How far will Donald Trump go to sell a lie?

After a week of government shutdown, it is obvious the United States is irreparably broken.

You don’t have to believe me. Just listen to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. In a recent CNN appearance, he claimed President Donald Trump “has plenary authority” — absolute power, in other words — to ignore court rulings. Oops. In other words, Trump is God.

No one is happier about that than the president, who said on Tuesday that some vital workers still on the clock won’t get back pay after the shutdown ends. “There are some people that don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” Trump said.

How, pray tell, will that be, Donny? Putting that aside, consider a country where masked men without identification are dragging citizens out of their homes. No charges are filed. Due process is ignored and people are held against their will. Members of the clergy are physically attacked. Only one faith is accepted. The legislature is so broken it cannot operate. The criminal justice system is compromised by corruption and sloth. 

Consider a country where the press is filled with sycophants who do the bidding of the country’s leader. Anyone presenting information not approved by the ruler is denounced and belittled, ostracized and denied access. Media companies are controlled by those loyal to the leader. Academia is attacked for not teaching what the government decrees to be true. Political opponents are labeled as criminals and enemies. The leader decrees what is acceptable entertainment.  

Though these may seem like they are representative of our current government, they are actually themes explored by director Raoul Peck in “Orwell: 2+2=5”, the newly theatrically-released documentary about George Orwell’s life as he wrote the dystopian novel “1984.”  

“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,” Orwell wrote in his diary while he was working on the book. “It has to be thought of as infallible.” Therefore, “only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.” 

While today those who lovingly swoon at the thought of working in GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional office may dismiss Orwell’s novel as mere fiction, he was merely doing what every good writer does — he wrote about what he knew. As a former police officer and a journalist in the British Empire, Orwell grew up in a reality he used to create his fiction. 

Today, facts told as fiction are not nearly as popular as fictions presented as facts. That is the Donald Trump twist on reality. And as much as some would dismiss the obvious parallels between the book “1984” and current reality, the fact is that two plus two does not equal five and never will.

Trump, for example, claims Portland is war ravaged. So Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem showed up in the city on Tuesday, and right-wing influencers depicted her staring down the “army of antifa.” In reality, Noem was on a rooftop staring at photojournalists, fewer than a dozen protesters — and one guy in a chicken suit.

That brings us to Jeff Tischauser, an adjunct professor and a frequent protester at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago. Hewas struck by a rubber bullet and hit with tear gas last week in an apparently unprovoked attack by DHS agents. “I had a hard time seeing. My eyes stung and I was out of breath. A young Latino man grabbed me and pulled me out of there. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t helped,” he told me.

In a series of press releases, DHS told a different story and justified firing “non-lethal” weapons on crowds by calling them rioters, looters, gypsies, tramps and thieves.  

“Political language makes lies sound truthful and murder acceptable,” Orwell warned. “Totalitarianism demands the continuous alteration of the past and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

This observation explains Trump’s recent moves. A day after Texas National Guard troops arrived in Chicago, Trump threatened the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, both Democrats. “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” he said in a Truth Social post. “Governor Pritzker also!”

The president didn’t say what federal law the men broke, or if he had asked the National Guard to take them into custody. Questions about that remained unanswered by the White House press office. Pritzker dared Trump to come after him, and he laughed at the idea of a convicted felon claiming he should be jailed.

But in Trump’s dangerous, delusional state, which is dominated by the fear of anyone saying the name “Epstein,” he is telling us exactly how far he’ll go to sell a lie. To Trump, the nation is on fire. He should know. He supplied the gas and the match. 

“We have no choice but to do this,” he said in an Oval Office event Monday, referring to blue cities he has targeted. “Portland is on fire. Portland has been on fire for years…These are unsafe spaces. We’re going to make them safe.”

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Trump went on to claim that the people of Memphis “are so happy.” Black women in Chicago, he said, are wearing MAGA hats “all over the place.” Everyone is welcoming National Guard troops. “They want the Guard to come in, or they don’t care who comes in. They just want to be safe and they really don’t care…We’re going to go city by city. We’re going to have safe cities.” 

The president added a dark warning: “So far, it hasn’t been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason.” He suggested the law could be invoked “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up.” He said, “I want to make sure that people aren’t killed. We have to make sure that our cities are safe.”

Desperation and fear bleed through everything he dispenses. But there is still a method to the madness. Miles Taylor, who worked in the first Trump administration, posted on Substack: “I co-wrote Trump’s first anti-terrorism plan in 2017-18. He’s not trying to stop ‘left-wing’ terrorism. He is staging it. His troop deployments are a false flag — meant to provoke a response in order to justify harsh crackdowns. This is now very obvious.”

And Trump is not above pitting Southern red states against Northern blue states. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? He said that Texas Gov. Abbott is not the only red state governor to offer troops: “Every one of them is willing to offer whatever we need.” To hear him tell it, that’s because “they want our agents protected.”

Trump will never serve a day in prison for his corruption or crimes. But the more people scream about Jeffrey Epstein, the more seriously Trump will consider invoking the Insurrection Act. 

Meanwhile, he’s got House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., running interference for him by keeping the House in recess. “Why are we in recess?” GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who is leading the effort to release law enforcement files about the deceased sex offender, posted on X. “Because the day we go back into session, I have 218 votes for the discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.”   

Johnson is also holding the House’s newest member, Rep.-Elect Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., hostage. Despite telling CNN on Tuesday that he would swear her in “as soon as she wants,” the speaker has made no move to do so. He certainly hasn’t had any problem swearing in Republicans whenever he wants. On Tuesday, a House leadership aide made Johnson’s position clear: “We will swear [her] in…as soon as the House returns to session when Chuck Schumer, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego decide to open up the government.”

There’s a reason for the delay: Grijalva is expected to provide the final signature needed on a petition to force a full House vote on releasing further materials in the Epstein case. The delay in swearing her in, Johnson has said, has anything to do with Epstein. Sure, and Richard Nixon had nothing to do with Watergate. Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with the Contras. And George W. Bush had nothing to do with Iraq.

Johnson is willing to further Trump’s narratives because he faces losing control of the House if the president fails. Trump needs total control to avoid accountability. And Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House border czar Tom Homan and especially Stephen Miller need control to prevent the long arm of justice from ever reaching them. While Trump may never serve a day in prison, that can’t be said of some of the most corrupt power-brokers in his regime.

MAGA diehards will call whatever ends up befalling these shady, side-show sycophants a “weaponizing of the Justice Department.” Democrats will simply call it justice. I guess both statements can be true, but the motive matters little. The endgame will not be pretty.

Last week I said I’ve never seen Trump so scared. This week, as he struggles vainly against the rising tide of accountability, we’ve seen writ large across the national stage to what lengths his fear will lead him. Trump’s health appears to be failing him. His charm is failing him. Soon he’ll be reduced to the same level as William Jennings Bryan in his last days — an itinerant flycatcher, sitting in the courtyard of Mar-a-Lago, making sounds like a bullfrog and babbling like a cicada on meth.

On Friday, for the second time in a year, Trump will “stop by” Walter Reed Medical Center for an annual physical. On deep background Thursday night, a source close to Trump wouldn’t say specifically why he was going to the hospital, “but no one has an annual physical twice in the same year — unless there’s something going on with their health.”

Should Trump expire before he is held accountable, it would be in the best interest of the country for his wealth to be stripped from his heirs and his vast property holdings turned into low-cost housing for the underprivileged and the homeless. Then Trump should be relegated to the same dustbin of history as Epstein.

In “1984,” the state controlled everything; that’s Trump’s goal. He continues to pressure his Department of Justice to arrest and prosecute his political opponents to achieve that aim. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who defeated Trump in court, is the latest victim of his fear and anger. She was indicted Thursday in Virginia on two felony charges — bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution — after pressure from Trump.

James’ answer to the indictment should be the response of everyone who is persecuted by Trump’s regime, from the poorest immigrants to the former government officials he despises: “I am not fearful, I am fearless.”  

The only way to beat a bully is to stand up to a bully.