Governing in the Dark
On the foolish irresponsibility of the Trump administration’s hostility to scientific thinking and research
With the one-month anniversary of the second Trump administration coming up later this week, this seems like a good time to take stock of where are.
In my writing (and teaching) about Trump 2.0 so far, I’ve highlighted two broad themes. First, I’ve noted the administration’s aggressive, multifront assault on the separation of powers, with the White House asserting vastly greater power, both within the executive branch and of the executive branch vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than any past administration.
Second, I’ve suggested that Donald Trump aims to personalize the presidency by embracing a transactional, clientelistic approach to governing that rewards friends and harms enemies. A great many things we’re seeing from the administration, from the obsession with tariffs to the Justice Department’s moves to drop charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams, make sense when viewed against the backdrop of Trump’s commitment to governing like a mob boss who bestows tribute on compliant clients and inflicts harsh punishment on those who dare to defy his will.
But there’s another dimension to what the administration is doing that I’ve so far neglected and want to focus on in this post: Its outright rejection of science, expertise, academic research, universities, and knowledge derived from the empirical study of reality using rigorous and replicable methods. This can be seen in the administration’s draconian funding cuts to scientific, medical, and scholarly research, as well as in the way it formulates policy proposals in defiance of widely accepted, empirically grounded claims about how the world works.
The outright hostility to scientific thinking (broadly defined) is unprecedented and signals a wholesale repudiation of the model of governance that came to prominence roughly a century ago and has dominated policymaking ever since.
Lashing Out on Behalf of the Non-College Grads
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