Empowering Bias: Trump Truth vs. Science
Photograph Source: Molly Adams – CC BY 2.0
It is true that science is embedded within human culture and therefore will carry some expression of human bias. However, this bias has always been considered a kind of contamination—something that drags us away from, rather than nearer, to scientific truth. Biases have come in innumerable forms, most claiming themselves to be representative of “real” truth. They have often come in the guise of religion, as Galileo can testify, and more recently, as those who do stem cell research can tell. But there are other mindsets that can lead us astray and indeed fatally cripple scientific endeavors. Take, for instance, turning race and ethnicity into racist dogmas. Or, just denying anything that gets in the way of one’s comfort zone.
In the short time Donald Trump has been in office, he has applied a plethora of science eroding biases to the federal government’s programming. Here are some of them:
—No Climate Change/Global Warming!
For years now Trump has proclaimed that global warming is a hoax, and there was no need to make concerted efforts to minimize something that is just “the weather.” Well, that’s fine as a personal opinion. It is not so fine as standard for government policies. And, even worse, taking steps to silence those with a different, more evidence-based position.
Within weeks of assuming office, Trump confronted us with this: Disappearing Data: Trump Administration Removing Climate Information from Government Websites. “So far, some of the most glaring deletions from the current administration have been on agency websites at the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the State Department, along with offices within the Executive Office of the President, like the Council on Environmental Quality.”
Why take the radical step of censorship? Why not put up your counter arguments alongside the scientifically supported ones? The probable answer is that debate is not what ideologues do—much less ideologues who are narcissistic and take all differences of opinion as personal attacks.
—No More Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)!
In his first week in office, President Trump issued a blizzard of executive orders. Many of them aimed at dismantling all DEI programs funded by the federal government. President Trump made it clear that he considered such programs to be “illegal and immoral.” So, on January 20, he issued an executive order terminating “to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions); all “equity action plans,” “equity” actions, initiatives, or programs, “equity-related” grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees will be terminated.”
To push this agenda along, the Trump administration sent just about every department of government an extensive list of “keywords” such as “gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, biologically male, biologically female, he/she/they/them” to use to flag projects likely to be purged.
There has been some on-the-job resistance to this process. For instance, the National Science Foundation (NSF) program director who, confronted with a host of programs flagged as potential violations of Trump DEI order, decided they were legitimate anyway. “I’ll probably get in trouble for doing that,” she said. “But I’m not in the business of McCarthyism.” Odds are high she will lose her job.
The NSF program director was reacting to the Trump administration’s attack on a decades old effort to make employment and eligibility for services fairer and more just. This effort, in turn, sought to rectify centuries of discrimination based on race and gender—a racist and anti-women culture that Trump now wants to revive. Why?
That discriminatory culture established the United States as a white male and Christian place even as the population diversified over time. The effect was to make fairness and justice, particularly in terms of the economy, education, housing, policing, and politics impossible without governmental regulation. This situation encouraged the growth of DEI programs. However, at the same time, this corrective effort came to be seen by a sizable proportion of white conservatives as a “reverse” form of discrimination. in Trump’s words that made it “illegal and immoral.”
Much of this attitude is a product of which of the myriad number of American subcultures you grow up in or are acculturated into. There are places in the United States where, historically, whites from poor to well off find self-esteem in the fact that people of color are lower on the pecking order. And this has led to culture wars triggered by the effort to increase opportunities for those who, for instance, grow in polluted neighborhoods, with poor underfunded schools. The counter effort to oppose this move for diversity, equity, and inclusion has, at least temporarily, won with Trump’s 2024 election.
One can call attention to the irony of a president, himself a convicted felon and abuser of women, deciding on what is or is not “illegal and immoral.” The hypocrisy makes little difference given the domestic balance of power. I once was asked by a frustrated member of an audience I was addressing, “but who are the ones in the right?” I had to answer, “those who win.” Fortunately, that position can change. Unfortunately, not always for the better.
Bending Science To “Trump Truth”
Donald Trump often declares himself a “very stable genius,” a suspicious claim from someone who is an egomaniac imposing his biases into the realm of scientific research. In other words, this “genius” now seeks to replace scientific truth with “Trump truth.” Here is a brief sample: Referring to his effort to destroy DEI programs, he declares that the government is no longer in the business of pushing “gender ideology extremism.” In other words, it will no longer support efforts to understand gender as physically and psychologically expressed along a continuum. That, of course, is how gender is actually experienced in the real world. Instead, the government will “restore biological truth” to its policy making. “Biological truth” here is not a scientifically based judgment, but rather a culturally asserted notion that gender is strictly binary.
According to the New York Times (NYT), the attack on DEI is “altering scientific exploration and research agendas across a broad swath of fields.” Prior to the present inquisitorial environment, it was generally understood among the scientific community that there was a representation problem. This in turn precluded large elements of the population from access to scientific learning and research and reduced the range of insights and objectivity that one was likely to get from those who were active in scientific fields. As a result, a wide range of DEI programs were initiated.
This has now been stopped dead in its tracks. Among those scientific organizations and agencies that have now been forced to turn back the clock and radically alter their funding and hiring standards are: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, NASA, The National Institutes of Health, and large numbers of academic research programs.
Again, the context for this has to do with the cockeyed view that challenging America’s historically discriminatory culture is “illegal and immoral.” How come? Let’s ask the question of Darren Beattie, a Trump enthusiast, who has been given the post of acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy (for which he has no obvious qualifications). Here is his answer, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” Trump Truth!
Other Trump actions have directly impacted American science. Dramatic cuts in funding and the White House issued orders to suspend grants have at least temporarily shut down programs ranging from NASA missions to research in regenerative biology. Trump’s people point to the rise of indirect costs, which they say hides waste and inefficiency. There is no doubt some truth to that charge. One might even speculate that all administrative undertakings experience a growth in waste and inefficiency over time. However’ in the present case, shutting projects down en masse threatens the very foundation of the U.S. scientific enterprise. Here is one assessment, “When we think about what is going to be immediately affected at [research] universities, it’s going to be the ability to keep the lights on. … It’s tragic that we are contemplating, as a country, destroying one of the great crown jewels of this country over the last 75 years. It will destroy it.”
One characteristic of Trump Truth is that it never involves thinking things through in detail.
Conclusion
One prerequisite of good science is open mindedness. That is not easy in the best of times because all of us come out of an historical and cultural context that unconsciously seeks to confine perception and imagination to accepted norms. But, in times of politically enforced ideological correctness, open mindedness can become openly stifled—even made “illegal and immoral.”
This process is not unique to the present American administration. Trump and company are now selectively replicating the same process that hurt Soviet science during the Stalin era. In the 1930s-1950s, Soviet Union physiologists were dogmatically bound to a Pavlovian paradigm. For a time, Einstein’s theory of relativity was attacked as “physical idealism” and only saved from suppression because of its relevance to the Soviet nuclear program. These are only two examples among many. As the well-known critic of ideological intervention in science, Anna Krylov, has observed, Soviet control over science “turned out to be a grand failure, and the attempt to patch the widening gap between the West and the East by espionage did not help. Today Russia is hopelessly behind the West in both technology and quality of life.” Can we learn from this history? Do our leaders in Congress and the White House even know this history?
Nonetheless, there is little doubt that similar intrusions into science during the present Trump era (actually we have precedents going back to Bush Jr.) will have a similar selective impact in the U.S. But Trump, like Stalin, doesn’t know of this possibility, or just does not care. He is apparently concerned only in his position of power which he conveniently equates with the good of the nation. Both men are examples of narcissistic sociopaths. Open mindedness does not go well with such people in power.
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