August 21, 2018
By Paul Krugman
War is peace. (click here) Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Truth isn’t truth.
Rudy Giuliani’s latest bon mot is a reminder, if anyone needed it, that calling the Trump administration Orwellian isn’t hyperbole, it’s just a statement of fact. Like the ruling party in “1984,” Donald Trump operates on the principle that truth — whether it involves inauguration crowd sizes, immigrant crime or economic performance — is what he says it is. And that truth can change at a moment’s notice.
For example, not long ago, Republicans insisted that Russia was our greatest threat, and that Barack
Obama was betraying America by not confronting Vladimir Putin more forcefully; now Putin is one of the good guys, and the base has gone along with the change. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
And if you thought you heard something different from the Trumpian version of reality, blame evil conspirators and saboteurs, whom you get to denounce in the Two Minutes Hate, chanting “lock her up.”
But how did this happen to the whole Republican Party? And it is effectively the whole party: There is no serious GOP opposition to Trump or his vision. Why did the party’s belief in objective reality collapse so suddenly and completely?
I don’t claim to understand the whole story. But one thing is clear: The Orwellification of the GOP didn’t start with Trump. On the contrary, the party has been moving in that direction for years; the mindset Trump is exploiting was already well in place before he burst on the scene....
Republicans are wasting taxpayer monies on stupid campaign ideas. This is highly unethical and should be treated as such, including that of Senator Jim Inhofe.
...And there’s more. Some people seem startled at how quickly Trump has moved to use the power of office to punish and intimidate anyone who doesn’t go along with Dear Leader. But Republicans have long been doing that on climate.
Most famously, Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, spent several years trying to prove fraud on the part of Michael Mann, one of our leading climate researchers. Cuccinelli’s witch hunt (yes, this was the real thing) was thinly disguised as involving concern over misuse of state funds, but it was obviously an attempt to use political power to censor and suppress inconvenient science....
...Climate denial is a deeply cynical enterprise; the people misrepresenting evidence and sifting through emails for “gotcha” quotes have to know that they’re not being honest. Yet their rage against “elitists” who continue to point out inconvenient truths is very real — because it’s a fact of life that many people feel special hatred for those they’ve mistreated.
The same goes for Trump and company. Trump knows perfectly well that he’s guilty of collusion. That doesn’t mean he’s faking his volcanic rage at those documenting his guilt: He hates his pursuers all the more because he knows they’re on the right track.
And as he lashes out, with no regard for law or the Constitution, will other Republicans try to hold him back? All the evidence suggests that they won’t.
