Orwell describes a mature autocratic, totalitarian society, in which misinformation and disinformation are "news" -- Truth is Falsehood; War is Peace. Orwell had a penetrating vision about how information would be managed in such a society. His primary target and concern at the time he wrote 1984 was Stalin. You would need to research a bit further to see how much time Orwell had spent in Russia.
For this nexus of reasons, 1984 has always been touted as a damning criticism of socialism generally. And there is little doubt that there is a Leninist patina to the world Orwell creates in the book. But the juxtaposition of communist totalitarianism and fascist totalitarianism is much more symmetrical than Righties would have us think. And in fact, if you study Nazism under Hitler and Goebbels, the German manufacture of information for a lemming populace better fits 1984 than Stalinist Russia, or otherwise there is parity.
The Russians, until this decade, had never been too masterful in the art of propaganda and deceit. Their deceits were so obscenely obvious that only a Russian absorbing the state-media-monopoly would fall for it. Their clumsiness derives from a defective laboratory: if the state controls all media to begin with, if there is a black-market set of media-sources, there's very little to experiment with in a pluralistic context.
Goebbels, on the other hand, is considered the Father of modern propaganda and psy-war. Then the CIA tried their hand at it, co-opting German refugee employees of the Goebbels propaganda machine. The company conducted research using these people for 15 years and a $billion per annum. This didn't even cover the cost of actual deployment, but you can read more about Frank Wisner, Sr. and the "Great Wurlitzer", Cord Meyer, Edward Geary Lansdale and others. Under Wisner's Directorate of Clandestine Operations, CIA was vetting manuscripts and published novels to subsidize Hollywood in promising movie productions:
The favorite which I cite often is Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate", although the book is full of snickering satire, while the film noir is a horror movie, and the horror movie is not all that insidious except for the addition of the "propaganda of action" that occurred in 1963 -- like bringing to life Pygmalion's statue of Galatea -- an "Oreo Cookie" of fictional preparation and shock reality. This particular case was the result of a renegade who worked in the lower ranks, with potent resources left in surplus after a plan to use them against Castro.
What the Russians learned more recently, probably absorbed some of that old CIA history. Call it a grain of salt moment, but Congress put the kibosh on CIA's work with Hollywood during the '70s.
In some cases, Walter Bedell Smith's idea that propaganda was a good prophylactic to reduce the cost of defense hardware had a ring of truth. Now, we find that combatting Russian psy-war is also costly.
But Orwell describes a world in which the State controls all media, and so 1984 gives us something to worry about, even as we sound the alarm to the threat from a thousand cable-TV microphones.
The only redeeming thing about Trump is his amateur understanding of techniques once deployed by CIA and certainly underlying concepts behind the Russian initiative. He's f***ing stupid with a capital F. But the longer he's in office, the more he will learn. So a Trump presidency post-2020 would be even greater cause for worry in terms of punishing opposition figures and greater state control of media. So I think the application of an Orwellian myth to the Trump presidency is especially relevant, even if not so accurate for the moment. But the worry we have is the Future.