You’ve probably read somewhere that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is waging a war on science. This is a completely understandable sentiment, of course, and one which, in its typical meaning, is hardly wrong. But the Trump Administration isn’t merely waging war against climate science, or medical science, or the great research universities which have empowered the United States. The Trump Administration is at the forefront of a new – or, perhaps, ancient – way of viewing the world: one in which conclusions are drawn irrespective of what evidence may or may not exist. To wit, the Trump Administration, and its contemporaries, oppose not merely the results of science, but the very process of science itself.

This is, in some ways, a banal claim: the first Trump Administration was notorious for the phrase “alternative facts” (referring to blatant lies), and its, well, blatant lies. But in other ways, it is an extraordinary one: the Trump Administration has abandoned an evidence-based approach to governance, and an epistemological approach which enabled more than two centuries of unprecedented discovery and transformation.

And extraordinary claims, even those which appear simultaneously banal, require extraordinary evidence.

Mr. Trump and his allies prioritize decisions stemming from his instincts, rather than proven and time-tested facts or methodologies. Perhaps the best example of this is Mr. Trump’s ridiculous amalgamation of tariffs. Despite decades of consensus by economists that free trade is a positive-sum affair, Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on goods imported from other countries. Although even the most free-trade-friendly economists have made the case for limited tariffs in certain sectors, blanket tariffs on foreign states damage both the spending power of U.S. residents and harm the livelihoods of residents of foreign countries.

Mr. Trump claims windmills cause cancer, and redirects hurricanes with the stroke of a Sharpie. What he says one day is not what he said yesterday the next. What is useful is twisted into a flattering self-portrait so that he can navel-gaze; what is not disappears into the memory hole. When the U.S. Constitution gets in his way, Mr. Trump simply orders it reinterpreted; when courts order his administration to modify its actions, it often chooses to ignore them. He is not a man of evidence; his administration is the antithesis of science: it starts with a conclusion, and then collects what evidence there is to support it, or fabricates it if none exists.

These facts draw an image so utterly beyond the pale that, without being able to reread their sourcing, I would struggle to believe the picture they lay out. Acknowledging the mendacity of Trump feels almost slanderous: the fictions so extreme and the actions so illogical that one cannot hope but to imagine there is some truth, or at least some grand strategy to the whole affair.

But all evidence (and evidence, despite everything the Trump Administration does to the contrary, must still be the basis of any serious analysis), points to the opposite. Mr. Trump, and his administration, are acting on gut instinct and impulse, and then providing the reasoning after the fact. Like a large language model providing any rationale to prove its stochastically regurgitated claim, so too will Mr. Trump’s administration defend its bizarre decision making processes.

Mr. Trump is making war not merely on the results of the scientific process, or institutions which exemplify the process, but on the very concept of scientific epistemology itself. There needs be no evidence to support an idea, only a claim by Mr. Trump and endless rationalizing and sane-washing to explain it.