Truth in the Age of Trump

This article was originally published on The Blank Page in Spring 2018.

(Author's note, Sept 25, 2025: I wrote this article back in midwinter of 2018, reflecting on the first year of Trump’s first Presidency. Before Google and Meta de-listed news for Canadians. Before January 6th. Before the entire Biden Presidency. Before Trump II: Corruption Boogaloo. Before Project 2025.)

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one  turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

While he was prone to bombastic and indefensible statements during the campaign, most observers presumed Donald Trump would adhere to the norms that govern the office of the Presidency. However, within days of Trump’s ascension to the throne in Washington, George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984 became the number one best seller on Amazon. Sean Spicer, the much-derided former press secretary, famously claimed the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was bigger than Obama’s—despite clear photographic evidence disputing it, as well as legitimate statistics from the Transit Authority of Washington. The press- in their best attempts to literally do their job—asked the White House to justify their claims. Kelly-Ann Conway suddenly entered global consciousness and coined a phrase that seemed like it was lifted right out of Orwell’s 1984: alternative facts. She doubled down on her turn of phrase, claiming, “Two plus two is four. Three plus one is four. Partly cloudy, partly sunny. Glass half full, glass half empty. Those are alternative facts.”

Stephen Colbert made a name for himself back in the mid-2000s with his acclaimed political satire show, The Colbert Report. He coined a new phrase, “truthiness,” meaning holding fast and tight onto an idea or belief with scant regard for factual bases. His show was a mockery of Fox News and their brand of “punditry,” but his satire was so on the nose that the conservative media establishment actually took it at face value, even inviting him to host the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006. He delivered an evisceration of both President Bush and the conservative media establishment to a stunned-silent room. Interestingly, a study back in 2011 found that conservatives felt that Colbert was pretending to be joking and genuinely meant what he said, while liberals felt that Colbert was being satirical and was not serious when offering political statements.

We live in an age of deep polarisation, of truthiness and of alternative facts. It may at the outset appear to be a novel fissure in our democratic societies; however, this is an old game, one that goes back to the invention of public relations, propaganda, and the manufacturing of consent.

In the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003, the American security apparatus was convinced there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This was used to justify going to war. It was a lie. Donald Trump himself weighed in: “You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They [the Bush administration] lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]; there were none. And they knew there were none.” In the age of Trump, we’ve been quick to attack him and his administration for distorting reality and refuting facts. However, this has long been a political tool. The legendary George Orwell was well aware of the importance of language for politicians: 

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

He was writing back in the 1940s when the world was swamped by World War Two—pitting democracies and Communism against fascist dictatorships. Indeed, Orwell wrote 1984 as a parable. At the time, many in the West saw the book as a rebuke of totalitarian dictatorships. Recent analyses, however, contend that the book was perhaps a rebuke of governments writ large.  not like Churchill’s wartime coalition in Great Britain was anything approaching a democracy. Heck, the majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, and here we are now. 

To really understand the links between language, politics, and democracy, we must first visit with the journalist and social theorist Walter Lippmann. Writing back in the 1920s, Lippmann coined the phrase “manufacturing consent”.

Lippmann did not believe that news and truth were synonymous. He contended that distorted information was an inherent part of the human mind—people generally made up their minds before considering “facts”. To him, journalists were meant to be mediators between the general public and policy-makers. He believed that the average citizen was unable to understand modern society’s growing factual complexity and required an intermediary to serve as an information broker and translate the complexities of policy into digestible portions. 

Lippmann was deeply cynical about the intellectual capacity of the average citizen. He felt that voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies and that en masse, and that man functioned as a "bewildered herd" who must be governed by "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." (Chomsky, Necessary Illusions). This is well in line with sociological thinking from the era, as Gustave Le Bon eloquently outlined. 

“Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings… and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” (Le Bon, The Crowd)

Lippmann, Le Bon, and the majority of public intellectuals of the era were intensely elitist in their worldview. To them, it was the purview of the elites to control and manage the masses, lest they get too unruly. 

Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, drew from both Lippmann and De Bon, outlining how crowd psychology and psychoanalysis could be used to control the masses in desirable ways. He, like Le Bon, believed the masses to be irrational and governed by a herd instinct. He is considered to be the “father of public relations,” the field that literally exists to manufacture consent and convince people to do something they might otherwise not do. 

Bernays was an ad-man, and he was particularly influential in the cigarette industry. In the 1920s, women weren’t smoking enough, so Bernays devised a plan—he leaned on Freudian psychoanalysis and capitalised on the nascent suffragist movement, marketing cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. See, women didn’t smoke, and modern women were rebelling against the established order, asking for things like equal rights and the vote, and Bernays astutely positioned cigarettes as part of the rebellion. Naturally, the ad campaigns were on point. He even made the links between the thinness of a cigarette and the “desirable” thinness of the female form. 

He knew of the power of the media, of the written word, and of the mutability of facts, and as an elitist, believed it was the duty of the elites to control the way the masses think. He popularized the term “propaganda”. And importantly, he was a Western thinker applying his analyses to Western Democracies:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” (Bernays, Propaganda)

Lippmann was also clear: public opinion is irrelevant to the policymaking process. Political leaders ignore public opinion because most Americans can neither "understand nor influence the very events upon which their lives and happiness are known to depend." Propaganda and thought control are clearly not just communist-era bugbears, as our corporately-controlled media would like us to think. 

Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and social analyst, jumped on Lippmann’s ideas a half-century later,  with a series of books discussing the role of the media in framing the way citizens view the world. The first of which was actually called Manufacturing Consent. He was highly critical, arguing that the media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion, by means of the propaganda model of communication” 

Not a year later, Chomsky published Necessary Illusions, doubling down on his thesis from Manufacturing Consent noting that “the very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine.” (Chomsky, Necessary Illusions)  and “within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and decision.” (Chomsky, Necessary Illusions) Bernays is still stoked. 

Now here’s a crazy thing: Chomsky wrote his books in the late 1980s. Rupert Murdoch didn’t create the pre-eminent factual distortion machine of our day,Fox News, until 1996. Just think about that for a second. Chomsky was already sounding the alarm about corporately-controlled media edifices framing the way we think about politics and society well before Fox perfected the emotive-resonance model of discourse. 

It is quite clear that truthiness and manufacturing consent are old tricks, ones hewn in the late 19th century, embroidered in the 1920s, jazzed up in the 1940s, and fired out of a cannon by the time Don Draper rolls around in the late 1950s. 

Just look around us today, either on– or offline, advertisements are everywhere selling lifestyles, coercively attempting to convince us to consume more and more. Political machines have used the same tactics the world over to frame the way citizens think, act, feel, and vote. Just take a glance at a series of political ads from the last election in America—you can see Bernays’ and Lippmann’s fingerprints all over it. They almost always appeal to emotion, leaning on Freud’s notion that irrational forces drive human behaviour.

It’s been over a hundred years since Le Bon and Lippmann started really talking about manufacturing consent. Bernays wrote Propaganda in 1929. The tools and tricks available to those who wish to frame the way people think, act, and consume have far surpassed those available to the turn-of-the-century trailblazers. Just look at the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.

So when Kelly-Ann Conway talks about alternative facts, when Trump steps up on the podium, whenever the camera rolls at Fox News, we’re just continuing along a continuum—one that is premised on the idea that the masses are dumb and rife for manipulation, and it is the duty of the elites to manufacture consent, to ensure the smooth running of affairs. Here’s one difference about today, though: truthiness has been institutionalised. This is actually from the Republican Party’s website. The official website for the governing party of America advertised the “Fake News Awards”. In days of yore, manufacturing consent was subtle, behind the scenes—but that’s no longer the case. It’s in the open, from truthiness to Fox News to our 21st-century internet information silos. Where this ends, I couldn’t tell you. But Orwell saw it coming.

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.

—George Orwell, Why I Write. 

Sources Cited In-Text

• Edward Bernays, Propaganda, IG Publishing, New York City, 2004.
• Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Press, New York: 2002.
• Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions - Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Anansi Press, Concord Ontario: 1989.
• Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, Dover Publications, Mineola, New York: 2002.
• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, Dover Publications, Mineola, New York: 2004.
• George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, Penguin Classics, London: 2013.