People of good faith can disagree about the legality, effectiveness, and wisdom of any of these individual policies—and they do. But Trump has attacked the policies collectively and with great gusto, while declining to ever actually learn about the underlying scientific evidence.

Meanwhile, he sits atop the science agencies of the U.S. government, some of the finest scientific institutions ever constructed. Last month, his own administration released the Climate Science Special Report, a product of 13 federal agencies and itself the best scientific synopsis of climate change in years.

It seemed to address exactly his concern. “The number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records,” its authors said, with the highest confidence possible. “The frequency of cold waves has decreased since the early 1900s, and the frequency of heat waves has increased since the mid-1960s.” (The Dust Bowl period still holds the record for the most extreme temperatures.)

Trump has never expressed curiosity for this kind of fact finding or self-education. But neither he nor his administration has publicly fought climate change on its scientific basis. After some hand wringing this summer, the government released the unabridged Climate Science Special Report last month.  And while much could still change, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of Trump’s EPA, seems unlikely to revoke the agency’s own endangerment finding, a 2009 memo that accepts the scientific foundations of climate change into federal policy. The Trump administration has hastily scaled back climate policy and barely touched climate science.

Indeed, this has characterized Trump’s approach: a rapid dismantling of law, and a lazy disregard for evidence. He has called climate change—in part a triumph of the American scientific enterprise—a “hoax” “created by and for the Chinese.” Trump seems confident in his belief that Earth scientists and the climate-concerned have invented a phenomenon out of whole cloth and that he needs to pay little attention to it. He seems sure, too, that the shambolic catastrophe of a destabilized climate—which will be a central preoccupation of the United States in the 21st century, whether its leaders recognize the reality of it or not—is a fable. In so doing, he underestimates the citizens whom he governs; and he conceives of the country over which he presides as being shallower, less curious, quicker to anger, more unwise, and altogether not as secure in its good understanding than it actually is. Pity him, and mourn for us.