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People were already invoking the Republican Party’s rejection of “the reality-based community” and its “epistemic closure” long before Donald Trump took it over. But it has taken Trump to elevate the Republican Party’s reality-altering habits to a level that is literally Orwellian. The latest visit to the mind-bending frontier of pseudo-reality comes via this presidential tweet:

The so-called leaks coming out of the White House are a massive over exaggeration put out by the Fake News Media in order to make us look as bad as possible. With that being said, leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 14, 2018

Here we learn that the anonymous quotes coming out of the White House are invented “so-called leaks” by the hostile reporters of the “Fake News Media.” At the same time, Trump denounces the leakers as “cowards” and “traitors.”

“Doublethink,” as George Orwell wrote, “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Even Big Brother had enough respect for his audience to insist that they had always been at war with East Asia, or whoever they were at war with at the moment. You didn’t see Big Brother calling East Asia his great ally and enemy in consecutive sentences.