OPINION EDITORIAL: The Trump Trance

UNITED STATES (TXAN 24) — George Orwell’s 1984 is often reduced to a shorthand for surveillance or authoritarian aesthetics, but its deeper warning was psychological.

Orwell understood that power is most durable not when it suppresses truth, but when people willingly abandon it. The most effective control, he argued, is convincing citizens to doubt their own eyes in service of loyalty.

That warning echoes loudly in today’s political climate.

There is a growing number of Americans who remain committed to a political movement even as evidence mounts that its actions contradict foundational democratic principles.

This loyalty is not rooted in policy outcomes or constitutional fidelity, but in identity. To question the movement would feel like self-betrayal. And so reality becomes negotiable.

Across the country, concerns over due process and constitutional protections are increasingly dismissed as inconveniences rather than safeguards.

Federal agents, some trained for only a matter of weeks, have been granted expansive authority in enforcement actions that blur legal and moral lines.

When these encounters result in serious injury or death, including involving American-born citizens, the public response from devoted supporters is often not alarm, but rationalization.

This is where Orwell’s insight becomes unavoidable. The issue is not whether incidents occur. They are documented. The issue is whether citizens are willing to assign them meaning.

When violations are excused because they are politically useful, the rule of law becomes conditional. When constitutional rights are defended only for those we favor, they cease to be rights at all.

This is not an argument about partisan labels. It is about civic responsibility. The Constitution does not belong to a movement, a leader, or a moment of national anxiety.

It exists precisely to restrain power when fear, anger, or loyalty tempt us to abandon restraint.

History shows that once exceptions are normalized, they expand, rarely in ways those who justified them initially expect.

Orwell warned that the final command of authoritarian thinking is not obedience, but internal compliance: the ability to accept two contradictory ideas at once. To believe the nation is free while excusing the erosion of its freedoms. To claim devotion to liberty while supporting its selective application.

Democracy does not collapse overnight. It weakens incrementally, through quiet concessions and moral shortcuts. It erodes when citizens decide that discomfort is more dangerous than truth, and unity more valuable than accountability.

A free society requires more than voting or rhetoric. It demands vigilance, especially when power is exercised in our name. Believing what we can plainly see is not disloyalty. Questioning authority is not extremism.

These are not radical acts. They are the minimum obligations of a self-governing people.

The trance Orwell warned about is not imposed. It is chosen. And it can be broken, but only if citizens are willing to look honestly at what is happening, even when that truth is inconvenient.