President Donald Trump has been tweeting out false quotes and attributing them to Congressional Republicans, according to a report from the New York Times, which has been looking closely at quotations found in the president’s social media postings.

According to the Times, as the House of Representatives was debating two articles of impeachment before a vote on Wednesday, Trump quoted one of his chief defenders, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee:

“In his tweet, Mr. Trump quoted approvingly from what Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, had said on ‘Fox & Friends’ about the two impeachment articles passed by the House — that they were the product of Democrats who ‘couldn’t find any crimes so they did a vague abuse of power and abuse of Congress, which every administration from the beginning has done.’ But in fact, Mr. Collins never made the claim that “abuse of power and abuse of Congress were common practices of past administrations.”

And that’s just one instance of the president creating fake quotations and putting them in the mouths of others, according to the Times:

“The Wednesday morning post was just the latest example of Mr. Trump, who rails against the ‘Fake News,’ doing his own kind of editing of comments made by top administration officials and other prominent allies. Mr. Trump has made a habit of injecting his own words into the comments of people he sees on television and then publishing them as direct quotes on Twitter, where he has more than 67 million followers.”

But perhaps more telling is the fact that the Republicans who are cited in connection with the fake quotations Trump sends out seem perfectly willing to go along with the ruse:

“More often than not, the allies who Mr. Trump misquotes do little to publicly contradict him. Sometimes a lawmaker’s office will simply point reporters to the transcript when asked about the disconnect. They rarely call out Mr. Trump for spreading falsehoods or altering the meaning of their words.”

All of this is yet another example of the cult of personality which has been built up around Trump, with members of his party afraid to criticize or second-guess him no matter what he does.

A quote from George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984 comes to mind:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again.”

It may be 2019, but we are living in the hell of 1984 Orwell warned us about.

Featured Image Via NBC News