Trust and Us

America has become a country where children cannot trust their parents when they tell them they will be safe at school. Even a child knows that is not the truth. A society where parents are not trusted by their children is in an abject state of decline, maybe even dissolution. There is little to no trust left in the United States, not in its government or institutions, businesses, universities, the media, the economy, and virtually every endeavor that holds together and comprises a free nation. Nothing is more telling about the decline of a culture and government than the end of trust. America is losing even the interstitial notion of trust as a binding force for a people.

We have tended to believe that our republic is secured by armies and honored by monuments. But its strength has always arisen from the faith of its citizens that the system will be fair, that our ballots will matter, courts will not bend to political winds, and that leaders, though imperfect, will honor the Constitution. We have mostly been right about those convictions, but is has become ephemeral, and without this faith, institutions become hollow rituals, and democracy devolves into spectacle, like three-hour cabinet meetings spent praising a failed and amoral person. America is teetering right now in the winds of such a moment, its civic trust splintering under suspicion, its institutions regarded less as guardians than as combatants.

The Founders understood the perils that appear when trust is lost. Madison warned that its absence “is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.” Washington, in his Farewell Address, cautioned that partisanship and distrust could unravel liberty more effectively than foreign adversaries. There is a persuasive argument to be made that the people of this country have done more to undermine its existence than any enemy army. Hamilton placed his hope in the “deliberate sense of the community,” knowing that the experiment could survive only if citizens believed in the process by which their leaders were chosen, and that they trusted that process.

We no longer do.

Belief in our government, ourselves, our laws, and trusting the construct of our democracy, has, historically, carried us through darker hours. Lincoln, who confronted a disunion unequalled still on this continent, called for reverence toward law as “the political religion of the nation,” insisting that only faith in institutions could hold the republic together when battlefields could not. Roosevelt, in the darkest depths of the Depression, told Americans in his second inaugural that “we have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.” His appeal was to not be afraid, but to trust that democracy could still deliver on its promises. Even Watergate, which seemed to expose rot at the highest level, ultimately confirmed the system’s strength: Congress investigated, courts enforced the law, and Nixon resigned because Americans still believed the machinery of accountability could be trusted.

That is no longer a functioning proposition. The 2025 Congress only investigates political enemies and people the president considers opponents and critics. The mere idea of trust has grown brittle. The 2000 presidential election, decided by a handful of ballots in Florida and a Supreme Court ruling, should have been a warning. While many accepted the outcome, the sense that political power could be determined by judicial decree left scars. Two decades later, in 2020, those doubts metastasized into conspiracy. Millions refused to accept the legitimacy of the result, convinced that ballots had been conjured or discarded, that democracy itself had been rigged.

The culmination that skepticism came on January 6, 2021, when citizens, no longer trusting elections or courts or even Congress, stormed the Capitol to halt the certification of a peaceful transfer of power. The images were startling but also predictable: when trust evaporates, ballots are replaced by barricades, and belief in process gives way to force. Trust, subsequently, all but disappeared once the President, elected four years later, began to provide pardons to the criminals trying to overthrow his legitimately elected opponent and congress.

What do we trust today in this country, if we cannot believe in our elections? To dismiss elections as fraudulent because they yield an unwelcome outcome is to toss aside the sovereignty of the people themselves. To see courts as nothing more than political actors is to strip law of meaning, which is what happens every time the current president appeals one of his executive orders to the Supreme Court. To treat the Constitution as a document to be gamed rather than a covenant to be honored is to abandon the very balance that restrains tyranny. And to assume all leaders are corrupt is to invite demagogues, who thrive in the vacuum created by despair, and corruption will spread like a deadly virus as trust withers and dies.

There is no secret about where this is going and history tells us where the road leads. Athens decayed into factional revenge, and Rome surrendered to Caesar when the Senate lost the people’s trust. Their decline was not a sudden collapse but slow erosion, until the forms of democracy remained but their spirit had died. No country has ever survived when trust in its leaders and its government was lost to suspicion and antipathy among interest groups and political opponents.

Americans are clearly an optimistic people and have not yet fully acknowledged the existential crisis that exists for our country. Maybe that’s because our history tells us America has chosen renewal before. We did not fracture after the contested election of 1800; Jefferson took office and the republic endured. We did not dissolve in the Civil War; Lincoln reminded us that the Constitution still bound us. We did not surrender in Depression, nor disintegrate in the scandal of Watergate. Each time, trust was bruised but not broken.

The question is whether we still have the will to repair it. Trust will not be restored by rhetoric but by deeds: elections so transparent that even the defeated can acknowledge their fairness; courts whose rulings are respected because their independence is beyond reproach; leaders who treat truth as duty, not as strategy; and citizens who accept that defeat is not disenfranchisement but the cost of belonging to a free people.

If trust fails, though, the Constitution is paper, elections are theater, and courts are props in a partisan pageant. If trust can be rebuilt, though, and Americans once more believe, the republic will endure, not as performance but as promise. And in the end, the survival of this nation will turn on a question not of power or prosperity, but of faith in who we might still be as a people, and whether we still trust ourselves enough to be free.