I find this paradoxical. To be consistent to themselves, Trump supporters must also argue that the president is guiding his ship based on sound scientific advice. Yet he and, according to the poll, his supporters, express a deep skepticism that science can be trusted to help with this crisis. To square this circle, I suppose his supporters must believe that, “science” being good and Trump being on their team, he is using “good” scientists—people who agree with him. Given that Trump frequently disregards expert, scientific opinion, and that his supporters have been told again and again that the coronavirus is a hoax intended to bring down their team, any scientist who disagrees with him must not be a “good” scientist. It’s a nice circle. Trump relies on good scientific information. How do we know? Because he ignores all bad scientists. If they were good, they would agree with him.

Interestingly, there is rising agreement across the board that the opinions of the uninformed, untrained public should not play a role in guiding policy decisions about scientific issues. In 2014, only 35% said the uninformed public should not. During this pandemic, minds changed on the power that the untrained public should have guiding policy regarding science: 55% now say they should not. If Republicans don’t trust the scientists and they don’t trust the public, then there is only one group left to trust: their party leaders and their media luminaries.

This, I suppose, helps in part to explain why we failed to heed the warnings of the scientists about the coronavirus early on.

Even for those of us who were listening to the science, there can be no denying that we received inconsistent information from the scientists themselves on a regular basis. Part of that is understandable; it is, in fact, the nature of scientific inquiry that hypotheses remain tentative and change as new information comes to light. But the culture of the preprint and the 24-hour news cycle meant that these tentative hypotheses reached the eyes and ears of millions, shaping policy and public opinion, and creating cascades of damaging misinformation.