(Dis)Trusting Science in the Trump Era: The Partisan Divide

Introduction

Griffith et al. (2020) defines trust as belief in the competence of a person or persons to complete a given task while they describe distrust as questioning a person or persons’ motives and viewing their actions as suspicious. The terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, the global economic crisis of 2008, and the migrant crisis resulted in a general distrust of the entire US political system among many of its citizens. This distrust was intensified by the media’s intentional and repeated portrayal of these events and spurred the creation of extreme right political groups whose missions were to secure US borders and remove the US economy from the control of the global market (Muddle, 2019). Consequently, a nationalistic view developed among many Americans in reaction to perceived external threats to US “values, borders, and people that embraced a desire to return to a nostalgic imaginary past of US ‘greatness’” (Reyes, 2020, p. 870). In the midst of these crises, when US conservatives were leaning toward nationalism and populism, Donald Trump announced his bid for the US presidency (Reyes, 2020). Trump sensed the dissatisfaction with traditional politics among Republicans and capitalized on their frustrations by announcing a nationalist and populist platform, which was well received by Republicans and would ultimately land Trump the presidency (Rothwell & Diego-Rosell, 2016).

Trump’s presidential win in 2016 was an event that shocked, frightened, and aggrieved Democrats across the country and delighted Republicans, who perceived Trump as the president who would finally eliminate their perceived notions of disenfranchisement exacerbated during the Obama administration, would secure our borders, and put his “Art of the Deal” strategies to work on the American economy. Republicans saw traditional politicians and intellectuals as elitist and meritocratic, resented their social and cultural successes, and felt they (as provincial Americans) had been slighted (Whitfield, 2019). Analyses of Trump’s agenda and personality indicate that his success with Republicans occurred for a variety of reasons. He presented himself as a “true representative of the people” (Wodak, 2017, p.2), a leader whose practices deviated radically from previous politicians. Trump used a colloquial form of language in his tweets, his interactions with others in public, and his speeches that resonated with his conservative anti-intellectual base; he offered hyperbolic, simplistic answers to complex problems that incited anxiety in his constituents (Wodak, 2015); and he quelled the fears of privilege loss among older, White, heterosexual males by boldly and often abrasively communicating his racism (Austermuehl, 2020), misogyny (Jacobson 2020), and disdain for diversity in general (Muddle, 2019).

In this chapter we will focus on the implication of the Trump presidency for the scientific community, the historical development of science mistrust in general, current bipartisan science beliefs, including those related to climate science, vaccinations, and COVD-19 and counteracting such distrust while rebuilding science trust.