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The Rise of the Vichy Scientists

Too many scientists are willing to collaborate with Trumpism in the mistaken assumption that obedience will save their own necks.

Jayanta Bhattacharya, director of the US National Institutes of Health, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, on Saturday, March 28, 2026.

American science is struggling for its life. It’s been under assault since January 2025, and nothing is getting better. We’re soon to be on a death watch. It is unbelievably stupid and insane—flushing away decades of American preeminence in innovation, and for what? No one has adequately explained why the mad men of the Trump administration are so hell-bent on this task.

But a question has lingered in my mind for months now: Why would scientific institutions be cozying up to the very people who want to pull them all down? Why do they insist on whitewashing what is happening, helping the perpetrators burnish their credentials?

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, wrote about the complicity of another set of scholarly actors—the members of legal academia—in a January blog post about the “dual state.” Even though it didn’t focus on the sciences, it still applies to the world I work in.

In this universe, we live in a bifurcated world: the normative state, where the systems of daily life and civic governance hew to the usual, existing order, and the “prerogative state,” which Vladeck describes as “a governmental system which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”

This idea of the dual state originated in the writings of Ernst Fraenkel, who fled the Nazis in 1938 and wrote a book in 1941 called The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Vladeck goes on to quote an essay by University of Minnesota law professor Oren Gross, titled “Hitler’s Willing Law Professors,” which discussed how “German academia turned with much zeal and enthusiasm to the project of justifying and legitimating the actions of the regime.… While legal scholars did not, by and large, participate directly in the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, they facilitated those by conferring a veneer of legality and legitimacy to the actions of the regime” (my emphasis). Vladeck rejects comparisons between our current moment and Nazi Germany, but suggests that the concept of the dual state may still apply in our own time. The dual state operates with another function as well, beyond the two-track world it represents, as Pema Levy wrote in Mother Jones: “The dual........

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