By George Packer
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
In George Orwell’s 1984, at the
climax of Hate Week, Oceania is suddenly no longer at war with Eurasia, but
instead is at war with Eastasia, and always has been. The pivot comes with no
explanation or even announcement. During a public harangue, a Party orator is
handed a scrap of paper and redirects his vitriol “mid-sentence, not only
without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.”
Republican politicians in Donald Trump’s Inner Party
faced a similar verbal challenge when the president changed
sides in Russia’s war against Ukraine. One morning in late February,
Republicans in Washington greeted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a
hero for continuing to resist Russian aggression. By afternoon, following
Zelensky’s meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and Vice President J. D.
Vance, the Ukrainian leader was an ungrateful, troublesome, and badly dressed
warmonger who, if he hadn’t actually started the conflict with Russia, was the
only obstacle to ending it.
After this new line was communicated to party leaders, a
pro-Zelensky social-media post was taken down as swiftly as the banners
denouncing Eurasia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker of the House Mike
Johnson, and Senator Lindsey Graham—all supporters of Ukraine—were sent out in
front of the cameras like the Hate Week orator, not to explain a new policy but
to pretend that nothing had changed while America switched sides. Using nearly
identical language, Rubio, Johnson, and Graham declared that Zelensky must do
Trump’s bidding, which is also Vladimir Putin’s bidding, and capitulate to
Russia; otherwise, Johnson and Graham added, Zelensky should resign. America’s
enemy isn’t Russia. America’s enemy is Ukraine.
The philosopher Henri Bergson observed, “The attitudes,
gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as
that body reminds us of a mere machine.” The cause of laughter is the
“deflection of life towards the mechanical.” This insight explains why there is
something comical about politicians when they substitute programmed language
for speech that reflects actual thought. They are besuited contraptions, like
another orthodoxy-spouting ideologue in 1984 whose spectacles catch the
light and seem to render him eyeless while his jaw keeps moving, as if “this
was not a real human being but some kind of dummy.” Having emptied themselves
of the capacity or will for independent judgment, they become extremely fluent
automatons, able to put together whole paragraphs of logical-sounding
arguments, but with no connection between brain and mouth. Every politician is
required to speak like a robot some of the time; it takes a special talent to
betray an entire worldview without missing a beat.
Graham’s mechanical style is to flit almost gleefully
from one position to its opposite while remaining a party insider, which
is his only consistent position and the justification for all his others.
Johnson stares through his glasses and gropes for the appropriate words with
the unease of a simple man trying not to screw up his lines: “I can tell you
that we are—we are re-exerting peace through strength. President Trump has
brought back strength to the White House. We knew that this moment would come,
we worked hard for it to come, and now it’s here.” Rubio is a more complex
case. He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost
visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa.
Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and
adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the
inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his
unhappy face.
But Rubio had already begun the process of mechanizing
himself weeks before, when he shut down foreign-aid programs that he had always
supported. Reappearing in public after the meeting with Zelensky, he denounced
the Ukrainian president with the overzealous exasperation of a successfully
hollowed policy maker.
When a leader requires his underlings to say what they
know isn’t true—up is down, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,
Ukraine is to blame—it’s a test of loyalty and a show of dominance. Ritualized
humiliation is essential to an authoritarian regime. Trump forces aides,
advisers, and the friendly press that he allows into the room to utter
absurdities on his behalf in order to bind them closer to him, and thereby
frees himself from any restraint. They know from the example of more courageous
or less careful colleagues that any quiver of independence will doom them
politically, and perhaps even harm them physically. Almost immediately, it
seems, they cease to be troubled by conscience or even motivated by fear. As
they become more machinelike, they forget that they ever held a different idea,
or any idea at all. You can see it in their relaxed features and smoother
delivery.
Trump alone is allowed to say what he thinks. There’s
nothing laughably mechanical about his abandonment of Ukraine, Europe, and
American leadership of the free world; he doesn’t embrace Russia like an
eyeless dummy. He never sounded more natural, or truer to himself, than when he
told Zelensky of his bond
of sympathy with Putin and mocked the Ukrainian president for the agony
that Russia has inflicted on his country. And if, a week or two later, American
policy on the war flipped again, it wasn’t because Trump’s worldview changed—he
still prefers dictators and wants to be one of them. It only meant that the
leader can declare that Oceania is at war with Eastasia or Eurasia on any given
day.
At least from the time he was 5 years old and, according
to Maggie Haberman’s biography, Confidence Man,
threw rocks at a baby in a playpen, Trump has admired strength and despised
weakness. Terms used by Ukraine’s defenders, such as sovereignty, democracy,
and shared values, obviously disgust him, because they’re the language
of the weak. For Trump, strength has nothing to do with the classical virtues
of nobility and courage; it’s the raw power to humiliate another, whether a
person or a country. Zelensky’s physical and moral courage, including his
refusal to be belittled on camera in the Oval Office, enrages Trump, for he’s
accustomed to endless subservience and flattery.
Trump’s decision in March to halt the flow of arms and
intelligence to Ukraine doesn’t follow a foreign policy of isolationism. When
Vance, running for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio in 2022, said, “I don’t really
care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” he was expressing
an isolationist sentiment. This indifference falls well short of Trump’s
contempt for Zelensky and long-standing attraction to Putin. Trump wants Russia
to win and Ukraine to lose.
Some analysts argue that Trump is turning American
foreign policy toward “realism”: a cold calculation that Ukraine falls in
Russia’s sphere of influence, not ours; that defending an embattled democracy
against a much larger and more powerful dictatorship depletes American
resources without serving its interests; that, in an ever more multipolar
world, the United States is overcommitted; that the U.S. should stop trying to
uphold global rules and democratic values, and start acting like a traditional
great power that uses its immense strength to secure specific interests.
These sound like rational claims, but they don’t describe
Trump’s words and actions. There’s nothing realistic about aiding a dangerous
adversary, undermining allies, breaking agreements, extorting concessions,
threatening annexations, and destroying an order that has expanded American
influence and made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in
modern history. These are the policies of crude power worship, not realism.
They are extensions of Trump’s character around the world, and they will destroy
all that Americans and others value about this country, turning the United
States into a shinier image of Putin’s Russia. It doesn’t matter whether Trump
is an actual Russian asset; he’s already doing the work of one.
A poll in early March by the civic organization More in
Common shows that Americans haven’t abandoned all the values that Trump and his
sycophants are trashing. Nearly two-thirds of respondents still sympathize with
Ukraine and more want to continue arming it. Even among Republicans, a
majority believe that Russia is to blame for the war and consider Putin a
dictator. Support for Russia is in the low single digits. The survey shows that
years of propaganda and lies from Trump and the MAGA right have failed to
poison the body politic with cynicism. Although the elites in power insist that
might makes right and that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, most
ordinary Americans haven’t yet thrown away a worldview of true and false, right
and wrong. They might be America’s last best hope.
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