“Our president certainly has high confidence in his beliefs,” said Chu, chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. “Scientists always test their beliefs all the time. That’s part of the fabric of science.”…

Meteorologist Ryan Maue, a conservative scholar, said that on policy, he and other conservatives like Trump’s agenda of deregulation, including pulling out of the United Nations’ Paris climate agreement. He pointed to increased funding of NASA and its return to the moon mission as pro-science, and added that the weather service is improving its forecast models.

But when it comes to communicating science, Trump “is a mess,” Maue said. He’s trying to be funny and folksy “and it doesn’t work and the media is eating that stuff up alive. And I think that’s fair.”