The Appeal of Trumpism to Traditionalists

David Gelernter is an innovator in parallel computing, a prolific writer on religion and culture, a talented artist—and one of two apparent finalists for the job of science advisor to President Donald Trump. To call the Yale computer scientist “anti-intellectual,” as The Washington Post did in January, is to stretch the word past its breaking-point. But Gelernter is also at the center of two falsely comforting ways of thinking about Trumpism. The first assumes that the most anti-intellectual president in recent memory infects everything he touches—that when someone who writes books decides to back a president who never reads them, the former gets dumbed-down by association. The second assumes that when a cultural conservative like Gelernter supports Trump, there's nothing more interesting at stake than an acute case of hypocrisy.