Interviewed by CNN’s Don Lemon, who claimed President Trump has lied over 2,000 times since he took office, former CBS anchor Dan Rather opined that President Trump’s statements about the media and his attacks on them are “straight out of Orwell.”
Rather started by huffing, “Truth is the currency of democracy.”
That statement certainly rang hollow, since Rather was fired by CBS after Rather’s team, in collusion with John Kerry’s campaign, aired unverified documents in 2004 about George W. Bush’s National Guard service.
Rather called Trump “authoritarian,” saying Trump wants Americans to believe that “the one and only truth comes from him.” When Lemon mentioned Trump stating, “Don’t believe what you see or what you hear, that’s not what’s happening,” Rather responded, “It’s straight out of Orwell … Orwell, what he wrote, it’s practically a shooting script for Donald Trump. … There is a method to this, and the method is to convince people that the only truth is the truth that comes from me, the ultimate power … As several people have said before me, he is not just attacking the truth, he wants to annihilate the truth. He wants to move us completely into the post-truth political era in which there’s no such thing as objective facts. He is the only fact.”
Rather claimed there “has been some desperation” in Trump’s recent attacks, adding, “And as he gets more desperate he takes bigger risks in telling bigger lies or more often telling lies. And telling people, ‘Look, don’t believe what you read or see anywhere else, just come to me. I have the ultimate truth, I am the way,’”
What is ironic about Rather’s remark is that in Orwell’s “1984,” Big Brother uses the media to control the masses. That is far more similar to the Barack Obama years, when the media acted like lapdogs for Obama. Trump targeting the media is precisely the opposite of 1984.
Yet Rather describes Trump’s actions as Orwellian . . .