Q. Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, many concerned citizens have been snatching up copies of George Orwell's '1984', in response to his playing 'fast and loose with the facts'. Is this something we should be concerned about?
A. Not unduly, no.
President Trump does have something of a penchant for hyperbole and exaggeration, to be sure. It's part of his character, and for the most part his supporters know not to take him too literally when it comes to the specifics.
On the contrary, many in fact prefer his style of 'casual' dishonesty as an indicator of enthusiasm, over the career politicians who have made an art-form of that much more obsequious form of dishonesty, double-talk. You can see it any interview—rather than answering an actual question, they instead answer a different question that hasn't been asked, but one in which the answer makes them look good.
If they were trying to actually provide useful information, of course, they would first make it clear why it makes no sense to ask the original question, before rephrasing it to something more helpful. This rarely happens, but when it does, it feels different and you notice it. For example, take this partially fictitious exchange loosely paraphrased from an interview with Nigel Farage:
Interviewer: "So if you were to become Prime Minister, would one of your first orders be to kick all the immigrants out?"
Farage: "I'm not going to be Prime Minister, let's make that clear. But if you mean, 'Do I think the country would be better off if we ended all immigration,' then no, I don't think that at all, and have never claimed otherwise."
Isn't that refreshing.
Anyhow, an irony that most prefer to ignore is that the real culprits in the 'war on facts', so to speak, are the very organisations claiming that this is what President Trump is doing. The mainstream media has been outright lying about almost everything they report on for at least the past decade, and probably a long time before that too. However, while in the past they mostly limited it to lies of omission (which are no less lies—except when it comes to defamation suits), missing out certain facts in order to frame their stories in ways that lead people to conclusions that no reasonable person would reach if presented with all the facts... since the beginning of the last US election cycle, they've uprooted and shifted firmly into the territory of outright fabrication.
To put it very clearly, everything negative the mainstream media has claimed about Donald Trump (which is almost everything they've had to say about him) is demonstrably false by even a cursory glance at the primary sources. Rank amateurs that they are, they made the rookie mistake that is the undoing of all bad propaganda:
Never assume that the people you're propagating to are idiots.
The only people convinced that President Trump was a monster after the collaborated year long smear campaign in the press were the people that were already convinced from the outset that President Trump was a monster. Even some of them saw through the obvious campaign of lies, and ended up switching sides. It was so transparent, that anybody who was not a hardened anti-Trumpster was driven to check the primary sources for themselves, and after the picture the media had painted, the reality looked surprisingly rosy by comparison.
Q. But if President Trump and the mainstream media are both peddling lies of sorts, then why support one over the other?
A. This is something of a point of contention for those that claim to be (but actually aren't) political centrists—that those on the 'left' will believe left leaning sources, and those on the 'right' will believe right leaning sources, and confirmation bias will do the rest.
To some extent, this is of course true. Confirmation bias is a powerful cognitive blind spot shared by everybody, including the self-professed (albeit falsely) centrists.
However, what makes President Trump stand out is that he did not make the same rookie mistake. When he speaks, he credits his listeners—the public at large—with enough intelligence to be able to determine for themselves when he's speaking literally and when he's exaggerating or overstating. Sure, some people do get it wrong, especially those with a 'progressive' mindset (more often than not, deliberately), but the undercurrent of basic respect goes a long way towards earning the charitable benefit of the doubt, a currency the mainstream media has long since been found wanting.
Q. So are you saying that Donald Trump won the presidency because he was better at propaganda than the mainstream media?
A. If by 'propaganda', you mean 'not insulting people's intelligence', then yes.
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