In the past few months, President Donald Trump has claimed to be in control of many things. Not more than two weeks after his electoral victory, Trump tweeted: “The world was gloomy before I won – there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!”
Trump continued the trend in mid-December when he claimed victory after Sprint vowed to bring thousands of jobs back to the U.S.
Beyond stocks and jobs, Trump can add driving up book sales to his list of accomplishments. George Orwell’s “1984” saw its sales increase by nearly 10,000 percent after Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway referred to erroneous information disseminated by Press Secretary Sean Spicer as “alternative facts.”
Parallels were immediately drawn between Conway’s statements and the dystopian novel which tells of a society where facts are distorted and suppressed into a cloud of “newspeak.” For a brief period, “1984” reached the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s bestselling books list. Publisher Signet Classics responded by placing a 75,000-copy reprint order, according to NPR.
This isn’t the first time the 1939 novel has experienced spikes in popularity due to political occurrences. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s exposure of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance programs, the book experienced a similar revival in 2013.
