Donald Trump as Mammoth Meat

Everyone is engaged in proposing reasons why Donald Trump won the presidency again. Here is my take: it has to do with (fake) mammoth meat.

You may have heard that last year an Australian company said they could manufacture a “mammoth meatball” using genetic engineering techniques, a story that gained some traction in the media. But it just wasn’t true: the pretended mammoth meat was sheep meat with a sprinkling of elephant myoglobin. The story is debunked in Business Insider and, if you want to know the details, they are explained in an excellent video by Giacomo Moro Mauretto (alas, only available in Italian). It was a clever marketing stunt, but no more than that.

The problem is that practically all the media and sites reported the story as if it were true. For instance, Smithsonian Magazine completely fell for it. CNN cast some doubts on the story, but only after having described it as real and with a title that left no doubt it was real. Apparently, nobody cares too much about checking that what they report has at least some relation with reality.

Alas, the public may be gullible, but there are limits to that. If you keep feeding fake stories to people, eventually people will stop believing you. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Take a look at these data:

The collapse of trust in the media is impressive. By the way, note that the people who define themselves as “independents” are now the largest fraction of the American public; 49% of the population according to Axios. So, a large majority of Americans distrust their media. Other data show the general collapse of trust in all sectors of society, including science, plagued by many problems; corruption, cronyism, incompetence, bureaucratization, and a few more. Take a look at the data. They are not as bad as those for the mainstream media, but the trend is the same

It is not surprising that after decades of “Gee-Whiz” science pushed by the media, the public is starting to see the lies they are exposed to. One of the consequences has been the election of Donald Trump as US president (*). It is not that he won because of a mammoth meatball, but it was one of the factors. The people who voted for him are not dumb, not ignorant, not deplorable. They are just fed up with the scams that the media and the institutions have been piling up on them.

Yet, the fact that the public can detect lies does not necessarily lead to the truth, as I discussed in my recent post “The Empire of Lies.” The problem is how to rebuild trust, truly a monumental task. At the very least, we need to drain the swamp that science has become, fishing out the chunks of rotting mammoth meat in there. But, of course. Trump is hardly the right person to do that. Yet it is not unthinkable that a consequence of his election may be some serious effort to reform science, getting rid of the widespread corruption, cronyism, elitism, incompetence, waste of resources, and more similar niceties. Maybe RFK Jr. could do something good in the area where the swamp is deepest and smelliest: medicine. But the task is gigantic, the opposition fearsome, and the risk of worsening things large. Honestly, it looks like an impossible task to me, even assuming that RFK could survive long enough to do something serious about it.

Eventually, flawed institutions tend to crumble by themselves. It may be high time for Science to go that way, just like the Roman Empire did, long ago. In the meantime, we’ll keep hearing stories about mammoth meatballs and, why not, unicorn steaks and sandworm ribs.

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(*) As a personal note, I wasn’t especially dismayed nor overjoyed by Trump’s victory. I can imagine several scenarios in which a Harris presidency could have been much worse than anything that Trump could do, but also the reverse.