Trump team takes a page straight out of the "1984" playbook

I recently reread "1984" (having last read it about 40 years ago). Today I heard Kellyanne Conway talk with a straight face about "alternative facts" regarding the number of people who attended Donald Trump's inauguration. It made me realize how spectacularly prescient George Orwell was about how and why power-obsessed leaders manipulate truth. He wrote:

"The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it ...

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary ...

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality."