How to Tackle Truth Decay
When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up consuming more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “Science doesn’t know.”
Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise.