Donald Trump has accorded a novel spin to his bizarre perception of coronavirus and climate change. The controversies around the American Head of State have thus deepened.
In the process, he has debunked the discipline of science for in his reckoning, Americans ought not to put “much stock in scientific consensus”. He prefers to address the most intractable and urgent problems with the promise that these will simply vanish.
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Yes, he does have promises to keep and miles to go before the United States recovers from the pandemic as the country approaches the grim milestone of 200,000 deaths ~ a devastation that has few parallels in history. He has made his disparaging observation in the context of climate change, the other critical issue that engulfs the world today.
His contention was described as “magical thinking” as he dismissed a suggestion that the dozens of fires raging across the West, most destructively in California, could be related to climate change caused by humans. Although 2020 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record, the President sounded delusory when he told a meeting in California that “it will start getting cooler. You just watch.”
The comity of nations, developed as well as developing, shall not concur. Hence the prompt rebuttal by California’s secretary for natural resources ~ “I wish science agreed with you.” Double think runs wild.
From what he told veteran journalist Bob Woodward in February, the President knew the virus was far more dangerous than what he was telling the country. Had Trump been more honest about the threat, he might have reaped a fair measure of goodwill and support. He could also have put in place a widespread testing regimen, as other countries did.
Instead, the President continues to display scant regard for safety measures. On Sunday night, he held an indoor rally in Nevada, where thousands of his supporters packed a warehouse, ignoring a state order limiting such gatherings to 50 people. “We are already making the turn. We’re making that round, beautiful, last turn” to a postpandemic future, Trump told the generally maskfree crowd.
The grim reality in America runs counter to such contrived expressions of electoral optimism. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s debunking of science, the USA’s oldest monthly magazine, Scientific American, has debunked the President ~ “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the US and its people because he rejects evidence and science.
The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the pandemic, which killed more than 190,000 Americans by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.”
But if the thumping support he receives from his followers is an indication, the White House is not the only place where the unscientific American resides.
