Trump’s Headlong Rush to Ignorance

In March 1970, during the confirmation hearings for Richard Nixon’s nomination of the stunningly unimpressive but pro-segregation G. Harrold Carswell for the Supreme Court, Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska leapt to Carswell’s defense. “Even if he were mediocre,” Senator Hruska announced, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation too, aren’t they?”

Carswell’s nomination was voted down 51-45, after which Nixon nominated Harry Blackmun, who was confirmed 94-0 and went on to write the majority opinion in the now-defunct Roe v Wade.

In 1970, mediocrity was apparently not considered an advantage in attaining high office. Now we are lucky to get presidential appointees who rise to that level. Thus, among the many previously valued human traits that Donald Trump has declared war on, including decency, compassion, truth, and honor, is…

Thought.

Like Hruska, Trump is pandering to those in the conservative base who loathe highly educated, highly paid “experts,” charlatans who steal from ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing people, bedrock Americans who do not need fancy degrees but only common sense to achieve a desired result.

Among Trump’s many targets have been the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, elite universities, and that hotbed of smug intellectual snobbery, the National Weather Service. (This just skims the surface but the list of gutted agencies, including the EPA, is so long that a smattering will have to do.)

The National Science Foundation is…or was…an independent federal agency that is…or was…one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research in engineering, mathematics, computer technology, and medicine. They evaluate proposals and award grants, often in yearly increments, to projects that they believe to be in the national interest. Not every project reaches fruition but some grants have led to rather significant advances, such as Lasik surgery, supercomputers…and the internet.

But to Trump and his loyalists, science is an affectation, so a new directive prevents NSF from awarding any new research grants or from supplying allotted funds for existing grants “until further notice.” Trump appointees also required NSF staff, those who remain, to screen any new grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities,” with any not “in alignment” rejected. One can only imagine what the forbidden territory will eventually encompass. In addition, it seems certain that any NSF staffer who approves a project that the Trump crowd does not like will be fired.

While disemboweling the NSF will impact our future, the gutting of the CDC and the FDA may well impact our present. The CDC has already lost a fifth of its workforce, with more cuts to come and FDA has been similarly denuded. And what were these overeducated, overpaid, useless bureaucrats doing? Wasting their time and the public’s money by funding programs to cure and prevent disease, making certain we are not poisoned by the food we eat or the medicines we are prescribed, investigating the causes of illnesses, especially those that might have an environmental component, such as asthma and lead poisoning, and setting up prevention programs so that the million Americans who died during the Covid pandemic, hoax though it may have been, might be saved the next time around.

And, of course, overseeing much of the replacement of hard science by quackery is Robert Kennedy, Jr., whose own scientific philosophy seems to have been acquired from the 1600s. It is surprising that he did not attack the new measles outbreak by ordering afflicted children to be bled. The consequences of Kennedy’s aggressive idiocy are potentially catastrophic, especially if once eradicated diseases, such as smallpox and polio, gain a new foothold in what promises to be a burgeoning population of unvaccinated Americans, the vast majority of whom will be children.

But if you’re going to attack thought, the best place to go is where it is taught, and so perhaps Trump’s favorite target has been higher education, especially Ivy League universities.

Universities certainly have their problems, everything from overpaid tenured professors who don’t teach, to legacy admissions, to skewed curricula, to bloated administrative staffs, to selective definitions of free speech, to astronomical tuitions that saddle students with crippling debt that will often result in default or forgiven loans. But universities and the research they do are also one of the main reasons the United States ascended to world dominance in medicine, technology, science, and business. (They turn out a lot of lawyers, too, but it is unclear if the resulting litigious legal system is a benefit or detriment.)

Trump wants nothing less than to dictate to undergraduate and graduate programs what can be taught and what cannot. And he has not stopped at higher education but intends the use the power of the federal government and money it dispenses to school districts to ensure that K-12 schools turn out a series of mindless robots who think the United States is and always has been the nicest, safest, most virtuous nation on Earth, where discrimination never existed, everyone went to church, the law was equal for all, everyone who went to jail deserved it, white people were fair, charitable, and kind…and the 2020 election was stolen.

As noted above, all this represents a mere sampling of Trump’s initiatives, but that he wants to foster a society so profoundly ignorant, so unwilling or unable to question, so mindlessly loyal to his vision, must…not may, must…result in a nation that loses its edge, forfeits its leadership, and ultimately diminishes the quality of life for large swaths of its citizenry.

It is important to note that ignorance is not the same as stupidity. Stupidity is an accident of birth; ignorance is a choice. While there seems to be no shortage of genuinely stupid people in the Trump administration, there are many, such as Marco Rubio and Howard Lutnick, who are not. That they may agree with Trump on foreign policy or even tariffs is beside the point. For the sake of position and personal power, they have embraced Trump’s drive to Make America Ignorant, which they know to be abhorrent and destructive.

And so, Trump and his followers have made their choice. The rest of us need to make ours.