Science: The Dark Ages

“One thousand three hundred and sixty-one more days of Donald Trump!” This was the headline in The Economist last week, celebrating the ^47th US president's hundredth day in office (April 29) a little early. It must be said that in the United States, the results of these first three months in office are being particularly scrutinized. There have been a few other famous debuts, such as that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But nothing compares to that of the disruptive president, who is sweeping everything before him: “Donald Trump is at the head of a revolutionary project that aspires to reshuffle the economic, bureaucratic, cultural, and foreign policy maps” of the United States. Even “to transform the very idea of ​​America,” worries the liberal weekly, which accuses him of having “inflicted lasting damage” on his country.

And lasting, there's no doubt they will be. Despite ongoing legal proceedings almost everywhere and despite the resistance, too, that is beginning to organize, as at Harvard. Since Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20, we have continued to decipher the decisions of the new American administration. A complicated journalistic exercise given the administration's incessant reversals. In the United States, in an attempt to gain more clarity, some newspapers have chosen to explain each government announcement day by day. One of the first to set up this "Trump Tracker" ? Science magazine, back in February, and this is no coincidence. Because science and research were in the Trump administration's crosshairs very early on.

Budget cuts, layoffs, the elimination of major research programs, data erasure... Executive orders are multiplying, undermining the work and independence of scientists in the United States. In addition to the more than vague economic motivations, there are the ideological positions of the new American government, which wants to get rid of issues related to gender inequality, vaccines, or climate change, to name but a few. All scientific fields are affected by this loss of knowledge, from basic research to weather forecasting, to space, diabetes research, and more.

It is to this senseless crusade against research, knowledge in general, and scientists in particular (especially young doctoral students) that we are dedicating our front page this week. Because reading the articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal , and the Nature editorial that we have translated in this issue, we understand very precisely the mechanics at work in the Trump administration and we better grasp the immense stakes of the backward step it entails.

The logic is far from obvious: Donald Trump may claim to be the king of Greenland, Ukraine, Gaza, Canada, the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, global trade, migration, gender issues, etc. Everything seems to isolate the United States a little more each day. “One hundred days is all it took to cut America off from the rest of the world,” laments Ben Rhodes in The New York Times .

In science, it's the same thing: by cutting federal subsidies everywhere and eliminating diversity programs, the Trump administration is not only organizing a major leap backward in knowledge, but also a brain drain, and immediately ruining the United States' lead in innovation, to the benefit of its sworn enemy, China.

Absurd, did you say absurd? To try to find our way around and grasp a little better what underpins the Trump era, there's nothing like, as a delightful article in the Boston Globe invites us to do, rereading... Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco. The author's explanation: "But what is this strange and tragicomic work about? Fascism, my father explained to me—and more precisely, the cowardice and opportunism shown by otherwise intelligent and reasonable people when they rallied to the Nazis or turned a blind eye," writes Christopher Hoffman. He adds: "The play is a vibrant denunciation of authoritarianism and groupthink in all their forms." In other words: conformity. I'll let you discover the rest.