A Slate article, Is Anyone Actually a Scientist?, made me think about Trump’s denial of climate change, Russian interference in the US election, and any of the other issues to which Trump responds “nobody really knows”, as well as his comment that he knows more about ISIS than the generals.
What’s Trump actually saying when he says “Nobody really knows”? For most of the situations where he resorts to that phrase, he’s talking about a complex issue, be it scientific/technical or political, or in some other domain that he doesn’t know much of anything about. Since he assures us that he has a “very good brain” and is “a really smart guy”, we can assume that he has a very high opinion of his own intelligence. I think perhaps Trump’s comment about the generals and ISIS is very revealing. Donald Trump may not be able to recognize or accept that anyone knows more about anything than he does.
Therefore, if scientists use all these hard-to-interpret charts and voluminous data and talk about chemistry and modeling global circulation of the atmosphere or oceans — well, Donald doesn’t understand. And since he is, in his own mind, the smartest person on the planet, those scientists (or generals, or intelligence agencies) must just be making up garbage to confuse everybody. Because if any of it actually made sense, well little Donnie would be the first one in the class to understand, since he is the smartest one in the room — any room. At least in his own mind. If Donald doesn’t know, it’s obvious that nobody really does.
I fear this will not end well…...