On Friday’s broadcast of “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s statement on birtherism was “a reverse, Orwellian inversion of the truth” and “it’s interesting that an authoritarian personality type comes in at the same time with a complete disrespect for even tangential relationship to the truth, that words are unmoored.”

Brooks said, “What struck me was that, especially reading the comment, the statement from the Trump campaign, which we heard summarized by Trump himself earlier in the broadcast, you know, we’re always used to spin. Usually, there’s some tangential relationship to the truth, but a corroding relationship to the truth, frankly, as politics has gone on over the years. But now we’re in a reverse, Orwellian inversion of the truth with this. And so we have a team of staffers, and then the candidate himself, who have taken the normal spin and smashed all the rules. And so we are really in Orwell land. We are in ‘1984.’ And it’s interesting that an authoritarian personality type comes in at the same time with a complete disrespect for even tangential relationship to the truth, that words are unmoored. And so I do think this statement sort of shocked me with the purification of a lot of terrible trends that have been happening. And so what’s white is black, and what’s up is down, what is down is up. And that really is something new in politics. And the fact that there’s no penalty for it, apparently, he’s doing fantastically in the last two weeks in the polls, is just somehow where we have gotten.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett