We doubt he's very happy about it...
So far, Donald Trump’s presidency is not proving good news for many and with less than one week in office he has already managed to alienate women, non US citizens, the LGBTQ community and essentially everyone who cares about affordable healthcare, climate change and the threat of nuclear war.
In the past week he has started repealing Obamacare, reinstated the global gag rule thereby threatening women’s reproductive rights and has removed all mention of climate change from the official White House website. It has undoubtedly been a bad week.
One thing he has done, however, is ignite book sales of George Orwell’s literary classic: 1984.
That’s right, in some of the most unexpected news to come out of Donald Trump’s presidency (even more unexpected than if he actually did go through with any of his campaign promises), Trump’s administration has caused Orwell’s book sales to soar, by accident of course.
The dystopian novel depicts a tyrannical political regime of dictatorship, extreme government surveillance and public manipulation. We’re not going to lie – it’s pretty topical.
It seems that the comparisons between Trump’s presidency and Orwellian society have caused the book sales to soar, with Trump’s senior advisor Kellyanne Conway adding fuel to the fire on Sunday by referring to Trump’s claims about crowd size as ‘alternative facts’ – a direct quote from Orwell’s novel.
Despite being published in 1949 the book made it into the top 5 on Amazon.com on Tuesday, with sales spiking so much that the publisher is supposedly printing more copies.
People have since been taking to twitter to post chilling 1984 quotes that sum up the current political climate. Many tweeted the famous phrase ‘who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’, while one Twitter user posted ‘Someone should let Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer know that Orwell’s 1984 is a warning; not a guide.’
