Daniel Richardson, Payson, AZ, October 2020
Those of us in the science profession would prefer to stick to our jobs and not get mixed up in political frays. But once in a while we are compelled to do so, and the words and deeds of President Donald Trump toward science and medicine has necessitated such a time. From candidate Trump saying that climate change is a hoax to President Trump saying that the coronavirus is a hoax, Donald Trump has been consistently dismissive of factual evidence mostly, but not exclusively, science-based. And it's not just Trump's words, but also his deeds that have been dismissive and damaging.
Although nearly every administration in modern times has politicized and/or abused science to promote its political agenda, it's the magnitude of the abuses under Trump that are almost beyond belief. On this note, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) tracks abuses of presidential administrations toward science counting as abuses such things as the defunding of federal agencies based on science, censoring what federal scientists are allowed to say or publish, altering scientific reports, disbanding scientific advisory panels, the firing of federally employed scientists without cause and many more.
The UCS thought that they had hit the zenith with George W. Bush who racked up 98 abuses of science in his eight years as President earning him the title of most antagonistic president toward science in modern history. Little did they know that the worst was yet to come. Donald Trump put George W in the dust by committing over 100 attacks on science in just two and a half years. On an annual basis, that's over three times as many as President Bush. As it would be quite a chore to cover all of these in a single document, I'll point out just a few of the ones that I feel have been, and still are, most damaging to the health and wellbeing of our Nation and the people in it.
If you considered Trump's abuses of science as nuggets, then the ones directed at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be the motherload. For starters, every proposed budget during the Trump presidency has included significant cuts in funding of the EPA. The most recent of these being a proposed 26 percent cut in the EPA share of the fiscal 2021 budget, a reduction that would eliminate at least 50 EPA programs.
Since its establishment by President Nixon in 1970, the EPA has been supported by every subsequent president with the exceptions of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Reagan sought to weaken the EPA by appointing an anti-environmentalist, Anne Gorsuch Buford (Neil Gorsuch's mother), to head the agency. She spent her three years as its director trying to scale back, if not eliminate, many of the EPA regulations. However, she saw little success.
As stringent as Reagan's opposition to the EPA was, it pales in comparison to that of Donald Trump. But then, what could you expect from a president whose experience of the great outdoors has been limited to well-manicured golf courses. Trump's vendetta against the EPA began early in his presidency by appointing Scott Pruitt as the EPA Director. Pruitt was a lawyer, not a scientist, whose environmental experience consisted of suing the EPA on behalf of the carbon fuel industry. He only served about a year and a half before being forced out due to his participation in several scandals. But during his relatively short tenure, Pruitt managed to remove most of the environmental scientists from the EPA advisory panel.
Pruitt was replaced by the current administrator, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, who like Pruitt, has zero environmental science knowledge or experience. However, unlike Pruitt, Wheeler, an Eagle Scout, has stayed clear of scandals. But evidently obtaining the rank of Eagle Scout didn't teach Wheeler anything about the importance of a clean environment.
I must admit that to their credit, Trump and Wheeler, like Reagan, did recognize that the EPA was getting bulky and over-regulated. However, instead of just trimming out unnecessary regulations, they went after those that were necessary in protecting the environment as well as the science advisors who favored them. On this note, within his first year on the job Wheeler proved to be far more damaging than Pruitt in going after protective regulations and eliminating the voice of science. Some of the more noted of his hatchet jobs on the EPA include: 1) A systematic reduction in the role of scientists in the agency's policymaking. 2) A proposal to restrict the use of scientific studies in EPA decisions. 3) A roll back of an Obama-era regulation requiring coal-fired power plants to clean up their coal ash deposits (recall that Wheeler is a friend of coal). 4) A roll back of protections of the Clean Water Act. And 5) A roll back of emission standards for automobiles. There are more, but you get the idea that notwithstanding having been an Eagle Scout, Andrew Wheeler is not a friend of the environment. In fact, under his leadership the EPA could be more rightly named "The Environmental Pillage Agency".
Fortunately, things aren't as bad as they might seem. This is largely because the actions and important environmental regulations of the EPA from Nixon up to Trump have enough inertia behind them to keep going in spite of Trump and Wheeler's efforts to slam on the breaks and throw the EPA in reverse. The steering of the EPA toward its original objective of protecting the environment is being reasonably kept on course by its staff of non-political scientists and technicians (those who can't be fired by Trump or Wheeler) spread out over EPA's ten regional offices. These folks are doing a yeoman's job in keeping the EPA moving in the direction of protecting, rather than abusing, the environment that we all share. Nonetheless, they deserve a boss who supports rather than rejects their efforts.
As a bit of irony, Vice President Mike Pence recently pointed out that air quality in the United States has generally improved over the past several months. True enough, but this has nothing to do with the Trump Administration. It is instead the result of our severe economic slowdown due to the coronavirus pandemic in which the burning of fossil fuels has markedly dropped as people are driving less, airlines are flying less and coal-fired power plants are burning less coal due to a decrease in the demand for electricity by businesses that have had to scale back. You could rightfully say that all this is the indirect result of the Trump Administration's inadequate response to the pandemic that is upon us -- next topic.
While President Trump's attacks on the EPA have made for a less healthy environment, they have not been all that deadly, at least not so far. That has not been the case with his inadequate response to the coronavirus. In contrast to Trump's damaging actions on our environment, it's his inactions and failure to follow the advice of science and medicine that has resulted in the United States having more Covid-19 cases and deaths on a per-capita bases than any other first world nation. Another way of looking at it is that the US has about 4 percent of the world's population but so far has accounted for 22 percent of Covid-19 deaths. This means that if we were on par with the rest of the world, more than half of the people in our Nation who have died from the coronavirus would be alive today.
As President Trump himself stated in his recent interview with Bob Woodward, he knew about the severity of coronavirus as early as January of 2020. But rather than taking preemptive action at that point, he waited until the virus had a foothold in our Nation before doing anything. It was during that timeframe that Trump accused the coronavirus as being nothing but a hoax, a blatant lie given that he knew the truth. When he finally did take appropriate actions, such as getting respirators and personal protective equipment manufactured, it was a scramble to catch up which shouldn't have been necessary.
In the process of gearing up for the virus, President Trump made some absurd false statements, such as "anyone who wants a test (for the virus) can get a test". You couldn't then and you can't now. After having made that statement, Trump opposed himself by not supporting a $25 billion item for increased testing and contact tracing that was in a July 2020 pandemic relief bill.
Notwithstanding Trumps lack of support, testing eventually did get going following which the number of cases naturally went up as more folks infected with the virus were identified. Rather than being pleased that testing was helping to identify victims of the virus before they became deathly ill, Trump wanted the testing slowed down presumably because the resultant increase in the rate of new cases was making him look bad.
On a positive note, the Administration's assembling of a coronavirus task force was the right move. However, instead of standing back and letting them do their job, Trump constantly interfered. He even threatened to fire the head of the task force, Anthony Fauci, our Nation's leading infectious disease expert, when Fauci disagreed with him or said something that Trump didn't like. An early point of friction between Fauci and Trump was Trump's failure to understand that, as a never before seen virus, Fauci had to frequently adjust his recommendations as science and medicine learned more about how the virus is spread, what it does to the body and what mathematical models predict for the time course of pandemic.
Early on, for example, it was unclear if the wearing of masks would slow the spread. When it became unambiguously clear that mask wearing and social distancing were, and still are, key to slowing the spread, Trump refused to go along and continued to not wear a mask, or social distance, even when visiting places that required it. He has become somewhat better with this since contracting, what was thankfully, a mild case of the virus himself. However, his own illness taught him nothing about the nature of this virus as he continued to downplay its severity with dangerous statements such as "live your life and don't be afraid of it." You very well should be afraid of an easily spread deadly disease and adjust your life accordingly. Another dangerously misleading statement that Trump uttered after his recovery was: "if you have it, you have it, you get better". Try telling that to the families of the over 220,000 people who so far have died from the virus.
Since Trump didn't, and to a large degree still doesn't, routinely wear a mask or practice social distancing when out in public, neither did, or do, any of his immediate circle of family, staff and Republican admirers resulting in a large number of them testing positive for Covid-19, including the First Lady and their son. Thankfully, their cases for the most part have been relatively mild as well. However, the frequency of Covid-19 infections among those around him has earned President Trump the unflattering title of Super-Spreader.
Not only does Trump continue holding virus spreading events, like his campaign rallies in which few wear masks and there is no social distancing, he also continues to spread dangerous misinformation about Covid-19. Like "it will just disappear on its own" (it won't), or "we're rounding the corner" (our cases are increasing, not decreasing), or "I (Trump) will get rid of it" (shades of "only I can fix it", which he couldn't), or most devastating, "eighty five percent of the people who wear masks get the virus". That last statement is a reckless and dangerous twist of the possibility that lots of people who contract the virus wore masks some of the time. But Trump made it sound as if the wearing of masks increases your risk of catching the virus. The truth, as shown by numerous studies, is the exact opposite.
By mid-October of 2020 the U.S., along with the rest of the world, was dealing with a second wave of Covid-19. Trump has proven to be more inept at dealing with this wave than he was with the first. Not only has he refused to scale back his virus spreading campaign rallies, even when requested to do so by local authorities, but he took to demeaning infectious disease experts, such as Anthony Fauci calling him "a disaster" and the scientists who work with Fauci "idiots". What Fauci did to trigger Trump's rath was to more or less call him out for his virus spreading events, in particular the Rose Garden announcement of Judge Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court. Additionally, Trump didn't care for Fauci telling the truth about the potential severity of the second wave. Naturally, Trump didn't want to hear that sort of thing after having falsely stated that: "we're rounding the corner", and that: "the pandemic is nearly over".
President Trump's inadequate response to the coronavirus, along with his dangerous and misleading statements about it, has prompted the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine to weigh in on a presidential election (the present one) for the first time in its 208-year history of remaining solidly nonpartisan. In its October 8, 2020 edition, the journal published an editorial titled: "Dying in a Leadership Vacuum". The article, signed by 34 of the journal's editors, urged voters to oust Trump largely, but not exclusively, over the coronavirus issue. The article stated that our national leaders have undercut trust in science and government, causing damage "that will certainly outlast them." It further pointed out that instead of relying on expertise, the Trump administration has turned to "uninformed 'opinion leaders' and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies". The authors concluded by saying that: "When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs."
Scientific American, the popular journal that publishes the most recent noteworthy findings in all science disciplines, has for the first time endorsed a presidential candidate, that being Joe Biden. In doing so in its October 2020 edition, the editor stated that: "Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly." The article went on to say that: "The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people, because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. The pandemic would strain any nation and system, but Trump's rejection of evidence and public health measures have been catastrophic in the U.S."
Notwithstanding President Trump's inept response to the coronavirus pandemic, it will eventually abate through vaccines and with enough people following health guidelines. A different crisis that is upon us won't be so easy to conquer, that being global climate change. We've known for several years that we are in the midst of climate change through such things as the steady increase in average global air temperature, the melting of polar ice, the warming of the oceans, the increase in frequency and severity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, and the severe drought in the western United States resulting in a record number of forest fires.
Until recently, it has been debatable if the present global climate change is a natural cycle, of which there have been several in the earth's history, or if this one is due to human activity. However, in just the past few years it has become crystal clear that it's the latter and that the culprit is the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. There is now more agreement about this among scientists of all stripes then there is about what causes gravity. From my own scientific perspective, I have never seen a more compelling set of data as the one that points to human activity as the cause of our present global climate crisis.
As expected, given his tendency to dismiss factual evidence, President Trump is, and continues to be, a climate change denier. Passive denial is one thing, but Trump has taken a more active approach in things like cutting funds to agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, that are involved in developing sources of renewal energy, and pulling us out of the international Paris Climate Acord. Additionally, he ridicules and spreads misinformation about sources of clean energy, such as windmills, by saying things like windmills kill massive numbers of birds (they do kill birds, but automobiles and cats kill far more), windmills cause cancer (no evidence whatsoever for that) and if you live next to a windmill, the price of your house will plummet (no evidence for that either). Furthermore, like with the coronavirus, he doesn't listen to experts. This was most recently shown when Trump dismissed forest rangers and fire fighters in California who rightfully tried to tell him that the dry conditions fulling forest fires in the west is the result of climate change. He blew them off by saying things such as "science doesn't know", and by implying that the coming winter cold will stop the forest fires. The truth is that the science experts do know what they're talking about (their words are backed by facts), and cold weather alone will not prevent a forest fire. The bottom line here is that with the devastating effects of climate change upon us, we simply cannot afford to have a climate change denier in the Oval Office.
Given that Trump issues false statements about science, and many other things, on a daily basis I could go on and on. Rather than do that, I'll wrap this up with the following paragraph.
I have spent the entirety of my adult life in science and science teaching, a career which began in the early 1960s during the Kennedy Administration. From then until now I have never encountered a United States President more hostile to and dismissive of Science than Donald Trump. Considering the degree to which our Nation depends on science for everything from our food supply to producing energy to protection of our environment to addressing climate change to our health and health care and to even our national security, it is imperative that Donald Trump not be allowed another four years in the Whitehouse.
Afterthought: There have been five periods of massive species extinction since life first appeared on planet earth some 3.5 billion years ago. Each of these was caused by a global climate change triggered by some catastrophic event such as a giant meteor hitting the earth. If we fail to mitigate the present ongoing global climate change/crisis there will be a sixth, and it will include us.