A reelected Donald Trump would continue to attack studies that stand in the way of his agenda—and to make support for scientific inquiry a tribal belief.
The president of the United States cannot control the trajectory of a hurricane, but he can—we learned in 2019—force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to endorse a trajectory that he invented. Thus went Sharpiegate, the brief episode that began when Donald Trump tweeted a warning about Hurricane Dorian’s danger to several states. It was one of his more anodyne tweets, but he erroneously included Alabama. He doubled down when questioned, producing as proof a NOAA forecast altered with what looked suspiciously like a Sharpie. When this failed to quiet criticism, he strong-armed the agency into a statement that affirmed his tweet.
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The pandemic, of course, is where Trump’s willful and wishful ignorance turned the most deadly. Even as he privately acknowledged the danger of the novel coronavirus in February 2020, he publicly proclaimed that it would “go away” as the weather warmed. When that didn’t happen, Trump tried new ways to downplay the virus’s threat. He promoted miracle cures: first hydroxychloroquine and then convalescent plasma, diverting federal resources to drugs that did nothing against the virus. He mocked masks. When the vaccines finally arrived, he endorsed only half-heartedly what should have been his administration’s crowning scientific achievement, because admitting that the shots were a big deal would have meant admitting that the virus was a big deal.
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The upshot of Trump’s polarization of science is bad for everyone. The early days of the coronavirus were, despite everything that came after, a time of remarkable social cohesion. COVID attitudes had not yet hardened along clear partisan lines, and Americans, by and large, stayed home at first. We followed social-distancing guidelines. We successfully flattened the curve, at least for a time. In another crisis—another hurricane, another pandemic—we will again have to rely on one another. But can we, if we cannot even agree on the same reality?
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This is not Trump, it is conservatism generally. Conservative philosophy is to conserve traditional social and economic hierarchies. God over man, man over the family, white over black, straight over gay, cis over trans, and rich over poor. Science is antithetical to these kinds of hierarchical beliefs, therefore it must be rejected and repudiated.
Corporations over people.
Naw, the good Mormon Mitt taught us all that they are people.
I had to laugh when the cons tried to take up that talking point “corporations are just made of people”. Yeah, so is the government.
The fun part is when he freely admitted that he was lying to everyone about everything in the Bob Woodward interview and nobody blinked an eye.
Also that time he told Pence how stupid Christians are and gullible enough to believe anything he told them.
That (somewhere around there anyway) is when I realized: conservatives know who he is, they simply do not care. So long as he would stack the Supreme Court, he was useful.
Cruelty is the point, as well as trying to “own the libs”. The fact that normal people find donnie repulsive is part of the attraction for the con/Republican reptilian brain.
Grrr… why you… take my angry upvote, for daring to be factually correct:-). Yes, it does seem that hate spreads more easily than love, and perhaps fear better than anything. I find it hilarious actually that Trump himself is barely aware of what he is doing, it is like he is stumbling around saying whatever, and some things he says work (like this) while other things do not (remember when he told people to actually take the vaccine? and they hated him for it!? ah… good times:-P then again, he also told people to drink bleach and two people in Kansas actually did that, and my own sister went outside in the sub-freezing temps despite being sick based on the possibility that it might be covid and how sunlight is supposed to make it go away… yeah she knows literally nothing about biology)
He is a symptom himself of an underlying cause, despite how he himself is also a cause that further enacts things downstream of him. If you think how a medical doctor must navigate the variety of symptoms while also treating the root cause of a disease, it is quite impressive… however, I thnk that means that we are fucked, b/c how do we handle all of this at once? What democracy in all of human history has ever survived once it has devolved to become solely a 2-party system? Rome did not. And the world is too small these days. Looking at Israel, looking at Russia - if we think that if Trump gets elected a second time, and then that is followed by some other like-minded individual for a stretch of 8 years, that the rest of the world (like China) is just going to stand by and watch bemusedly… then we will be very surprised when they do what we will not and take action to protect themselves. Being a “civilian” doesn’t mean what it used to these days, and Russia in particular is very much blurring that line when they take civilians and with a gun to their backs, converts them into “soldiers” (even if there is no ammo in their guns, how is the other side supposed to know that? plus their bodies as they die - sorry this is gruesome but I think necessary - explode the mines, which then allows the real soldiers to follow, and shoot & kill not only them but their families at their own backs).
Does there come a point where, while it might be “understandable” that Russian civilians may or may not fully support the war, that no longer matters? And if so, THE USA HAS NUKES TOO, so what will the other nations do if we start to ally ourselves with Russia and become aggressive ourselves (is there a doubt that Trump would do this? he has already assassinated people!? mostly on a whim to try to gather media attention and thereby help get himself re-elected; this is not solely the plot of a bad movie, it is also our fucking reality!?), or at least softly block things like the UN resolutions against them? And then going one step down the ladder, at what point are people like Moscow Mitch “aiding” Trump, even if the mouth-noises he makes state the opposite, yet he still is the one who blocked the rest of the second impeachment effort, plus the first one too. If a murderer lives in your house and continues to come out and murder, and you help him evade police, then you are literally an accomplice to his crimes, in the eyes of the law. So at what point will people who vote for Trump - let’s say for the sake of argument that we exempt the first time when really nobody knew who he was, and anyway most people voted as protest against Hillary, but thinking that she would win in spite of that - be considered thus? Even that might be going too far, b/c “voting” is one thing, while “obstruction” is another, and yet the latter is happening too, and not merely as a by-product but as the entire point of what they were sent there to do?
A constitutional crisis is coming. They will not allow otherwise. I am not advocating anything at all, except that we think about what that means, b/c at this point there is a very high likelihood. Even with a mere 66% chance of rain I may bring an umbrella? And like rain, hate is a force of nature, that cannot really be stopped. Personally I do not think that we will survive. In fact, if you really want to get into it… I think we already have not survived. “Democracy” is a fiction that we tell ourselves is real, and in that sense the conservatives are telling the truth when they say that they want a more honest & stable government, without that little nuisance to have to keep working around.
Oh but hey, Roe v. Wade was overturned so… I suppose it was all worth it then, in the end? (to them) /s
trump is just abusing a method conservatives have purposefully cultivated over the last 30 years by slowly killing public schools.
if your kid is in a private school, you (we) are part of the problem.
instead of fixing public schools, everyone (re: rich) moved their kids to private ones, and then promptly de-funded public education. whats left are a shitload of unprepared, non-critical thinking humans ready to vote for whatever fox news tells them to.
as a nation, we got what we paid for
This has been the cons/Republicans for decades and decades.
