Trump hates science anyway, so why not fire all scientists? Problem solved. /s

Isn't what they're basically doing with the massive funding cuts and cover-ups?

Trump is an actor, he isn't the scenario writer, and as such you never should focus on Trump.

This isn't a surprise when religious conservatism enters a traditional marriage with oligarchic conservatism¹. This is more a classical case of "you keep them stupid, while we keep them poor". If even the Enlightenment is a heresy (Burke e.a), you will have to spin the clock back.

But you can't have your cake and eat it too, so the US will become closer to an Afghanistan, led by increasingly unruly lunatics and warlords. Women's rights, scientific progress, educated people with agency; it's all a threat. The conservative rage becomes violent because what it wants and believes conflicts with reality, so they have to smash that all down, including the progress.

Yes, they rather burn society down than to lose control. That is hard to grasp for decent people, so you see an endless stream of opinions trying and failing to come up with a constructive rationale, but when you can understand that there is a class of people with a non-constructive default mode like the rest of us, things will be much easier to understand.

The book banning has been going on for several years, and now we are in the escalation phase. The resent about women's rights, persecution² of transgenders, harassment of universities and scientists, in short: the Gleichschaltung³, should not be a surprise and has little to do with show- and stuntman Trump. It is unruly conservatism coming to its ultimate conclusion, confronted with shrinking religious control, with results of zero sum economics, with a shrinking voter base, with all gerry-mandering options exploited, and ultimately with having thrown away democracy. The clock is being turned back.

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1. This is the original definition of conservatism, to "conserve" the status quo of a very small class of owners versus large masses of poor people.

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170928

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung

I don't think its about hate, its more like he doesn't believe in taking away something he cannot see with his own eye. Here his idea is that research and development will still continue happening even if overwhelming majority of people responsible for it in the past, will be gone.

Take COVID for example. We were fine with minor breakouts prior to Trump administration. They came in and Trump saw we are spending $3.7 million on safety measures in Wuhan Lab, fund designated by Obama (here comes first red flag right?) By his standard you could not SEE the protection so he wanted to look like Champion and save tax payers 3.7 million by removing that protection. We all know what came next and boy was damage more financially painful than mere 3.7 mil?

Its like a person who doesn't wear a seat belt because they never been in a car accident so they don't see the point. If given power they would remove mandates to wear seatbelts and have insurance companies deal with the outcome.