The distrust and dislike of scientists, academics, and experts more broadly was a widely noted theme in the 2016 presidential election (e.g., Editorial Board, 2016). Often, this affective aversion to experts is conceptualized as a form of anti-intellectualism (Hofstadter, 1963; Rigney, 1991). Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, and in the months that followed, Republican nominee Donald Trump, for example, made several notable appeals to anti-intellectual sentiments.
For example, Trump questioned on several occasions whether or not climate scientists were secretly working with Chinese business interests to falsely promote evidence of climate change, hinted at researchers’ ulterior motives in producing research about the safety of vaccines, and called researchers “idiots” for creating (and advocating the use of) environmentally friendly but potentially carcinogenic lightbulbs (Swain & Wong, 2016). He also repeatedly questioned whether or not polling methodologists were conspiring to sink his presidential bid by artificially deflating his standing in the national polls (Golshan, 2016). Similar rhetoric was present too in Trump’s transition to the White House, when a senior campaign advisor characterized federal climate research programs as “politicized science” (Milman, 2016). Overall, experts received a considerable amount of criticism on and off the campaign trail in 2016.
Yet, while anti-intellectualism may seem like it has been a unique feature of Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 campaign, recent research (e.g., Gauchat, 2012) suggests that anti-intellectual attitude endorsement has been growing in the mass public for decades, especially on the ideological right.
