Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
For four years, President Donald Trump defied and denied reality.
Truth, he insisted, was what he preferred and proclaimed to be true.
Data? Science? Empirically testable evidence? They didn’t matter. Even arithmetic didn’t matter. If the numbers didn’t add up as he wished, he and his associates would add them up their own way.
Last week, reality caught up with him. Arithmetic, it turns out, can be denied but not disappeared. By week’s end, the numbers were clear: Joe Biden had millions more votes than Trump, and at least 279 electoral votes.
That’s a majority. That’s victory. That’s the presidency. No amount of denying, complaining or alleging can alter it.
When the history of the Trump interlude is written (and it will be written repeatedly, for years, from many perspectives), it is this – the rejection of science, of logic, of rationality – that may stand out.
Not the bigotry, which is consistent with ignorance. Not the crudeness (ditto). Not what his political opponents are convinced was his constant lying, because it may not have been lying. Much of what he says is false, but perhaps – having willfully banished the basic model of rationality – he sincerely believes that hydroxychloroquine cures Covid-19, that no president had done more for Black Americans (except maybe Abraham Lincoln), that millions of Biden votes had been cast by dead or nonexistent people.
After all, once a person, a party, a political movement dispenses with science, not just the details but the entire project, there are no limits to what that person, party or movement can argue.
Trump governed that way – as though there is no such thing as empirically verifiable fact; as though data, observation, experience were inconsequential. That made him the first un-American president.
No, make that anti-American, because nothing is more anti-American than the rejection of the rational.
Not, certainly, because America is or Americans are more rational than other countries or other people. Often enough, the opposite seems true.
But this country and its essential principles – political democracy, individual freedom, the rule of law, human equality – were based on rationality. Its founders were products and advocates of the movement that later become known as the Enlightenment, central to which (according to the Encyclopedia Britannica) was “the use and celebration of reason.”
They were flawed, those Founders, unable to live up to some of their own values, especially the part about human equality, which they proclaimed but did not produce. But the system they created was based on the belief that people determined what was true and good not by obeying the king or the priest or the whim of some strongman, but by assembling information and filtering that information through reason.
That’s why the era in which they lived is often called “The Age of Reason.”
Trump has either rejected or ignored reason. Nowhere is his scorn for the scientific enterprise more evident than in his denial of science itself. He dismissed the Covid-19 pandemic. It “will go away in April,” he said on Feb. 10. “It is going to disappear. It is disappearing,” he said last month.
It is, obviously, not disappearing. Thousands more have gotten sick and have died because the president and his enablers refused to accept reality. Thousands more will get sick and die in the coming weeks.
The persistent heating of the entire world is not disappearing, either, and all testable evidence makes clear that the heating results from burning fossil fuel, which creates what the U.S. government called “a blanket wrapped around the earth” holding heat close to the surface.
To Trump and his allies and enablers, all that is merely observable evidence and scientific fact. Who cares about that? They don’t want it to be true. Presto! It isn’t true.
James Madison would weep. So might the entire world weep more than it would have had to in the coming years had only Trump recognized reality.
But the impact of Trump’s anti-American irrationality is not limited specifically to scientific matters. It was the impact of the Age of Reason that inspired such changes as imposing limits on the power of the leader, replacing the caprice of the leader with the rule of law, granting specific powers to separate branches of government, guaranteeing freedom of expression.
Trump has ignored or trampled on all of that. He proclaimed that “the federal government has absolute power,” and that the Constitution gives him “the power to do whatever I want.” He brazenly violated the Hatch Act by holding some of the Republican National Convention at the White House. He has casually ignored subpoenas from Congress and ordered others in his administration to do the same.
He has not squelched freedom of expression, though not for lack of effort. Unable to suppress it, he regularly demeaned it.
Now, in refusing to accept the reality of his defeat, he threatens democracy. Ineptly, but the basis for his challenge to the election results is the same refusal to accept verifiable fact, or that there is such a thing as verifiable fact.
Even now, though, Trump’s disregard of rationality does not seem to be mean-spirited or malevolent. He is not trying to do harm. By all the evidence at hand he knows very little about history, economics, law, government, or even politics (though he does have some useful political instincts). He only knows what pleases him.
Besides, this rejection of the rational is not confined to Trump or to political conservatives. There is some of it over on the left side of the ideological spectrum, such as the “anti-fascist” demonstrators who cheered the shooting death of a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon.
There is even a sliver of the left which openly disparages science and rationality as an expression of “white culture,” and therefore responsible for racial inequality, an outlook at least partly endorsed by Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling “White Fragility,” some of which has a tenuous connection to factual accuracy.
Last spring, the website of the National Museum of African American History and Culture displayed a document pointing out “aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture in the United States,” including the “emphasis on scientific method, objective, rational linear thinking,” and “quantification.”
The display was removed, as it should have been. The museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, is an immense building – 350,000 square feet on 10 floors. A building that big designed and constructed by ignoring the scientific method, linear thinking (and measuring) and a whole lot of quantification would fall down.
A reality not limited to “white culture” whatever that may be. The Taj Mahal has not fallen down since it was finished in 1648. Neither have the palaces of Beijing’s Forbidden City, built in 1424. Neither has the pharaoh Khufu’s pyramid, started around 2551 B.C. All were designed and built by people who did a lot of measuring (along lines, hence linear) and quantifying. The Egyptians even figured out how to align Khufu’s pyramid to true north.
They used the scientific method. It’s universal.
The bad news is that inanity in America is bi-ideological and that some on the left and right seem intent on embarking on an Age of Non-Reason, even an Age of Anti-Reason.
The good news is that whatever his weaknesses and flaws, Joe Biden is not one those people. And he won the election. It’s plain arithmetic, which Donald Trump can deny, but not resist.
