“If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is. The Secretary of the Interior has made that designation . . . and Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that, pretty much every other outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America, and its very important to this administration that we get that right.” —White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking at her February 12 daily press briefing.
Back in 1997, in the dim pre-history of American Greatness, David King published a book entitled The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. In almost two hundred pages of photos, it demonstrated the ways that Stalin’s Soviet regime literally erased historical events and persons no longer considered to be consistent with the dictat of The Leader.
Such efforts involved extensive censorship and coercion, typically requiring the removal not simply of images and documents but the people to whom they were attached, who often wound up in a Gulag if they were lucky or in a ditch if they were not. At the same time, as the book shows, even more insidious than the coercion was the regime’s wholly cynical attitude towards truth—an attitude so well analyzed by George Orwell’s 1984 that it has come to be described by the colloquialism “Orwellian.” The regime and its Leader regarded themselves as literally authorized to dictate what is and what is not. It was not enough to denounce or disappear an opponent or to censor an image. It was considered necessary, and legitimate, to figuratively and literally erase the opponent and to produce an appropriately revised image or document in which that opponent did not appear, and thus did not exist, and indeed perhaps had never existed.
For Stalin—and, in different ways, for Hitler and Mussolini too—the essential principle of rule was simply stated: “what is, is what I declare it to be.”
On January 20, 2025, within minutes of his inauguration as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump declared, via Executive Order 14172, that heretofore the U.S. government would rename “the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico” as “the Gulf of America.”
Trump’s “Restoring [of] Names That Honor American Greatness” generated enthusiasm among his supporters, criticism among his opponents, and incredulity among most people, including most journalists. For the designation “Gulf of Mexico” has been in use for centuries, since before there was a United States. It has long been the internationally recognized designation for the body of water in question. And, until a few weeks ago, it was the designation employed by every American and especially by every American travel agent and resort owner.
And yet, with a stroke of a pen, Donald Trump declared it was now and forever the “Gulf of America.”
Google and Apple complied with Trump’s order. So too Axios.
But Associated Press chose a more nuanced response: “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.”
As a consequence, the White House very publicly blocked AP from Oval Office and Air Force One, making an example of the news agency for its temerity in failing to fall in line.
When questions were raised by journalists about whether such a move was consistent with either the First Amendment or long-standing White House practice, Trump doubled down, and went one step further, issuing a Proclamation declaring February 9 as “Gulf of America Day,” and calling “upon public officials and all the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.” Describing his renaming as a “momentous occasion,” he thus declared that Americans must not only change their language but celebrate him for proclaiming the change.
It was in this context that CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins pressed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who responded as she did on February 12, by not simply defending the denunciation and punishment of AP, but by declaring AP to be lying, and misleading the public, by refusing to acknowledge what is a fact.
Her logic was impeccable. Trump declared it. His hand-picked Interior Secretary “made that designation.” And thus it simply is. And to raise any question about this is to be not simply against what Trump says, but against the simple truth. The rhetorical coup de gras is the gaslighting at the end, the seemingly straightforward claim that “pretty much everyone else” knows this to be true, which renders anyone outside this supposed consensus very peculiar, suspicious, and indeed dangerous.
This is the methodology of totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian rule.
It is playing out in the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. And in the widespread scrubbing of federal government websites, an effort recently described by CBS News as a deliberate attempt “to remove content contrary to the president’s thinking.” And in the many directives requiring the repudiation of any and all signs of “wokeness” (citing recent Trump administration guidance, the Maryland National Guard just backed out of its long-standing participation in the state’s official celebration of the birthday of Frederick Douglass. One wonders how long until it is declared that Douglass himself is a much more complicated figure than many have thought, and perhaps never really lived, and the true heroes of the Civil War were Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson).
But the most serious instance of this quasi-totalitarian approach to truth, also declared in a January 20 Executive Order, was Trump’s pardoning of all individuals convicted of or charged with crimes associated with the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Through this edict, Trump explicitly redescribed every insurrectionist as a patriot, and every government official involved in the defense of the Capitol on January 6 or the arrest or prosecution of the insurrectionists as a “deep state” oppressor. As I argued recently, in “It’s Official: Donald Trump Won the 2020 Election,” through these pardons “Trump has commenced the process of erasing the truth not simply about January 6, 2021, but about the last four years.”
How serious is Trump’s Orwellian effort? Can it really succeed in reshaping public discourse? We can hope not. But can we be sure?
I am reminded of Vaclav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Writing in 1978, at a moment that he describes as “post-totalitarian,” Havel asks whether and how it might be possible to break through the repressive Czech regime’s veneer of invulnerability. He tells the story of a greengrocer who, upon instruction from the Party, “places among the onions and carrots, the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite,’” not because he believes the slogan but because it is the easiest way to get by in a very cynical society. As Havel writes:
We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
The Czechoslovakia of the 1970’s was not a full-blown Stalinist regime—thus Havel’s designation “post-totalitarianism.” But both parts of the designation matter, and while the Communist regime did not practice mass terror, and allowed a sphere of civil freedom in which individuals were free to “go about their business,” the regime very much claimed the authority to decide the limits of such business, and to exercise substantial control over both political and cultural life. When the regime circulated Communist slogans, it was well understood that the slogans were to be honored, and that every “good citizen” was expected to act as if they were not simply followers of the law but sincere and enthusiastic Communists. To do otherwise was to flout the official “truth,” which was the only accepted “truth”—and thus to be a dangerous liar if not certifiably insane.
We do not live in 1970’s Czechoslovakia.
But we do live at a moment when the democratically elected President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, seems intent on pursuing a very similar approach to public life, dictating what is and what shall be, and expecting those around him, and the citizenry at large, to follow in lockstep, and with at least feigned enthusiasm.
Havel makes clear in his 1978 essay that he understands the very real reasons why so many fellow citizens will make such accommodations with the regime, which are surely rational from the vantage point of the individuals involved. But he also holds out the hope that there are individuals who, following the example of his Charter 77 colleagues, will eventually discover that such accommodations come at too high a price, and thus will begin to raise questions, and to refuse to comply. Whether, when, and how such refusals might grow, he acknowledges, are open questions. What is important, he insists, is that there be some refusal, on the basis of which hope for the future can be sustained.
It took over a decade before Havel’s hope was vindicated (even if briefly, for the Europe of today is not the Europe of Havel’s hope).
Trump has only just begun to do the damage that he will surely do. On what basis can we sustain hope for a future beyond Trump? And how long must we wait for such hope to be vindicated?
