‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election

Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency in the early hours of 6 November. Owing to Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and actions during his last term in office, many are now bracing for four years of attacks on scientists inside and outside the government.

“In my long life of 82 years … there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,” says Fraser Stoddart, a Nobel laureate who left the United States last year and is now chair of chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. “I’ve witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.”

“I’m speechless,” says Sheila Jasanoff, a social scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Votes are still being counted in many places, but Trump has already won enough US states to sail to a resounding victory over his opponent, vice-president and Democrat Kamala Harris. Trump addressed his supporters as the victor early today, declaring his coalition “the greatest political movement of all time”.

Republicans also look primed to win the upper chamber of the US Congress — the Senate — flipping at least three Democratic seats, although there are five more competitive races that have yet to be called for either party. It could be days or weeks before the final results are in for the lower chamber, the US House of Representatives, but it seems likely that Republicans will retain control. This would give Trump and his party full control of government in Washington DC.

“We need to be ready for a new world,” says Grazyna Jasienska, a longevity researcher at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. “I am trying to be optimistic, but it is hard to find any positive aspects for global science and public health if Republicans take over.”

Trump has in the past called climate change a hoax and pulled the country out of the Paris climate agreement; he has said he would give Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a political figure who has denied the effectiveness of vaccines, a “big role” in his administration, and he has promised to make it easier to fire specialists such as scientists from the US government who oppose his political agenda.

Worries pouring in this morning align with those expressed by the majority of readers who responded last month to a survey conducted by Nature. Eighty-six per-cent of the more than 2,000 people who answered the poll said that they favoured Harris, owing to concerns including climate change, public health and the state of US democracy. Some even said they would consider changing where they live or study if Trump won.

Responses geared towards that sentiment have come swiftly. Tulio de Oliveira, a prominent virologist at the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, posted on X (the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter): “With the changes around the world, you may want to relocate to one of the best Universities in [South Africa] in one of the world’s most beautiful region!”, he said and linked to job ads for postgraduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

Another worry for researchers is that a second presidency for Trump “will be another nail in the coffin for trust in science”, given his anti-science rhetoric, says Lisa Schipper, a geographer specializing in climate change vulnerability at the University of Bonn in Germany. According to a survey of thousands of US adults by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, the percentage of people who say that science has had a positive effect on society has been declining steadily since 2019.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated throughout the day.

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