When I heard the news the authoritarian imbecile had fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics director for the crime of factual math, I dimly recalled something that George Orwell had written in a magazine essay 86 years ago. I had to look it up to confirm my memory, but there it was:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

Orwell wrote that at a time when fascism and communism were riding high in Germany and the Soviet Union, a time when it was beyond impossible to imagine that such darkness could ever envelop the United States of America. Yet here we are, with 77 million voters having chosen a tyrant to tear us asunder from within, to the point where two plus two equals five because duh Leader can’t abide numbers that measure reality.

Remember, pre-election when he was convicted in a civil trial of massive business fraud because he fed fake numbers about his net worth to banks and insurers? And because, among his many cons, he insisted that his Manhattan apartment was 30,000 square feet, when in truth it was less than 11,000?

And remember, pre-election, when he was booked for alleged crimes in Georgia and, in lieu of being weighed as required, he insisted he was six-foot-three and 215 pounds? That was quite a stretch, coming from a guy whose bloat brings to mind Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca.

It’s a straight line from that weight farce to the firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer for reporting weak job growth. It’s a straight line from her firing to Trump’s math-flunking claim that “we’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1,500 percent” – which is nuts by definition, because it would mean that drug companies are paying us for using their drugs.

As we know, the purge of Dr. McEntarfer – who was confirmed as BLS director by 90 percent of the U.S. Senate, including then-lawmaker J.D. Vance – is merely the latest manifestation of Trump’s multi-front war on all forms of nonpartisan independent inquiry. His regime has even nixed a federal grant to study “The Spread of Unsubstantiated Information,” which was grotesquely predictable.

Day by day, the predator is raping empiricism itself. He told us all along that it would come to this. Those of us who spent years warning about the obvious are dumfounded so many voters remained so oblivious. Now we’ve got the country we deserved.

Without nonpartisan economic numbers, employers and investors are left in the dark, and, more broadly, the rest of us can’t really know what’s going on. But that’s all by design. Priority One in a totalitarian state is to repress knowledge and render the populace clueless. Any numbers that flatter the tyrant are OK; any numbers that make him “look bad” are borderline treasonous. It’s like what happened in the 1930s when Stalin announced a Five-Year Plan, but later purged his statistical director for “bourgeois pessimism,” for reporting low crop yields that made Stalin look bad.

Is there any reason to hope a pivotal share of Americans will wake up to what’s happening in time to salvage some semblance of a society grounded in factual reality? Is there any reason to hope that Trump will pay a steep political price for trying to render us clueless and stupid? I’ve seen polls that show him underwater on virtually every policy front (most notably the economy, thanks to his inflationary tariffs). I’ve heard that House Republicans back home for the August break are getting booed in town hall meetings for toadying to the tyrant – even in red Nebraska. But the road to a patriotic restoration will be long and arduous; failure will leave us with what Orwell prophesied in his dystopian novel, about math and the bending of minds:

“In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it…The very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy…For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

What then indeed.

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]