This is Words Matter with Elise Jordan and Steve Schmidt.

Steve, you tweeted that you're reading a book by Tom Rex, who is more well known for military history, his coverage of the Iraq Wars in particular.

But this book is about Churchill and Orwell. Tell us why you like this book.

Well, first off, I'm a big fan of Tom Rex. Really the preeminent military affairs journalist, I think of his generation. He's written a lot of books about the Wars of our generation, a student of military history.

But this book, I think, is very timely. In our podcast, obviously, it's called Words Matter.

And for those two men, Orwell and Churchill, in defense of liberty, in defense of liberalism, small L liberalism, in defense of truth and democracy, they were very precise in their use of words to craft an argument that was essential at moments in time when liberty was under its gravest threat.

But Churchill and Orwell never actually met.

They did not. And they were very different men, but each and their own way used words to communicate the vital necessity and maintenance of liberty, freedom and the threats to it.

Orwell saw the danger of totalitarianism. And he wrote great books about it, 1984, animal form that we remember.

But he was an essayist who was prolific in his writing, his warnings about how dangerous it is when truth is assaulted, when truth is affronted. And he understood that in a democratic society, our institutions are laid on a foundation of trust and truth.

And that without truth, you can't have liberty, you can't have freedom, you can't have democracy. And when we see this president's assault on the truth, these words, and what he said, stands timeless.

And so what Tom Ricks has done here is connected to vitally important defenders of freedom and liberty together, not through the experiences they shared because they didn't, not because of the generation that they grew up in because they didn't. But what connected them was a fidelity to truth and liberty.

Steve 1984 had a resurgence in popularity after Donald Trump won the American presidency. And every week, really every day, multiple lies are told by Donald Trump.

And the nature of the lie is an authoritarian, all politicians disemble usually a lie of self interest. I didn't have sex with that woman is obviously the most famous one. Trump's lies are different. Their lies of authority and George Orwell would have recognized it as the fetish of an autocrat when Trump does seem to have a fetish for autocrats indeed. He does. And when Trump lies, it requires somebody to suspend.

Disbelief that if what is true is what the leader says is true, or what the leader believes is true is straight out of 1984, where at the end of the book, the protagonist Winston is being tortured and interrogated by a party official who holds up four fingers. And he says to Winston, how many fingers am I holding up?

And Winston says, I see only four fingers with tears. And the party official says, but it could be three, it could be five. It's whatever the party tells you it is. And so when somebody goes out from a White House podium and says that Trump's crowd size is bigger than Obama's understand, stupid, though the claim is, it is frightening because it suspends the ability of otherwise rationality.

And so when you're talking about the fact that you're not being able to handle people to think for themselves and to process what is obviously true in front of their face.

Certainly the past three weeks seem like they could have been a modern day version of 1984 given how everyone's behaving and the attack on facts that are inconvenient for whatever political sides position that they happen to be pushing.

What do you think Orwell and Churchill would have made of these last three weeks?

They would have been appalled Churchill had a couple of observations. First was that in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

He did also observe of Americans and he was familiar with our character. He said that Americans will always do the right thing in the end though we will wait for the last possible moment to do so.

They would have understood that it's a chaotic country that it's a rough and tumble country but it certainly wouldn't have looked like the American politics that they were familiar with where American leaders conducted themselves with some level of dignity and decorum.

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