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Donald Trump has butted heads with a lot of people over the decades, more visibly since declaring his candidacy for President. There are different categories of opponents: some he butts heads with simply because they too are alpha-males, and it is his job to challenge them for dominance; some he butts heads with because they are female and therefore have no business acting like alpha-males; and so on.
But I'm interested in four professions with whom Trump has a particularly strong mutual antipathy: scientists, journalists, lawyers (especially judges), and the intelligence community. These four groups have different training, different career paths, different politics, but they share at least one cultural more: their job -- no, their sacred mission -- is to collect and weigh factual evidence to learn what's true in the real world. And while members of all four groups are human, and often fall prey to prejudice, confirmation bias, and so on, most of them view it as a failure to live up to their professions' high standards; they hold up for the highest esteem the members of their own professions who most rigorously follow the facts regardless of whom they help or hurt.
Along comes Donald Trump, whose whole life is an expression of the irrelevance of objective evidence and facts. To him, facts are whatever the most powerful alpha-male says; indeed, saying something obviously false is a good way of testing his dominance and his followers' loyalty, like Big Brother telling you he's holding up seven fingers on his right hand. Facts don't tell you about some mystical "real world", they tell you who's in charge; who believes which facts tells you which team they're on. The thought of publicly stating a fact without first knowing whom it helps or hurts, and therefore what allegiance it signals, would probably strike him as absurd and naive.
Obviously, Trump is a challenge to the identities of scientists, journalists, lawyers-and-judges, and the intelligence community: they've spent their whole lives and careers studying and mastering something whose very existence he calls into question every day. Conversely, these people's stubborn belief in the existence of some privileged set of facts that neither he nor any other alpha-male controls is a challenge to him; what alpha-males do with challengers, what they must do in order to retain their positions, is crush and humiliate them by any means necessary. Even if Trump didn't originally have any objection to their facts, the independence of those facts offends him; he'll go out of his way to contradict the facts asserted by science, journalism, law, and intelligence just so he can win and they can lose.
There is no possible compromise between these world-views. Either there is an objective reality that outranks every conceivable human authority, or there isn't and "reality" is conditioned upon your tribal affiliations and allegiances. This conflict is not inherently between Republicans and Democrats (although any Republican candidate these days who leans too far towards objective reality earns an insulting nickname from the President), and it's far more consequential than the traditional Republican/Democratic disagreements over the size and role of government. If we can't even agree on the facts, there's no point going on with the democratic experiment.
But I'm interested in four professions with whom Trump has a particularly strong mutual antipathy: scientists, journalists, lawyers (especially judges), and the intelligence community. These four groups have different training, different career paths, different politics, but they share at least one cultural more: their job -- no, their sacred mission -- is to collect and weigh factual evidence to learn what's true in the real world. And while members of all four groups are human, and often fall prey to prejudice, confirmation bias, and so on, most of them view it as a failure to live up to their professions' high standards; they hold up for the highest esteem the members of their own professions who most rigorously follow the facts regardless of whom they help or hurt.
Along comes Donald Trump, whose whole life is an expression of the irrelevance of objective evidence and facts. To him, facts are whatever the most powerful alpha-male says; indeed, saying something obviously false is a good way of testing his dominance and his followers' loyalty, like Big Brother telling you he's holding up seven fingers on his right hand. Facts don't tell you about some mystical "real world", they tell you who's in charge; who believes which facts tells you which team they're on. The thought of publicly stating a fact without first knowing whom it helps or hurts, and therefore what allegiance it signals, would probably strike him as absurd and naive.
Obviously, Trump is a challenge to the identities of scientists, journalists, lawyers-and-judges, and the intelligence community: they've spent their whole lives and careers studying and mastering something whose very existence he calls into question every day. Conversely, these people's stubborn belief in the existence of some privileged set of facts that neither he nor any other alpha-male controls is a challenge to him; what alpha-males do with challengers, what they must do in order to retain their positions, is crush and humiliate them by any means necessary. Even if Trump didn't originally have any objection to their facts, the independence of those facts offends him; he'll go out of his way to contradict the facts asserted by science, journalism, law, and intelligence just so he can win and they can lose.
There is no possible compromise between these world-views. Either there is an objective reality that outranks every conceivable human authority, or there isn't and "reality" is conditioned upon your tribal affiliations and allegiances. This conflict is not inherently between Republicans and Democrats (although any Republican candidate these days who leans too far towards objective reality earns an insulting nickname from the President), and it's far more consequential than the traditional Republican/Democratic disagreements over the size and role of government. If we can't even agree on the facts, there's no point going on with the democratic experiment.
