So You Think You Know Trump Meme

People packed in by the thousands, many dressed in cherry-red, white and blue and carrying signs reading "Four more years" and "Make America Peachy Again". They came out during a global pandemic to make a statement, and that's precisely why they assembled shoulder-to-shoulder without masks in a windowless warehouse, creating an ideal surround for the coronavirus to spread.

US President Donald Trump'southward rally in Henderson, Nevada, on 13 September contravened state health rules, which limit public gatherings to 50 people and require proper social distancing. Trump knew it, and later flaunted the fact that the country authorities failed to stop him. Since the showtime of the pandemic, the president has behaved the same manner and refused to follow bones wellness guidelines at the White Business firm, which is at present at the centre of an ongoing outbreak. The president spent three days in a infirmary after testing positive for COVID-19, and was released on 5 Oct.

Trump's actions — and those of his staff and supporters — should come as no surprise. Over the by eight months, the president of the United States has lied about the dangers posed past the coronavirus and undermined efforts to contain it; he even admitted in an interview to purposefully misrepresenting the viral threat early in the pandemic. Trump has belittled masks and social-distancing requirements while encouraging people to protest against lockdown rules aimed at stopping illness transmission. His assistants has undermined, suppressed and censored government scientists working to study the virus and reduce its harm. And his appointees have made political tools out of the United states Centers for Affliction Command and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ordering the agencies to put out inaccurate information, consequence sick-advised wellness guidance, and tout unproven and potentially harmful treatments for COVID-xix.

"This is not just ineptitude, it'due south demolition," says Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia Academy in New York City, who has modelled the evolution of the pandemic and how earlier interventions might have saved lives in the United States. "He has sabotaged efforts to proceed people safe."

The statistics are stark. The The states, an international powerhouse with vast scientific and economical resources, has experienced more 7 million COVID-19 cases, and its death toll has passed 200,000 — more than than whatever other nation and more than one-fifth of the global total, even though the U.s.a. accounts for just 4% of world population.

Quantifying Trump's responsibility for deaths and disease beyond the land is difficult, and other wealthy countries accept struggled to contain the virus; the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland has experienced a like number of deaths as the The states, after adjusting for population size.

But Shaman and others suggest that the majority of the lives lost in the United States could take been saved had the land stepped up to the claiming earlier. Many experts blame Trump for the land's failure to comprise the outbreak, a charge also levelled by Olivia Troye, who was a fellow member of the White House coronavirus job force. She said in September that the president repeatedly derailed efforts to contain the virus and salvage lives, focusing instead on his own political campaign.

Equally he seeks re-ballot on iii November, Trump's actions in the face of COVID-nineteen are just 1 example of the impairment he has inflicted on science and its institutions over the past four years, with repercussions for lives and livelihoods. The president and his appointees accept besides dorsum-pedalled on efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, weakened rules limiting pollution and diminished the role of science at the US Environmental Protection Bureau (EPA). Across many agencies, his administration has undermined scientific integrity by suppressing or distorting testify to support political decisions, say policy experts.

"I've never seen such an orchestrated war on the environment or science," says Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under sometime Republican president George Westward. Bush-league.

Trump has besides eroded America's position on the global stage through isolationist policies and rhetoric. By closing the nation's doors to many visitors and not-European immigrants, he has made the United States less inviting to strange students and researchers. And by demonizing international associations such equally the World Health Organization, Trump has weakened America'due south ability to answer to global crises and isolated the country's science.

Supporters of President Trump — many without masks — crowded into an indoor facility in Henderson, Nevada, on 13 September. Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

All the while, the president has peddled anarchy and fright rather than facts, as he advances his political agenda and discredits opponents. In dozens of interviews carried out by Nature, researchers accept highlighted this betoken every bit particularly worrisome because it devalues public trust in the importance of truth and evidence, which underpin science too equally commonwealth.

"Information technology'south terrifying in a lot of ways," says Susan Hyde, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the ascent and fall of democracies. "It's very agonizing to have the bones operation of authorities under assail, peculiarly when some of those functions are disquisitional to our ability to survive."

The president tin can point to some positive developments in science and technology. Although Trump hasn't fabricated either a priority (he waited nineteen months earlier appointing a science adviser), his administration has pushed to return astronauts to the Moon and prioritized development in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In August, the White House appear more US$1 billion in new funding for those and other advanced technologies.

But many scientists and one-time government officials say these examples are outliers in a presidency that has devalued science and the role information technology tin can take in crafting public policy. (A timeline chronicles Trump's actions related to science.)

Much of the damage to science — including regulatory changes and severed international partnerships — can and probably will be repaired if Trump loses this Nov. In that event, what the nation and the globe volition accept lost is precious time to limit climate change and the march of the virus, among other challenges. But the harm to scientific integrity, public trust and the U.s.a.' stature could linger well beyond Trump's tenure, says scientists and policy experts.

Every bit the ballot approaches, Nature chronicles some of the key moments when the president has nearly damaged American scientific discipline and how that could weaken the United States — and the world — for years to come, whether Trump wins or loses to his opponent, Joe Biden.

Climate harmed

Trump's assail on science started even before he took part. In his 2016 presidential entrada, he chosen global warming a hoax and vowed to pull the nation out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, signed by more 190 countries. Less than five months after he moved into the White House, he announced he would fulfil that hope.

"I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump said, arguing that the agreement imposed energy restrictions, cost jobs and hampered the economy in order to "win praise" from foreign leaders and global activists.

What Trump did non acknowledge is that the Paris understanding was in many means designed by — and for — the United States. It is a voluntary pact that sought to build momentum by allowing countries to blueprint their own commitments, and the simply power it has comes in the form of transparency: laggards will be exposed. By pulling the Usa out of the agreement and backtracking on climate commitments, Trump has also reduced force per unit area on other countries to human action, says David Victor, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. "Countries that needed to participate in the Paris procedure — because that was part of beingness a fellow member in good continuing of the global customs — no longer feel that force per unit area."

The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions. Credit: Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty

After Trump announced his decision on the Paris accord, his appointees at the EPA set about dismantling climate policies put in place under onetime president Barack Obama. At the top of the listing were a pair of regulations targeting greenhouse-gas emissions from ability plants and automobiles. Over the past 15 months, the Trump administration has gutted both regulations and replaced them with weaker standards that volition salvage manufacture money — and exercise piffling to reduce emissions.

In some cases, fifty-fifty industry objected to the rollbacks. The administration's efforts prompted objections from several carmakers, such as Ford and Honda, which final year signed a separate agreement with California to maintain a more ambitious standard. More recently, energy giants such as Exxon Mobil and BP opposed the administration'due south move to weaken rules that require oil and gas companies to limit and eliminate emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

According to ane estimate from the Rhodium Group, a consultancy based in New York City, the administration's rollbacks could boost emissions by the equivalent 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide past 2035 — roughly v times the almanac emissions of the United Kingdom. Although these measures could be overturned by the courts or a new administration, Trump has price the country and the planet valuable time.

"The Trump era has been actually a terrible, terrible time for this planet," says Leah Stokes, a climate-policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Trump administration formally filed the paperwork to exit the Paris agreement last year, and the US withdrawal volition get official on 4 Nov, one day later the presidential election. About nations have vowed to printing forward fifty-fifty without the U.s., and the European Union has already helped to fill up the leadership void by pressing nations to bolster their efforts, which China did on 22 September when it appear that it aims to be carbon neutral past 2060. Biden has promised to re-enter the agreement if he wins, but information technology could be difficult for the United states to regain the kind of international influence it had under Obama, who helped energize the climate talks and bring countries on board for the 2015 accord.

"Rejoining Paris is piece of cake," Victor says. "The existent result is credibility: will the rest of the globe believe what we say?"

State of war on the surroundings

Trump hasn't just gone afterwards regulations. At the EPA, his administration has sought to undermine the manner the government uses scientific discipline to make public-wellness decisions.

The scale of the threat came into focus on 31 October 2017 — Halloween — when then EPA administrator Scott Pruitt signed an order barring scientists with active EPA research grants from serving on the agency'southward science-advisory panels, making information technology harder for people with the most expertise to assistance the agency assess science and craft regulations. The order fabricated it easier for industry scientists to replace the academic researchers, who would be forced to either give up their grants or resign.

"That was when I said, 'Oh my god, the fix is in," says John Bachmann, who spent more than three decades in the EPA's air-quality programme and is now active in a grouping of retired EPA employees that formed to abet for scientists and scientific integrity at the agency, later Trump officials began their assault. "It'due south not only that they accept their own views, it'south that they are going to make sure that their views deport more weight in the process."

Pruitt'south gild, which would eventually exist overturned past a federal estimate, was part of a broader effort to advance turnover and appoint new people to the panels. And it was just the starting time. In April 2018, Pruitt revealed a "science transparency" rule to limit the agency's ability to base regulations on research for which the data and models are not publicly available. The rule could exclude some of the well-nigh rigorous epidemiological research linking fine-particulate pollution to premature death, because much of the underlying patient data are protected by privacy rules. Critics say that this policy was aimed at raising doubts about the science and making it easier to pursue weak air-pollution standards.

Pruitt resigned in July 2018, but the tendency at the EPA continues. Nether its new administrator, Andrew Wheeler, the agency has accelerated efforts to weaken regulations targeting chemicals in h2o and air pollution.

Whitman, the one-time EPA chief, says in that location's nothing wrong with revisiting regulatory decisions by past administrations and altering grade. But decisions should be based on a solid scientific assay, she says. "Nosotros don't see that with this administration."

One of the biggest recent decisions at the EPA came in the air-quality programme. On 14 April this yr, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the EPA proposed to maintain electric current standards for fine-particulate pollution, despite evidence and advice from government and academic scientists who have overwhelmingly backed tighter regulations.

"It's devastating, totally devastating," says Francesca Dominici, an epidemiologist at Harvard Academy in Boston, Massachusetts, whose group found that strengthening standards could salve tens of thousands of lives each year. "Not listening to science and rolling dorsum environmental regulations is costing American lives."

Pandemic problems

The coronavirus pandemic has brought the perils of ignoring science and evidence into sharp focus, and ane thing is now clear: the president of the Us understood that the virus posed a major threat to the land early on in the outbreak, and he chose to lie about it.

Speaking to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on seven February, when only 12 people in the United States had tested positive for the coronavirus, Trump described a virus that is v times more lethal than the even the most "strenuous flus". "This is mortiferous stuff," Trump said in the recorded interview, which was released but in September.

In public, all the same, the president presented a very different message. On 10 February, Trump told his supporters at a rally not to worry, and said that past April, when temperatures warm upward, the virus would "miraculously get away". "This is like a flu," he told a press briefing on 26 Feb. In a Television receiver interview a week later: "Information technology'due south very mild."

In another recorded interview with Woodward on 19 March, Trump said he had played downward the take a chance from the beginning. "I withal like playing information technology down considering I don't desire to create a panic," Trump said.

Afterwards the tapes were released, Trump defended his efforts to keep people calm while simultaneously arguing that he had, if anything, "upward-played" the risk posed by the virus. But wellness experts say that explanation makes little sense, and that the president endangered the public by misrepresenting the threat posed past the virus.

All the while, scientists now know, viral transmission was surging beyond the country. Rather than marshalling the federal government's power and resources to contain the virus with a comprehensive testing and contact-tracing programme, the Trump administration punted the result to cities and states, where politics and a lack of resources made it incommunicable to track the virus or provide accurate information to citizens. And when local officials started to shut downward businesses and schools in early March, Trump criticized them for taking action.

"Last year, 37,000 Americans died from the mutual Flu," he tweeted on nine March. "Nothing is shut down, life & the economy continue." Within a calendar month, the US coronavirus death cost had topped 21,000, and the pandemic was in full pace, killing around two,000 Americans every day.

Shaman and his colleagues at Columbia decided to investigate what might accept happened had the country acted sooner. They developed a model that could reproduce what happened county past county across the Usa from February to early May, equally land and local governments shut downwardly businesses and schools in an try to halt the contagion. They so posed the question: what would accept happened if everybody had done exactly the same one week before?

Their preliminary results, posted as a preprint on 21 May (Southward. Pei et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/ghc65g; 2020), suggested that effectually 35,000 lives could take been saved, more than than halving the death toll as of 3 May. If the same action had been taken two weeks earlier, that death toll could have been cut by nearly 90%. Reducing the initial exponential explosion in cases would accept bought more time to roll out testing and address the inevitable outbreaks with targeted contact-tracing programmes.

"There's no reason on Earth this had to happen," Shaman says. "If we had gotten our act together earlier, nosotros could have done much improve."

Gerardo Chowell, a computational epidemiologist at Georgia Country Academy in Atlanta, says that Shaman's report provides a rough approximation of how before action might have inverse the trajectory of the pandemic, although pinning down precise numbers is difficult given the lack of data early in the pandemic and the challenge of modelling a illness that scientists are notwithstanding trying to empathize.

Trump responded publicly to the Columbia study by dismissing information technology as a "political hit job" by "an institution that's very liberal".

Control the message, not the virus

With the economic system in freefall and a mounting expiry cost, Trump increasingly aimed his vitriol at China. The president backed an unsubstantiated theory suggesting that the virus might accept originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, and argued that international health officials had helped China cover up the outbreak in the primeval days of the pandemic. On 29 May, he made good his threats and announced that he was pulling the The states out of the Globe Health System — a move that many say weakened the country'due south power to respond to global crises and isolated its science.

For many experts, information technology was notwithstanding some other counterproductive political manoeuvre from a president who was more than interested in decision-making the message than the virus. And in the finish, he failed on both counts. Criticism mounted equally COVID-xix connected to spread.

"The virus doesn't respond to spin," says Tom Frieden, who headed the CDC under Obama. "The virus responds to science-driven policies and programmes."

As the pandemic ground forrard, the president connected to contradict warnings and advice from government scientists, including guidance for reopening schools. In July, Frieden and 3 other sometime CDC directors issued a sharp rebuke in a guest editorial in The Washington Post, citing unprecedented efforts by Trump and his administration to undermine the advice of public-wellness officials.

Similar concerns take arisen with the FDA, which must approve an eventual vaccine. On 29 September, seven former FDA commissioners penned another editorial in The Washington Post raising concerns about interventions by Trump and Department of Health and Human being Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar in a process that is supposed to be guided by government scientists.

This kind of political interference doesn't just undermine the public-health response, but could ultimately damage public trust in an eventual vaccine, says Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and vice-provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Everybody is wondering: 'Am I going to be able to trust the Food and Drug Administration'south conclusion on the vaccine?'" says Emanuel. "That fact that people are fifty-fifty asking that question is show that Trump has already undermined the bureau."

Elias Zerhouni, who headed the U.s. National Institutes of Health under former president Bush from 2002 to 2008, says the Trump assistants failed to control the coronavirus, and is at present trying to strength government agencies to use their prestige and manipulate science to buttress Trump's campaign. "They don't really get the science," says Zerhouni of Trump and his appointees. "This is the rejection of any science that doesn't fit their political views."

The White House and the EPA did non respond to several requests for comment. The HHS issued a statement to Nature saying: "HHS has ever provided public wellness information based on sound science. Throughout the COVID-19 response, science and data accept driven the decisions at HHS." The department adds: "President Trump has led an unprecedented, whole-of-America response to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Isolationist science

On 24 September, the United states Department of Homeland Security proposed a new dominion to restrict how long international students tin spend in the United states of america. The dominion would limit visas for most students to four years, requiring an extension thereafter, and impose a two-year limit for students from dozens of countries considered loftier-take chances, including those listed as state-sponsors of terror: Republic of iraq, Islamic republic of iran, Syria and the Autonomous People's Republic of Korea.

Although it is not yet clear what effects this dominion might accept, many scientists and policy experts fear that this and other clearing policies could have a lasting bear on on American scientific discipline. "Information technology could put the Us at an enormous, enormous competitive disadvantage for attracting graduate students and scientists," says Lizbet Boroughs, associate vice president of the Association of American Universities in Washington, DC, a group representing 65 institutions.

Information technology fits in with previously implemented travel restrictions that accept made it more hard for foreigners from sure countries — including scientists — to visit, study and work in the Usa. These policies mark a sharp shift from previous governments, which have actively sought talent from other countries to fill up laboratories and spur scientific innovation.

Researchers fear that the latest proposal will make the Usa even less attractive to foreign scientists, which could hamper the country'southward efforts in scientific discipline and technology.

"How nosotros intersect with students from other countries has been hugely impacted," says Emanuel. If the all-time and brightest students from other countries start to go elsewhere, he adds, US science will endure. "I fear for the state."

The proposed rule provides a glimpse of what a second Trump term might look similar, and highlights the intangible impacts on US science that could endure fifty-fifty if Biden prevails in Nov. Biden could opposite some of the Trump assistants's regulatory decisions and move to rejoin international organizations, just it could accept fourth dimension to repair the impairment to the reputation of the The states.

James Wilsdon, a science-policy researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK, compares the Usa situation under Trump to the Uk leaving the European union, maxim both countries are at hazard of losing influence internationally. "Soft ability is driven a lot by perception and reputation," Wilsdon says. "These are basically the intangible assets of the science system in the international loonshit." Whether or how quickly that translates into loss of competitiveness in attracting international scientists and students is unclear, he says, in office considering scientists understand that Donald Trump doesn't represent US science.

On the domestic front, many scientists fright that increased polarization and cynicism could last for years to come. That would make it harder for government agencies to do their jobs, to accelerate science-based policies, and to concenter a new generation to replace many of the senior scientists and officials who have decided to retire nether Trump.

Re-establishing scientific integrity in agencies where government scientists have been sidelined and censored by political appointees won't be easy, says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has documented more than 150 attacks on scientific discipline under Trump's tenure. "Under Trump, political appointees have the dominance to override science whenever they want if it doesn't conform to their political calendar," Rosenberg says. "You can reverse that, but you have to practice it very intentionally and very direct."

At the EPA, for example, information technology would mean rebuilding the entire research arm of the bureau, and giving information technology real power to stand up to regulatory bodies that are making policy decisions, says ane senior EPA official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press. The trouble pre-dates Trump, merely has accelerated nether his leadership. Without forceful activeness, the official says, the EPA's Part of Research and Evolution, which conducts and assesses inquiry that feeds into regulatory decisions, might but keep its "long reject into irrelevance."

If Trump wins in Nov, researchers fear the worst. "The Trump folks have poured an acid on public institutions that is much more powerful than anything we've seen earlier," says Victor.

"People tin can milkshake some of these things off after one term, simply to accept him elected again, given everything he has done, that would be extraordinary. And the harm done would be much greater."

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Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02800-9

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