Science strikes back at Trump
It would seem that Donald Trump, a science skeptic nevertheless benefiting during his coronavirus convalescence from the best modern medicine can offer, has poked a tiger in the ribs with a short stick.
This week, science — in the authoritative voice of The New England Journal of Medicine — roared back.
The prestigious journal took the unprecedented step of editorially condemning the Trump administration’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic and urged its ouster in the Nov. 3 presidential election.
The editor-in-chief said the magazine rarely publishes editorials signed by all editors. Much less does it wade into politics.
In breaking with that practice, it said the Trump administration took “a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”
American leadership was “dangerously incompetent,” it said, and anyone else “who squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences.”
More than seven million Americans have been diagnosed with coronavirus and more than 214,000 have died from the disease.
The scathing editorial followed a similar volley from Scientific American magazine, which had never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history until recently supporting Democrat Joe Biden.
The magazine said it felt compelled to speak out because “the evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science.”
It called the president both dishonest and inept, someone who has attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the research and public science agencies that help “this country prepare for its greatest challenges.”
Just weeks ago, in a meeting with local officials in California dealing with devastating wildfires, Trump said: “I don’t think science knows” what’s happening on climate change, something he has long dismissed as a hoax.
In a 2017 book called “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters,” Tom Nichols wrote that “the United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.”
Worse than mere ignorance, he said, is the fact “we’re proud of not knowing things.
“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.
“The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of ‘uninformed,’ passed ‘misinformed’ on the way down, and is now plummeting to ‘aggressively wrong.’ ”
There could hardly be a better description, or more ringing denunciation of the current president.
More than 50 years ago, Richard Hofstadter published a celebrated analysis of the strong strain of anti-intellectualism in American life — its hostility and mistrust of expertise.
Anti-intellectuals portray themselves, as Trump has and almost all demagogues do, as champions of the common people, celebrators of common sense who prefer the “everyman” to the experts, who are always portrayed as “out of touch.”
In the U.S., there has historically been, Hofstadter said, an overwhelming preference for commercial and business success to excellence in the realm of ideas, the intellect, the arts, the sciences. Trump exemplifies that strain. He is adulated by his followers not in spite of his inarticulate ignorance and science denialism, but precisely because of it.
So long as he doesn’t “talk smart” he is thought to be speaking their language, and by extension delivering the straight goods, no matter the monumental tally of his lies.
As analysts have noted, populism is seldom about reality. Rather it is about appealing to the masses, setting up scapegoats for those masses to loathe, and touting the innate wisdom of followers, irrespective of evidence to the contrary.
This week, science bit back, shredding Donald Trump with an emphatic QED.