Trump’s Revenge Against the Loathsome Elites

The silver lining in Trump’s fascist transformation of America

Photo by Gage Skidmore, on Flickr

American trust in government was low well before Donald Trump’s political career.

According to an American National Election Studies graph showing the average trust in government from 1964 to 2024, the trust level reached its high point in the mid-1960s, which was above 60%, but it fell below 50% in the late ’60s, and has remained well below that mark for the rest of the period. In 2015, the year leading to Trump’s first term as president, the trust level was below 20%, and it has remained below 20% until 2024.

There were only two exceptions to the downward slide in trust over that half a century. From 1980 to 1986, the trust rose to a high point of 47%, due to enthusiasm for the Reagan Revolution, although it slid starting in 1986, perhaps taking the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle as symbolic of libertarianism’s hollowness as a populist agenda. And the trust level rose to a high point of 43.5%, from 1994 to 2002, due to enthusiasm for Bill Clinton’s vitality and an early rallying around George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

Pew corroborated that overall dismal drop in trust, finding that in the mid ’60s, trust in government was high, at 77%. But there was a precipitous decline until the…