WASHINGTON, D.C. Jan . 24 (DPI) – It appears the Trump administration has found its defining catch phrase – “alternative facts” – after one of Trump’s advisers foolishly used the nonsensical term in a television interview over the weekend.

That apparently triggered a spike in sales on Amazon.com of George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984,” according to The Guardian and CNN.

Orwell’s novel, written in 1949, is famous for its sinister double-talk uttered by authoritarians.

Kellyanne Conway, who’d been a key campaign adviser to Trump, decided over the weekend to get in another theatrical scrap with Chuck Todd of NBC News, this time over the size of the crowd at Friday’s inaugural.  At one point she suggested that one of her colleagues possessed “alternative facts” on the matter.

As The Guardian posted yesterday:

Comparisons were made with the term “newspeak” used in the 1949 novel, which was used to signal a fictional language that aims at eliminating personal thought and also “doublethink”. In the book Orwell writes that it “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”.

The ongoing anxiety – among both the public and press – over Trump’s and his staff’s incoherent bluster may be a healthy development, especially if it is spurring them to buy – and read – books about the threat of authoritarianism.