Bob Zubrin on Trump and Mars – But Mostly Trump

Speaking of Bob Zubrin:  Statement of Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin Concerning the Election of Donald Trump

Ooh. That’s grandiose. Sounds like an official communique from someone important. Let’s see what’s inside…

Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. The Mars Society is non-partisan and does not endorse any candidate. Many of our members and other space advocates supported Mr. Trump’s election, while many others opposed him. For reasons I have amply explained elsewhere, I have always been a member of the latter group.

The first two lines are neutral statements of fact, but already in the third there is a problem: the simplistic and dishonest division of the Mars Society membership into those who supported Trump and those who opposed him, when those are not the only two possible alternatives. What about those who supported Harris on her own merits, for example, or those who opposed her for same, or those who voted third-party, or those who sat out for whatever reason?

Mr. Zubrin’s monochromatic monomania about Donald Trump excludes those possibilities. It’s black and white: the election was about Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump alone, and either you voted against him, or you voted for him. Kamala Harris who?

The fourth line is what gets me. It’s wholly unprofessional for the head of an organization having nothing to do with politics to insert his own political opinions into the organization’s official communications (however cleverly oblique he imagined he was being when he did it). I suspect his intent here was simply to signal his membership among the righteous, as he sees it.

I get it – I’ve been there. It jumps out at me because I’ve had to edit personal editorial statements like this out of my own organizational PR. As the head of an organization, when you speak in that role you are speaking as the organization, ex cathedra, and so you never say things that show condescension towards the membership over matters unrelated to the organization’s mission.

And if you expect to keep your organization viable and recruit new members, you don’t make half of those who are or could become members feel unwelcome by signaling to them that you consider them inferior. (This signal is more apparent when one reads those ‘explanations elsewhere’.)

That said, whatever we think of the various policies that Mr. Trump has put on offer, there is one that I and the vast majority of Mars Society members certainly support: his promise to initiate a program to send humans to the Red Planet. We will therefore support that initiative, not because we agree with Mr. Trump, but because on this issue, he agrees with us.

Having made it clear over the past few weeks that he did not see a potential humans to Mars policy as anywhere close to being an acceptable reason to support a second Trump presidency, this is an interesting about-face. I suppose it’s pragmatic – making lemonade from the orange he’s been given, so to speak – but it’s an odd willingness to cooperate with a man who Mr. Zubrin has been demonizing as Hitlerian for the past several months.

One would expect someone with such self-regard as a man of principle would regard cooperating with Mr. Trump on sending humans to Mars as just as unjustifiable as he did voting for the man to achieve the same end. While the former, coming after the fact, doesn’t assist Mr. Trump in getting elected, how can it not connote support for the new Trump administration – regardless of pious, self-serving disclaimers to the contrary?

(And yet again, he can’t resist the urge to editorialize, in this instance couching this pragmatic direction in slanted language – a disingenuously “objective” framing that in fact reads as Even though all his other policies suck and it’s very important that you know that I don’t agree with any of them…)

But the cherry on top is the clichéd re-framing at the end. To the extent Mr. Trump is interested in sending humans to Mars, it’s a harmony of interests, a parallel, possibly indirectly influenced by the past quarter-century of advocacy by Mr. Zubrin and the Mars Society but not due to having been persuaded to accept his/their position, as implied. I’d be surprised if Mr. Trump even knows the Mars Society or Mr. Zubrin exist. (It’s far more likely that Elon Musk is the origin of any interest in Mars on the part of Mr. Trump.)

The point is significant. The age-old dream of endowing human minds and hands access to the cosmos does not belong to Donald Trump, nor should it be considered the exclusive possession of any particular political party. It belongs to humanity. It is essential that we make that clear, because the fortunes of political war are always changing. Should the Mars project come to be regarded as the mere hobby horse of a controversial politician, business leader, or partisan faction, it would surely face cancellation the next time the winds of power shift. We cannot let that happen. Precisely because we are not followers of Mr. Trump, we need to step up and help explain why all Americans, regardless of party, should support this initiative.

Yes, yes, okay, we get that you despise Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Mr. Zubrin. Everything in this paragraph could have been stated, and better, without scratching that insatiable itch to sneak in your disdain for them.

Indeed, the rest of the piece is decently written and free of this kind of editorializing. Unfortunately, the rah-rah effect of the statement is dampened by the preceding paragraphs…and the recognition that it was only written at all as a working out of the author’s disappointment at the election results.