U.S. President Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, has been waging a war on expertise. From the moment then-advisor Kellyanne Conway spoke about “alternative facts” during an interview with Meet the Press in 2017 in backing then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false claims about how many people attended the first inauguration, Trump has stood his ground. He has spent years dismissing what experts have to say on issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, insisting that his commonsense approach to problems was superior. And now, in the first month of his second term, Trump has been attacking university expertise by implementing steep reductions in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in ways that threaten basic scientific research; just late last week the administration started firing National Atmospheric Administration workers.
Although Trump likes to distance himself from former President George W. Bush, there are more continuities than either would like to acknowledge. Indeed, attacks on expertise have been an essential element of Republican politics for decades. The reason that Trump’s blasts against institutions of knowledge resonate with voters is because the arguments have such deep roots in the party.
U.S. President Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, has been waging a war on expertise. From the moment then-advisor Kellyanne Conway spoke about “alternative facts” during an interview with Meet the Press in 2017 in backing then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false claims about how many people attended the first inauguration, Trump has stood his ground. He has spent years dismissing what experts have to say on issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, insisting that his commonsense approach to problems was superior. And now, in the first month of his second term, Trump has been attacking university expertise by implementing steep reductions in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in ways that threaten basic scientific research; just late last week the administration started firing National Atmospheric Administration workers.
Although Trump likes to distance himself from former President George W. Bush, there are more continuities than either would like to acknowledge. Indeed, attacks on expertise have been an essential element of Republican politics for decades. The reason that Trump’s blasts against institutions of knowledge resonate with voters is because the arguments have such deep roots in the party.
Anti-intellectualism, as the historian Richard Hofstadter argued in his classic work, is deeply embedded in American public culture. It was thus not surprising that for many decades Republicans tapped into this rhetoric as an effective weapon against Democrats. During the 1940s and 1950s, anti-intellectualism became an effective way to recast a party that, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had come to be seen as the champion of working- and middle-class America as, in fact, elitist. When Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson ran against military hero Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, Republican vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon called their opponent an “egghead.” In 1964, the actor Ronald Reagan delivered a speech in support of Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in which he said: “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Yet there were also limits as to how far most Republicans would go. After all, the early Cold War was an age of expertise. The rapid growth of the universities, funded by government spending for research and the GI Bill of Rights sending millions of veterans to college, elevated the standing of knowledge-makers in American society. Experts were everywhere. Psychologists, nuclear scientists, economists, and other disciplines saw their clout expand. Leaders from both parties respected their insights when forming policy. Conspiracy theories about science, such as allegations that communists were behind fluoridated water, were left to the cranks.
The real fault lines between Republicans and expertise started to take hold in the late 1960s. At a moment when many Americans were losing faith in the “best and the brightest” as a result of the disastrous Vietnam War—including some on the left who felt that knowledge had become a means for professions to assert their power—President Nixon pitted himself against the major institutions of American life. Though he still surrounded himself with some of the most renowned intellectuals, such as the economist Herbert Stein and Patrick Moynihan, Nixon set out to support the creation of alternative forms of knowledge to counteract what he perceived as the dominance of liberal intellectuals. As Sidney Blumenthal argued, conservatives created a counter-establishment of political think tanks, media outlets, and public intellectuals. “The cunning of these institutions was that they rested on a hidden asymmetry,” noted historian David Greenberg. “Though formally similar to those of the establishment, the Right’s organs were fundamentally different in that they served a plainly political purpose. Scholars at Brookings were committed, foremost, to scholarly values; the operatives at Heritage promoted the conservative cause above all.”
The tensions kept growing. As president, Reagan came under fire for ignoring the scientific research about acid rain and refused to even speak about HIV/AIDS for years as the disease ravaged cities like New York and San Francisco. On becoming speaker of the House in 1995, Rep. Newt Gingrich and fellow Republicans got rid of the Office of Technology Assessment, a unit that since 1972 had offered legislators in both parties scientific and technological analyses.
The fissures really came to a head during the presidency of George W. Bush. A Republican who was deeply influenced by Reagan, Bush perceived the value in distancing himself from expertise. During his campaign against Vice President Al Gore in 2000, Bush mocked Gore’s intelligence. In the debates, he gave cynical glances to deflate Gore’s clear mastery of policy issues. He made fun of Gore for claiming to have invented the internet—despite the fact that when in Congress, Gore had played a role in the development of the technology. “I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the internet,” Bush quipped in the first presidential debate, “he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math.”
Once in office, Bush criticized economists who opposed his tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. When a group of 400 economists, including 10 Nobel Prize winners, published a letter in the New York Times attacking the latter tax cut, the president simply released a statement from his own experts endorsing the bill. Bush decided to limit the number of embryonic stem cells available for research on Alzheimer’s and cancer to placate the religious right despite fierce protests from scientists who warned of the damaging consequences that would ensue.
The administration, which withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol shortly after taking office, challenged mainstream scientific consensus on global warning. Rather than focusing on how much regulation was warranted, the president echoed non-scientific claims that challenged whether global warning was even real. Multiple investigations exposed correspondence showing that the administration stifled research proving that the problem was very serious. The Union of Concerned Scientists warned: “[T]he administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions. This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; by censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists; and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice.” The University of Southern California’s Center for Science and Democracy reached a similar conclusion. Its report in 2004, which 12,000 scientists signed, documented the ways that the administration suppressed scientific findings.
All of this happened against a backdrop of a war against Iraq that had been launched based on claims that Saddam Hussein possessed a massive cache of weapons of mass destruction. Though the war would continue throughout his two terms, those weapons did not exist.
Reporter Ron Suskind captured the kind of mentality that many found troubling in an article for the New York Times Magazine. Suskind recounted a conversation he’d had with a top aide, whom many believe was Karl Rove, who said to Suskind “that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’”
By the time Bush, a Yale and Harvard graduate, finished his two terms, the political template for attacking expertise was set. Despite his own privileged background, Bush claimed to be a regular person in part because of his ongoing characterization of institutions of knowledge—and a Democratic Party that supported them—as out of touch with the common man.
The situation has become worse since Bush’s presidency. The fragmentation of communication through social media made it much more difficult for Americans to sift between sound arguments and pure disinformation. The general breakdown of filters has made expertise more vulnerable than ever before, since the public square is now an intensely fractious space where it is difficult for sound data to gain traction and easy for misleading claims to find international audiences.
As with so many other elements of American politics, Trump also goes further than any of his predecessors in what he is willing to do or say in pursuit of power. During the COVID pandemic he was more than willing to spread false information from the bully pulpit that left scientists and doctors, including members of his own administration, scrambling to combat what he had said.
His conservative populism has made the intellectuals and the institutions that house them one of his top targets. It is not a surprise that his early executive orders went after NIH funding by calling for drastic reductions in the overhead payments institutions depend on to maintain the facilities where the research takes place. The administration is using DEI programs as leverage to threaten all federal funding.
To be sure, experts themselves are far from perfect. As Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue in their new book, In Covid’s Wake, too often necessary debates during the pandemic were made difficult by the insistence to follow the science. The hard choices and trade-offs that were a fundamental part of public policy, such as whether or not to close schools, often didn’t receive sufficient attention. Many Americans, living with the consequences of the failure to consider different aspects of how to handle the health emergency, were left with bitter feelings about the scientists who, in their minds, cost their children their education. According to Pew, trust in scientists fell from 87 percent in 2020 to 73 percent in 2023.
But problems and mistakes do not justify discrediting institutions of expertise that have been vital throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to our economy and to our politics. At a moment when we face stiff competition from China as well as some other countries, as well as the possibility of further public health crises, the worst possible decision would be to push aside the persons and organizations that help us advance our knowledge. Indeed, steadier guidance from the president during the pandemic would have created a healthier environment to actually debate the kinds of tradeoffs the nation faced. Instead, scientists and their supporters were trying to survive being in a defensive position as people were dying.
In 1958, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, President Dwight D. Eisenhower worked with a Democratic Congress to pour massive amounts of resources into the universities and government science so that the United States could emerge as the stronger superpower. Today’s administration is moving in the opposite direction. Expertise is on the chopping block and Trump’s partner, Elon Musk, has his chain saw ready to go so that he can cut even deeper into the institutions we depend on to produce medicine, health care treatments, and broader knowledge about the world around us.
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