Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The Environment has benefited from regulations on air and water pollution that have coexisted with growth in population, GDP, and travel. Trump believes that environmental regulation is economically destructive; worst of all, he has called climate change a hoax and announced a withdrawal from the historic Paris agreement.

Safety, too, has been dramatically improved by federal regulations, toward which Trump and his allies are contemptuous. While Trump has cultivated a reputation for law and order, he is viscerally uninterested in evidence-based policy that would distinguish effective crime-prevention measures from useless tough talk.

The postwar Peace has been cemented by trade, Democracy, international agreements and organizations, and norms against conquest. Trump has vilified international trade and has threatened to defy international agreements and weaken international organizations. Trump is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, who reversed the democratization of Russia, tried to undermine democracy in the United States and Europe with cyberattacks, helped prosecute the most destructive war of the 21st century in Syria, fomented smaller wars in Ukraine and Georgia, and defied the postwar taboo against conquest in his annexation of Crimea. Several members of Trump’s administration secretly colluded with Russia in an effort to lift sanctions against it, undermining a major enforcement mechanism in the outlawry of war.

Democracy depends both on explicit constitutional protections, such as freedom of the press, and on shared norms, in particular that political leadership is determined by the rule of law and nonviolent political competition rather than a charismatic leader’s will to power. Trump proposed to relax libel laws against journalists, encouraged violence against his critics at his rallies, would not commit to respecting the outcome of the 2016 election if it went against him, tried to discredit the popular vote count that did go against him, threatened to imprison his opponent in the election, and attacked the legitimacy of the judicial system when it challenged his decisions—all hallmarks of a dictator. Globally, the resilience of democracy depends in part on its prestige in the community of nations, and Trump has praised autocrats in Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt while denigrating democratic allies such as Germany.

The ideals of tolerance, equality, and Equal Rights took big symbolic hits during his campaign and early administration. Trump demonized Hispanic immigrants, proposed banning Muslim immigration altogether (and tried to impose a partial ban once he was elected), repeatedly demeaned women, tolerated vulgar expressions of racism and sexism at his rallies, accepted support from white supremacist groups and equated them with their opponents, and appointed a strategist and an attorney general who are hostile to the civil rights movement.

The ideal of Knowledge—that one’s opinions should be based on justified true beliefs—has been mocked by Trump’s repetition of ludicrous conspiracy theories: that Obama was born in Kenya, Senator Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/11, Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered, Obama had his phones tapped, millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote, and literally dozens of others. The fact-checking site PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” (their term for outrageous lies, from the children’s taunt “Liar, liar, pants on fire”).²⁷ All politicians bend the truth, and all sometimes lie (since all human beings bend the truth and sometimes lie), but Trump’s barefaced assertion of canards that can instantly be debunked (such as that he won the election in a landslide) shows that he sees public discourse not as a means of finding common ground based on objective reality but as a weapon with which to project dominance and humiliate rivals.

Most frighteningly, Trump has pushed back against the norms that have protected the world against the possible Existential Threat of nuclear war. He questioned the taboo on using nuclear weapons, tweeted about resuming a nuclear arms race, mused about encouraging the proliferation of weapons to additional countries, sought to overturn the agreement that prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and taunted Kim Jong-un about a possible nuclear exchange with North Korea. Worst of all, the chain of command gives an American president enormous discretion over the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis, on the tacit assumption that no president would act rashly on such a grave matter. Yet Trump has a temperament that is notoriously impulsive and vindictive.