My copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has cardboard covers. Front and back, the book is decorated with cheesy reproduced paintings. Big Brother wears an evil goatee and eye makeup. A red helicopter buzzes under the “Four.” The illustrations look childish because I have somehow held onto a book that was assigned to me when I was about thirteen. The inside front cover has a sticker where schoolchildren in years past have written their names.

Turning the book and thumbing its ragged spine, what do I remember? The revelation that Winston has been recorded in his subversion with Julia, yes. The catchwords: Newspeak, Ingsoc, Thought Police, Ministry of Love. A roiling feeling of injustice. But the only part engraved on my memory is the torture, specifically Winston’s vision of his own spine snapping as his body is stretched and the spinal fluid dripping out. I remember that part because I was a child, and it frightened me.

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four have roared in the wake of the coinage “alternative facts” by President Donald Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway. When we suspect that we are living in a dystopia characterized by clumsy propaganda, it’s the book we buy from Amazon.com. (It was the top seller at that site on Wednesday.) There are certain elements of Orwell’s novel that can help us understand how Trump’s administration is already working on our minds.

Like the authorities in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Trump convinces his followers to forget their prior enmities and alliances. Russia has always been our friend, not our enemy. Also, Trump’s obsession with the Mexican-U.S. border echoes Big Brother’s policy of perpetual war. Lying outright to the citizenry is, yes, “Orwellian.”

But there is no Amazon.com in Nineteen Eighty-Four, because it is not a novel about globalized capital. Not even slightly! Nineteen Eighty-Four does not pastiche a world ravaged by capitalism and ruled by celebrities—the kind of world that could lead to the election of someone like Trump. Instead, it depicts suffering inflicted by state control masquerading as socialism. Remember, the banned book that opens Winston’s mind is called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism. That book, mixed with Winston’s own memories, supposedly reveal the true history of his world.