The totalitarian regime of 1984 brings innovation to the erasure of history. While other dystopias have their bonfires—cinematic conflagrations that turn censorship into spectacle—the Party, in George Orwell’s vision, relies on memory holes. The devices are incinerators, in the end; they burn books (and news and letters and art and all other evidence of the non-Party past) as effectively as bonfires do. But their flames are neatly hidden from view. Memory holes look and operate roughly like trash chutes: All it takes, to consign the past to the furnace, is a flick of the wrist.
Memory holes, in that sense, are propaganda by other means. They may destroy words rather than churning out new ones, but they are extensions of the Party’s insistence that “WAR IS PEACE” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” They do the same work as the creation of lies—they unsteady the world—by turning absence itself into a claim of power. The devices are tools of mass forgetfulness. They rob people of their past, of the stories that once bound them to one another, and thereby of their future. But they turn the destruction into a matter of infrastructure. They make the burning effortless. They make it boring. That is their menace—and their genius.
The bleakness of 1984 has been tempered, in the years since the novel’s publication, with one small bit of relief: The whole thing could be filed away as fiction. But Orwell’s insights are never as distant as we might want to believe, and recent days have provided more proof: The new Trump administration has spent its first weeks in office making memory holes relevant again. Words, websites, policies, programs, funding, research, institutional memory, the livelihoods of roughly 30,000 federal workers—they have all been, in some form, consigned to the chute. Purge, once a term of emergency, has become a straightforward description of policy. It is also becoming a banality.
Memory holes, those analog fictions, translate all too easily to the politics of the digital world. Americans are learning what happens when a president, armed with nearly unchecked power, finds his way to the “Delete” key.
The Trump administration’s purges are, in one way, fulfillments of long-standing political projects: the old aims of small-government conservatism, updated for the age of slash-and-burn partisanship. Trump has long made clear that his approach to leading the government would entail some dismantling of it. The jobs his administration has cut, the agencies crippled and gutted, have been realizations of that plan. The purges are also in line with the president’s own propaganda campaign—his styling of the federal government as a shadowy “deep state” and Washington as a “swamp” in dire need of draining.
The regime of 1984 erases the old truths in order to fill the void with new ones. Many of the Trump administration’s erasures, similarly, have been tactics of “Search-and-Replace.” Last week, Trump abruptly fired several high-ranking Pentagon officials, including Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president chose as Brown’s successor a retired three-star Air Force general. The White House, announcing the firings, offered little explanation. It didn’t need to. Trump, limited in his first term by officials who checked him, has learned his lesson. As he declared last week, in a tense exchange with Maine’s governor about the breadth of executive legal power: “We are the federal law.”
Had the president posted his claim to social media rather than offering it as a retort to an adversary, he might have written it, as is his wont, with all-caps insistence. “We are the federal law” is roughly akin to “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” in the depth of its incoherence. At best, it is a gaffe, uttered in anger. At worst, it hints at a twisted conception of U.S. government—a government so ruthlessly pruned that only one branch remains.
Early this month, The New York Times attempted to quantify the number of government webpages that had been taken offline in the days since Trump’s inauguration. It counted more than 8,000 across “more than a dozen” sites, including those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Head Start, the Food and Drug Administration, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The purges,” the reporter Ethan Singer wrote, “have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories.”
The information had been removed from public access—memory-holed—in response to an executive order Trump signed on one of his first days back in office: a document banning DEI, and the overall encouragement of diversity, equity, and inclusion, from the federal government. The order reads, and functions, as a legal and political document. It crushes DEI through the force of law and the threat of culture-war weaponry. DEI (sometimes also called “DEIA,” to include accessibility under its umbrella) is not one practice but many, a wide range of initiatives meant to bring fairness to environments where it has previously been absent. DEI has led to “disastrous consequences,” the White House order claims, without citing evidence; it is therefore “illegal,” the order stipulates, even as it neglects to provide a precise definition of what “DEI” entails.
Executive orders, given their stakes, typically bring extreme precision to their wording: Language that is actionable should also be, at the very least, legible. This order, though, exerted itself not only through its declarations—DEI as “corrosive,” “pernicious”—but also through all it left unsaid. DEI, under the order’s auspices, might refer to complicated hiring policies. It might refer to the word woman. It might refer to anything that whiffs of “wokeness.” It means, basically, whatever the White House claims it to mean—another example of the way absence can do the work of propaganda.
It is also how an executive order—its mandate limited, in theory, to the workings of the federal government—can extend to, and bear down on, the country at large. In response to DEI’s overnight illegality, universities across the country removed forums from their calendars and pages from their websites—cuts made in recognition, or fear, that research grants and other forms of federal funding, whatever their size or use, might implicate them in the ban. Corporations (among them Amazon, McDonald’s, Target, Google, Meta, and Walmart) scaled back and in some cases ended programs meant to ensure workforce diversity. Some had done so preemptively, in mere anticipation of the new Trump presidency. Some did so assuming that the federal elimination of DEI would expand, eventually, to the private sector.
The memory holes of 1984, dull as they are, are also warnings. They are always there, always available, always ready to consume new bits of history’s paper trail. The White House transmits its warnings, though, through the fog of endless ambiguity. Its DEI order, as a practical matter, is a mandate with few clear rules. Had Black History Month, for example, just been made illegal? How could one tell? What was to be made of the fact that executive agencies banned it from their calendars while the executive himself hosted a BHM event? The questions lingered, in essence unanswered. The order used imperative language but implied the conditional tense, casting readers—the country at large—to live in the blank space of the could.
When the Party of 1984 announces that “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” it is not trying to persuade. It is reminding people that it no longer needs to. A White House mandate that brings confusion to its demands for compliance—that leaves so much open to interpretation and imagination—makes a similar kind of claim. Words can addle, the propagandist knows, even in their absence. What does DEI mean, really? Who might be accused of using it, in violation of the law? Who will decide the terms?
In this regard, the answer is clear: the White House and its party of one.
The DEI order, despite and because of its ambiguities, imposed itself with remarkable speed and digital-age scale—“flood the zone” tactics, applied to the work of mass erasure. So efficient were the DEI-driven deletions that they were commonly discussed in self-ratifying terms: absences that have been enforced; purges that have been executed. This, too, was memory-hole politics at work. The devices of 1984 serve the Party not only by bringing tidiness to history’s destruction but also by turning the destruction into a passive-voice proposition. Memory holes are so user-friendly—so thoroughly intuitive—that using them quickly becomes a matter of muscle memory. “It was,” Orwell writes, “an automatic action” for people to open the hole’s little flap and consign the past to the fire.
Orwell, with that, breaks his own rule of writing—avoid the passive voice—to suggest how people, too, can be broken. Memory holes make their users part of the machinery. They make the purging of the past thoughtless, easy, mechanical, tautological: a thing that is done because it is done. The devices, in imposing passivity on their users, implicate them in the destruction and absolve them at the same time. They also, as they erase the old words, erode the old grammars. They are tools of a regime that has made itself the subject of every verb, and the agent of every action.
As the White House has expanded its project of erasure to the federal government at large, it has availed itself of the permissions of the passive voice. But it has also anointed a clear agent to carry out its project: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The group, neither a full department nor a full part of the government—overseen by the billionaire Elon Musk, who has been neither elected nor Senate-confirmed—has proved the glib literalism of Musk’s expressed desire to “delete entire agencies.” Armed with widespread access to sensitive government information but scant knowledge of how government works, DOGE’s agents have brought data-driven ruthlessness to their deletions. Barreling into federal offices, DOGE members have sown chaos along with pain. They have cut jobs, then reinstated them. They have introduced errors into the system. But DOGE has also operated, for the most part, in the shadows, its threats omnipresent and unaccountable: Big Brother, remade as Big Bro.
DOGE has done its work, in theory, in the name of “efficiency”: the business of government given a much-needed reorg, with the attendant collateral costs. But the purges, as “retribution,” have also been outgrowths of Trump’s long campaign to redefine certain government employees as likely agents of the “deep state.” The two rationalizations contradict each other, of course—one claims that civil servants do too little, the other that they do too much—but coherence is not the point. The people on the business end of it all, whether officially dismissed or laid off or cut or culled or forced into resignation, were essentially fired for cause. And the cause, as it so often is, was Donald Trump. Power, when claimed in this way, obviates the need for reason. It will take away whatever it wants—livelihoods, knowledge, history, rights, categories of people, democracy itself—simply because it can.
The Constitution, those crinkled pieces of parchment and ink, has always been at risk of being consigned to the flames, even by those meant to uphold it. Indeed, that risk is acknowledged in the document’s language. The past weeks have in some ways been evidence of the system working as it should, with attempted checks on executive power coming from the courts, from Congress, from the American people—and even, this week, from some chastened members of DOGE.
But these are only potential checks. They are safeguards relegated, like so much else, to uncertainty. If the courts find elements of the White House’s erasures to be illegal—and if the White House refuses to heed the decisions—what then? A Constitution in crisis can become, all too easily, a Constitution erased. Memory holes are tools of planned obsolescence. If they do their jobs, the world that is will eventually be fully severed from the world that was. People will comply not because they choose to but because they have been made to forget that other possibilities exist. The Party will rule not through force but through that final kind of efficiency: power pared so completely that only one regime’s vision remains. 1984 is fiction, yes, but the novel’s insight is not. When history is written by the victors, it can be erased by them too.
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