Two Plus Two Equals … ?

Orwell, ICE, and the Trumpian negation of reality

Jan 12, 2026

“Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” – Chico Marx,“Duck Soup”

In the days since a federal ICE agent shot Renee Good to death on a Minneapolis street, one quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984 has become ubiquitous in social media memes and postings:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

The evidence in this case consisted of videos that showed Good, her car moving forward at slow speed, turning away from the ICE agent – who fires one shot through her windshield and then two more from the side, not the front, of the car, through the drivers-side window. It constituted compelling visual evidence of a shooting that was grossly unjustified – in plain English, a murder.

But, as in Orwell’s dystopian land of Oceania, the authorities – President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem – insisted that it was really the victim who was to blame, who provoked the shooting, who was guilty of – in Noem’s words – “domestic terrorism.”

And, as Orwell’s quote foreshadowed, acceptance of this blatant untruth became a required test of loyalty for Trumpists of all stripes. Just as Oceania’s enforcers insisted that the dissident Winston Smith must agree that two plus two equals five, Trump and his acolytes have made it mandatory to accept that the Minneapolis shooting was not a case of homicide, but rather an act of self-defense by a staunch defender of law and order facing a grave physical threat.

By coincidence, I was rereading 1984 (for a book club) when the Minneapolis shooting occurred. What became clear to me as I digested the novel was that the demand to reject the plain evidence of our eyes and ears was just one of the ways in which Orwell anticipated the grotesque nature of Trump’s regime.

A key weapon in the arsenal of Orwell’s ruling party is embodied in Winston Smith’s realization that “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Smith works in the Records Department of the perversely named Ministry of Truth, and his main job is to rewrite the historical record to eliminate any piece of evidence that would contradict the ever-shifting dictums of the party. Whenever he discovers such material, he consigns it to the “memory hole”; a slot that ingests and obliterates the offending document. Smith is then free to falsify the record – be it a newspaper article, a book, a film, an audio recording – so it lines up with whatever the party now says is reality, without fear of contradiction.

Perhaps someone in the White House was also re-reading 1984; perhaps they had no need to. On Jan. 6, the fifth anniversary of the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters bent on preventing certification of his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, the official White House website introduced a page that distorts the events of that day in almost every possible way.

It was the Capitol police, and not the rioters, who initiated the violence – even though the police were under sustained attack that day and suffered numerous injuries. It was Democrats who inflamed the situation by insisting on the certification of a “fraud-ridden election” – even though no such fraud was ever demonstrated in dozens of court cases. It was Vice President Mike Pence who was guilty of “cowardice and sabotage” by refusing to decline to certify the election – even though the law gave him no choice but to certify it. In short, the victims were the guilty parties, the perpetrators of the riot were the innocents.

Perhaps someone in the White House was also re-reading 1984; perhaps they had no need to.

Orwell even anticipates Trumpian geopolitics. In 1984, the nation-state has become obsolete, and world is divided among three dominant super-states. Oceania, centered in what was once the U.S., controls the Western Hemisphere plus the British Isles. Eurasia, centered in Moscow, holds sway in Europe and northern Asia. The third superpower, Eastasia, controls China, Japan and India.

This is pure sphere-of-influence politics – and it is uncomfortably close to Trump’s vision of a world that dispenses with the inconvenient architecture of the rules-based international order that we evolved after the horrific destruction of two world wars. In Trump’s view, power is all that matters, and American power entitles us to dominate our hemisphere, top to bottom – including Venezuela, Greenland, and perhaps Canada depending on the president’s mood that day. Europe can fend for itself, if it is able; and if this means Vladimir Putin’s Russia comes to dominate that continent – well, as Trump advisor Stephen Miller put it recently, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Orwell’s Big Brother couldn’t have said it any better.

Putin of course has no issue with this viewpoint; in fact, he is so focused on establishing his own sphere of dominance by swallowing up Ukraine that he willingly sacrifices erstwhile allies in Venezuela and Syria to stay in Trump’s good graces. As for Asia, the implication is that so long as China sticks to its neighborhood and doesn’t encroach upon the Americas, Trump is cool with it. Taiwan? Where’s that?

The larger point here is not that Orwell somehow prophesied Trump seven decades in advance. The writer himself was very clear that he was not trying to predict the future, but rather to warn us about what that future might hold if we failed to assert our individual humanity in the face of the powerful institutional forces that sought to control us. Orwell believed this was possible; throughout most of his life, he was an avowed socialist, albeit a cantankerously independent one, who believed in the capacity of ordinary people to bend history to their will.

And for all the pessimism of his novel, Orwell has his doomed protagonist assert some fundamental truths – the solid world exists, stones are hard, water is wet, unsupported objects fall – and then arrive at the essential point:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

photo credit: Elimende Inagella via Unsplash

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