Trump the "Science Denier"

For John, BLUF:  While the President MAY be a "science denier", it appears, from his career, that he does believe in Engineering.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

Here is the sub-headline:

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been haunted by the science denialism of his ultraconservative religious allies.

From Told Old Gray Lasy, by Ms Katherine Stewart, 27 March 2020.

Here is the lede plus two:

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise.  In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States.  Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans.  And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis.  On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person.  “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Throughout Ms Steward fails to mention the missteps of the other political side, the Democrats.  Unmentioned is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio urging fellow New Yorkers to get out and enjoy the Chinese New Year.  Unmentioned is how former Vice President Joe Biden called the President xenophobic for, early on, shutting down travel from China.  Unmentioned is Mexican fear of Americans fleeing south. This is a hit job.  It is a hit job by someone who wrote a book on the larger subject of the "Religious Right", the book The Power Worshippers:  Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

I am not sure what the Anti-Vaxer Movement has to do with President Trump and with his fundamentalist Christian supporters.  In my mind the movement has always be centered among the Progressive California snowflakes.  Now, I grant you The Donald is a germ-a-phobe.  And, he is a skeptic by nature and experience.  But, in April of 2019 he came out strongly for the measles vaccination.

The author bashed the President over his desire to end the self-isolation by Easter (which was Sunday, 12 April this year):

Yet none of the benign uses of religion in this time of crisis have anything to do with Mr. Trump’s expressed hope that the country would be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.”  He could, of course, have said, “by mid-April.”  But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff