In George Orwell’s 1984, at the climax of Hate Week, Oceania is suddenly no longer at war with Eurasia, but instead is at war with Eastasia, and always has been. The pivot comes with no explanation or even announcement. During a public harangue, a Party orator is handed a scrap of paper and redirects his vitriol “mid-sentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.”
Republican politicians in Donald Trump’s Inner Party faced a similar verbal challenge when the president changed sides in Russia’s war against Ukraine. One morning in late February, Republicans in Washington greeted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero for continuing to resist Russian aggression. By afternoon, following Zelensky’s meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, the Ukrainian leader was an ungrateful, troublesome, and badly dressed warmonger who, if he hadn’t actually started the conflict with Russia, was the only obstacle to ending it.
After this new line was communicated to party leaders, a pro-Zelensky social-media post was taken down as swiftly as the banners denouncing Eurasia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Senator Lindsey Graham—all supporters of Ukraine—were sent out in front of the cameras like the Hate Week orator, not to explain a new policy but to pretend that nothing had changed while America switched sides. Using nearly identical language, Rubio, Johnson, and Graham declared that Zelensky must do Trump’s bidding, which is also Vladimir Putin’s bidding, and capitulate to Russia; otherwise, Johnson and Graham added, Zelensky should resign. America’s enemy isn’t Russia. America’s enemy is Ukraine.
The philosopher Henri Bergson observed, “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” The cause of laughter is the “deflection of life towards the mechanical.” This insight explains why there is something comical about politicians when they substitute programmed language for speech that reflects actual thought. They are besuited contraptions, like another orthodoxy-spouting ideologue in 1984 whose spectacles catch the light and seem to render him eyeless while his jaw keeps moving, as if “this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy.” Having emptied themselves of the capacity or will for independent judgment, they become extremely fluent automatons, able to put together whole paragraphs of logical-sounding arguments, but with no connection between brain and mouth. Every politician is required to speak like a robot some of the time; it takes a special talent to betray an entire worldview without missing a beat.
Graham’s mechanical style is to flit almost gleefully from one position to its opposite while remaining a party insider, which is his only consistent position and the justification for all his others. Johnson stares through his glasses and gropes for the appropriate words with the unease of a simple man trying not to screw up his lines: “I can tell you that we are—we are re-exerting peace through strength. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We knew that this moment would come, we worked hard for it to come, and now it’s here.” Rubio is a more complex case. He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.
But Rubio had already begun the process of mechanizing himself weeks before, when he shut down foreign-aid programs that he had always supported. Reappearing in public after the meeting with Zelensky, he denounced the Ukrainian president with the overzealous exasperation of a successfully hollowed policy maker.
When a leader requires his underlings to say what they know isn’t true—up is down, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, Ukraine is to blame—it’s a test of loyalty and a show of dominance. Ritualized humiliation is essential to an authoritarian regime. Trump forces aides, advisers, and the friendly press that he allows into the room to utter absurdities on his behalf in order to bind them closer to him, and thereby frees himself from any restraint. They know from the example of more courageous or less careful colleagues that any quiver of independence will doom them politically, and perhaps even harm them physically. Almost immediately, it seems, they cease to be troubled by conscience or even motivated by fear. As they become more machinelike, they forget that they ever held a different idea, or any idea at all. You can see it in their relaxed features and smoother delivery.
Trump alone is allowed to say what he thinks. There’s nothing laughably mechanical about his abandonment of Ukraine, Europe, and American leadership of the free world; he doesn’t embrace Russia like an eyeless dummy. He never sounded more natural, or truer to himself, than when he told Zelensky of his bond of sympathy with Putin and mocked the Ukrainian president for the agony that Russia has inflicted on his country. And if, a week or two later, American policy on the war flipped again, it wasn’t because Trump’s worldview changed—he still prefers dictators and wants to be one of them. It only meant that the leader can declare that Oceania is at war with Eastasia or Eurasia on any given day.
At least from the time he was 5 years old and, according to Maggie Haberman’s biography, Confidence Man, threw rocks at a baby in a playpen, Trump has admired strength and despised weakness. Terms used by Ukraine’s defenders, such as sovereignty, democracy, and shared values, obviously disgust him, because they’re the language of the weak. For Trump, strength has nothing to do with the classical virtues of nobility and courage; it’s the raw power to humiliate another, whether a person or a country. Zelensky’s physical and moral courage, including his refusal to be belittled on camera in the Oval Office, enrages Trump, for he’s accustomed to endless subservience and flattery.
Trump’s decision in March to halt the flow of arms and intelligence to Ukraine doesn’t follow a foreign policy of isolationism. When Vance, running for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio in 2022, said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” he was expressing an isolationist sentiment. This indifference falls well short of Trump’s contempt for Zelensky and long-standing attraction to Putin. Trump wants Russia to win and Ukraine to lose.
Some analysts argue that Trump is turning American foreign policy toward “realism”: a cold calculation that Ukraine falls in Russia’s sphere of influence, not ours; that defending an embattled democracy against a much larger and more powerful dictatorship depletes American resources without serving its interests; that, in an ever more multipolar world, the United States is overcommitted; that the U.S. should stop trying to uphold global rules and democratic values, and start acting like a traditional great power that uses its immense strength to secure specific interests.
These sound like rational claims, but they don’t describe Trump’s words and actions. There’s nothing realistic about aiding a dangerous adversary, undermining allies, breaking agreements, extorting concessions, threatening annexations, and destroying an order that has expanded American influence and made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history. These are the policies of crude power worship, not realism. They are extensions of Trump’s character around the world, and they will destroy all that Americans and others value about this country, turning the United States into a shinier image of Putin’s Russia. It doesn’t matter whether Trump is an actual Russian asset; he’s already doing the work of one.
A poll in early March by the civic organization More in Common shows that Americans haven’t abandoned all the values that Trump and his sycophants are trashing. Nearly two-thirds of respondents still sympathize with Ukraine and more want to continue arming it. Even among Republicans, a majority believe that Russia is to blame for the war and consider Putin a dictator. Support for Russia is in the low single digits. The survey shows that years of propaganda and lies from Trump and the MAGA right have failed to poison the body politic with cynicism. Although the elites in power insist that might makes right and that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, most ordinary Americans haven’t yet thrown away a worldview of true and false, right and wrong. They might be America’s last best hope.
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “The Hollow Men.”
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