Doublethink is thriving in Trump's dystopian present.

George Orwell insisted his greatest work was a warning, not a prophecy, writes his biographer Dorian Lynskey. Never has his description of hypocrisy and dictatorship been more apt

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It has been a tricky week for conservatives who thought they could support both Donald Trump and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine, far from being invaded by Russia in 2022, had “started it”, and that the country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky’s approval rating was just 4 per cent (it is over 50 per cent). Zelensky retorted that Trump was living in a “disinformation space” created by Russia. Trump fired back by calling Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime.

Some Trump admirers had enough integrity to point out that Vladimir Putin was the actual dictator who had in reality started the war, but many vacillated. Boris Johnson protested that Trump’s words were “not intended to be historically accurate” while Nigel Farage said they were not to be taken “absolutely literally”. You can imagine what George Orwell, a crusader for linguistic precision and scourge of slippery euphemisms, would have made of that.

It is a massive cliche to invoke Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four when discussing Trump’s assaults on reality, but it’s an unavoidable one when 77 million Americans re-elected a man who, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker team, made 30,573 “false or misleading claims” during his first term.

Back then, Trump’s breathtaking hostility to the truth could sometimes seem comical. His adviser Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts”, a risible substitute for “lies”, in response to something as trivial as the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

But there was nothing funny about his anti-democratic insistence that he had won the 2020 election, leading to the mob violence seen during the 6 January riots. Around two-thirds of Republicans currently believe this self-serving fiction. As Orwell wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”