There’s one thing eerily Orwellian about Donald Trump’s America, the place fact is dismissed as a lie, and lies are disseminated as fact: ANDREW NEIL

‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.’ These are the claims of state propaganda in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, a tale of how tyranny rules through lies, deceit and the quashing of all dissent.

Sad to relate, there is something increasingly Orwellian about Donald Trump‘s America in 2025, where truth is dismissed by government as a lie, lies are disseminated by the state as truth and plans of battle can on no account be regarded as war plans.

The growing Orwellian tendencies of the Trump administration came into stark relief this week with its attempts to defuse the Signalgate scandal after it emerged that Defence Secretary Pete ‘Hapless’ Hegseth had shared the precise timings of upcoming US airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen to a chat group of senior cabinet ministers and security officials on Signal, a commercial messaging platform.

In a petulant, rambling rebuttal, Hegseth insisted that he hadn’t disclosed any ‘war plans’ via Signal, which is less secure than the official communication channels that are meant to be used for handling sensitive and secret material. He was backed up by the White House.

Well, here are just a few excerpts from what Hegseth told the Signal chat group in advance of the attack:

’12:15: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)’

’14:15: Strike drones on target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP)’

’15:36: F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.’

Call them what you will – war plans, battle plans, plans of attack – the semantics hardly matter. No sentient, honest person could deny that revealing details of the start time and schedule for two waves of bombing raids before the operation had begun is obviously secret information of the most sensitive sort.

If it had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have seriously compromised the mission and cost American lives. At no stage did a single one of the 18 in the chat group, consisting of the most senior folks in the Trump administration, say: ‘Er, should we be talking about this on Signal?’

In a normal government anywhere else in the world, those at the top responsible for this egregious dissemination would have been instantly fired – if they had not already resigned in shame and ignominy.

But the Trump administration is not normal. It is defiantly toughing it out. No classified information was involved. Security was never in danger of being breached. Nobody did anything wrong. Any suggestions to the contrary are ‘fake news’.

By repeating this false mantra often enough the administration aims to turn lies into truth and truth into a lie. It might even get away with it, such is the cult-like unanimity of the messaging from the Oval Office down, repeated and amplified without the slightest caveat by the likes of Fox News, the semi-official broadcasting arm of the Trump White House.

This blatant attempt to bury the truth is all the more remarkable because, unknown to the jejune Hegseth as he was bombastically showing off his war plans to colleagues, a journalist had been accidentally invited to join the Signal chat group and was privy to everything the Defence Secretary was so cavalierly revealing. It was a potentially catastrophic security breach.

But far from holding up their hands in horror and shame, Trump and his acolytes simply trashed the journalist, Jeff Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine. Trump called him a ‘sleaze bag’ leading a media ‘witch hunt’. Others piled in, dismissing his presence in the chat room as a ‘hoax’ and accusing him of being a ‘sensationalist’ prone to conspiracy theories.

Goldberg is certainly anti-Trump but he is none of the above. He’s the only one linked to this fiasco who has behaved responsibly throughout. But it has long been Team Trump’s default position, when its back is to the wall, to play the man rather than the ball.

As I have said, it is also eerily Orwellian. In 1984, true believers are encouraged to participate in the ‘Two Minutes Hate’, a daily ritual in which they vent their hatred of regime ‘enemies’ with screams and jeers. In 1984, their prime target was a man called Goldstein. This week it was Goldberg’s turn to get his two minutes. There will be more to come.

In a vain attempt to move the story on, we were told to stop obsessing about Signal and acknowledge that, in attacking the Houthis, Trump was doing what his predecessor Joe Biden had failed to do. The attacks had been ‘unbelievably successful’, said Trump, a claim echoed by his minions. This was pure state propaganda.

The Biden administration mounted multiple attacks on the Houthis, usually with the support of British air power. Trump has upped the frequency and severity but it’s not clear what that’s achieved.

Near-daily Houthi missile attacks on Israel continue. The Houthis are still a threat to the sea-lanes leading to the Red Sea, so most commercial shipping continues to avoid them.

The Houthis withstood eight years of air strikes by the Saudis and the UAE using the latest US military hardware. It’s not clear that US air strikes alone will make that much of a difference. But anything, however unsubstantiated, that deflects from the embarrassment of Signalgate is worth pumping out.

An Orwellian disregard for the truth has been evident from the day Trump first entered the White House eight years ago. Bizarrely obsessed with the size of the crowd at his inauguration in 2017, Trump claimed it had been the best attended ever. Press secretary Sean Spicer was sent out to defend this boast despite the mountain of visual and statistical evidence to the contrary.

A few days later, Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s closest confidants, explained on TV that Spicer hadn’t been wrong, he’d just presented ‘alternative facts’. Orwell’s Winston Smith, beavering away fabricating facts in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth in 1984, couldn’t have put it better.

In Orwell’s dystopian novel, the world is dominated by three totalitarian giants: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. It’s not that different from Trump’s geopolitical worldview. As long as America gets to dominate the Western Hemisphere (Oceania, with Britain as its European landing strip – Airstrip One), he doesn’t mind a Russian-dominated Europe (Eurasia) or a China-dominated Eastern Pacific (Eastasia).

But unlike the fictional Oceania and Eurasia, who are at each other’s throats, Trump wants America to be Russia’s new best friend, dividing natural resources between them, as is all too apparent from the deal Trump is currently trying to shove down Ukraine’s throat.

Carving up the world between two dictators and a US president with his own ambitions to be a strongman is not how the 21st Century was supposed to pan out. The dark underside is already a cause for concern on America’s home front.

Nobody can object to the speedy deportation of Venezuelan street gangs inexplicably allowed to operate in the US during the Biden years. How it was done is another matter.

The bad guys were largely identified by their gangster tattoos. In one case, the tattoo might have been a logo indicating support for Real Madrid. Another was said to be in honour of a grandmother.

Who knows? It is why democratic legal systems put such store by due process to establish the truth, which was circumvented in this case even though it should have been a requirement, since the Venezuelans were not being returned to their own country but to a prison hellhole in El Salvador.

There’s more. On Tuesday, a young Turkish postgraduate woman with a valid student visa was suddenly apprehended on the pavement by plainclothes agents in masks and whisked away – ‘disappeared’, you might say – in an unmarked car. The video of it is what you’d expect in a Moscow street rather than a university town in Massachusetts.

It was later discovered she was in a Louisiana detention centre 1,350 miles away pending deportation. The government has suggested she was involved in pro-Hamas activities.

The only evidence presented so far is her co-authorship of a rather silly anti-Israel article in her university newspaper. There have also been reports of a French scientist barred from entry because he’d criticised Trump. Columnists beware!

‘All tyrannies rule through fraud and force,’ wrote Orwell in 1984, ‘but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.’

We are far from there yet. The US is still a robust, disputatious democracy. But there are enough sinister straws in the wind to justify concern that Trump’s second administration will not end well for America or what were, until recently, its allies.