, or at least to distrust it again?

Orwell has an answer: "Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden," believes _1984_'s protagonist, Winston. It was his greatest mistake. In the end, after all, he loved Big

Brother, too.