10/01/25
Science under attack. There is nothing like a crisis to uncover the mechanisms of power and control in a society. Such a one is the advent of the second Trump regime. Crises remove the veil (Durkheim, 1964, p. 15) and allow us to see at work the power relations of a social system. [References at the bottom of this post.]
What the second Trump regime has revealed so far, among many other things, is the near complete dependence of science on the State for its survival. After WWII the social contract between the State and science has been one in which the former controls (for the most part) the research agenda and science fulfills it as it sees fit (problem-solving, innovation, discovery). This modus vivendi between these two institutional entities was a direct violation of the creed among some in the scientific community, those I would call the autonomy-of-science fundamentalists (e.g., Michael Polanyi, 1891-1976: “…pure science (…) seeks to find truth for its own sake…” [1939, p. 62]), for whom science should be left alone to pursue its calling according to its own “internal necessities” (ibid., p. 68).
What the Trump 2.0 “policies” with regard to science also demonstrate is that the State is in near total possession of the material means of scientific knowledge production. Aside from a few fields (e.g., mathematics) and possibly some commercialized areas of scientific research (e.g., biotech), modern science requires an infrastructure (e.g., cyclotron) that necessitates massive financial resources which very few private entities, if any, have the wherewithal to support and only the State can.
Echoes of the past? The recent Trump 2.0 “policies” bring to mind what happened to Germany in the 1930s. Shortly after coming to power, the Nazi regime put into place the 1933 Civil Service Law. The purpose was to purge the universities and other research centers (e.g., Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes) of “non-Aryans” and political opponents (e.g., Communists). The result was an outflow of scientists which greatly benefited America. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Hans Bethe (1906-2005) were just two of the many foreign refugees who ended up on American soil, all victims of the authoritarian regimes (e.g., fascist Italy) in Europe. Germany’s loss was America’s (and other Western democracies’) gain.
One thing the Nazis did not do was to stop funding scientific research. The Trump administration is the first in the country’s history, as far as I know, that appears to be actively dismantling the nation’s scientific capital and giving up its scientific influence in the world (e.g., pulling out of the WHO). Aside from its military might, America after WWII became the dominant scientific power on the international scene. Just like German universities before the 1930s attracted students from all over the world (including America), so too did American universities after WWII. The measures taken by the Trump regime are jeopardizing America’s preeminence in matters scientific and scholarly.
Another aspect of the Trump administration that appears to be taken out of the authoritarian playbook is the use of, what mainstream science would consider, extra-scientific and irrelevant criteria, such as political loyalty, in the selection science administrators (governance of science). This too was a characteristic of the Nazi regime in Germany (see Ball, 2014, p. 67). The Trump administration announced that it would put in place
political appointees (as opposed to scientists) to evaluate the merit of scientific projects and whether they deserve to be funded or not—very much reminiscent of the political commissars in Stalin’s Russia.
Controlling the research agenda. In America, ever since WWII, the state has kept science on a tight leash. Every administration has violated to a greater or lesser extend, what mainstream science and its advocates refer to as “scientific integrity,” i.e., “the proper process through which science informs policy” (Berman and Carter, 2018, p. 1). “Proper” refers to the absence of “practices [that] introduce political and ideological bias into the science policy process” (id.). The second Trump regime has raised the state’s power over science to a whole new level. Because a substantial part of the funds that sustains its activities depends on the state, science, whether it likes it or not, is enmeshed in politics. Back in the 1960s, especially during the Vietnam war, you would have heard some scientists and members of the lay public denounce the “militarization of science.” Today, and for some time now, you will hear opposing camps accuse each other of “politicizing science.” Indeed a
White House spokesperson claimed that the Trump regime was “shifting away from ideological activism” (read, mainstream science) and “committed to eliminating bias and producing Gold Standard Science research driven by verifiable data” (translation: going against the established “scientific consensus,” or, as
some prefer to call it the “convergent evidence” obtained by mainstream science).
One major flash-point is “climate change.” On one side there is mainstream science which claims that human activity, especially the use of fossil fuels overwhelmingly in industrialized countries and with America at the forefront, has caused overall temperatures to increase which has led, among other things, to the rise in sea levels, thus threatening the very existence of some nations (e.g.,
Pacific islands) that had little or no responsibility for these conditions. On the other side, there is the climate science deniers who refer to it as an “ideology” (Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum,
September 2025)
. This component of the MAGA creed began, some years ago, by denying the very existence of climate change (a Chinese “hoax,” Trump 2012). Nowadays, although it admits, no doubt reluctantly, that human activity may have had an effect on climate, its impact has been overblown. This outlook has, of course, some real consequences: putting an end to any research on that particular topic, especially if it contravenes the MAGA credo, but promoting contrarian views, such as a report by an Energy Department panel that was roundly condemned by mainstream science for its inaccuracies, among other deficiencies; scrapping regulations that were in place to mitigate the effects of climate change; disinterest in any alternative sources of energy; etc.And then there is MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), the MAGA outlook applied to health care and medicine, and now running the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It too seeks to de-legitimize mainstream science in this particular field of research. One aspect of the MAHA creed is its denigration of vaccines. One specific area of attack is to establish a link, contrary to all the research done by mainstream science, between vaccines and autism and now between a common painkiller and autism.
Just like the Energy Department, HHS, back in May, published a study under the aegis of the MAHA commission. The report purported to study the issue of chronic diseases among children. Although the Trump regime and its MAHA arm claim to be committed to “gold standard” science and “radical transparency,” the said report appears to have “cited” numerous non-existent studies and to contain a basketful of substantive mistakes that were later dismissed by Trump’s press secretary and a HHS spokesperson as mere “formatting errors.”
If history is any guide, one area of science that is not likely to be touched by the the Trump fury is research that focuses on military applications. We shall see.
What is it that we are witnessing? What is this conspicuous display of power all about? One of the major battlegrounds in any social system in which resources, and therefore power, are unequally distributed has to do with the definition of “reality.” Who gets to define “reality” and how are they able to make their definition stick? As one sociologist put it, most pertinently: “For any group that is able to acquire a disproportionate share of society’s wealth, power, or status, it is advantageous for this inequality to be seen as legitimate” (Martin, 1999, p. 106). At this juncture in the history of America, MAGA has the upper-hand and it is pursuing its goal of a redefinition with alacrity. We’ve had prior examples. For instance, MAGA came to label the 2020 presidential election a “fraud.” Although it was unsuccessful in persuading the courts (including Trump-appointed judges), it was considered as such by the MAGA followers and led to a deadly attack on the Capitol in January 2021.
As we have seen, MAGA is following the same game plan when it comes to climate change and medical science. Regarding climate change, MAGA is and will be pushing the “reality” that either there is no such thing or some version of the message “it’s not as bad as it feels.” This MAGA crusade is a tall order. Trying to overturn years of scientific research which has led to the conclusion that “the evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused greenhouse gases is beyond scientific dispute” (National Academies, September 17, 2025) will be tough going. It might succeed on American soil, however it is very unlikely to do so among the scientific community, or indeed the lay public, in other countries. But, in the end, what matters to the Trump regime is its success in both convincing enough voters of the “veracity” of its claims (the MAGA fundamentalists) as well as having enough voters who, although they may not believe its claims, will not hold that against it (as seems to have been the case with the “big steal” claim).
This might be a good time to remind ourselves of Mead’s lemma (to the Thomas theorem): “If a thing is not recognized as true, then it does not function as true in the community” (Mead, 1936, p. 29). The MAGA ideologues are making sure that many things (e.g., climate change), as we have seen, are “not recognized as true.” There is more to come, I’m sorry to say.
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References:
- Philip Ball: Serving the Reich : the struggle for the soul of physics under Hitler, University of Chicago Press, 2014.
- Emily Berman and Jacob Carter: “Scientific Integrity in Federal Policymaking Under Past and Present Administrations,” Journal of Science Policy & Governance, Vol. 13, Issue 1, September 2018.
- Emile Durkheim: The Rules of Sociological Method, Free Press, 1964.
- Brian Martin: “Suppression of dissent in science,” Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, Vol. 7, Sept. 1999.
- George Herbert Mead, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Merritt E. Moore, University of Chicago Press, 1936.
- Michael Polanyi: “Rights and Duties of Science,” (1939) in Society, Economics & Philosophy: Selected Papers, Michael Polanyi, Transaction Publishers, 1997.