Trust in Government

Once upon a time, long, long ago, most Americans trusted the government to take care of things.  (Well, more accurately, most white Americans felt that trust; it was certainly different for African Americans.)  But then came some major breaches of that trust: Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, a serious recession and out-of-control inflation.  By 1980 Ronald Reagan’s could campaign successfully on the slogan Government is the problem.  Since that time, perhaps the most important accomplishment of the political right wing has been to trash our basic trust in government.  Without trust, a democracy cannot function.  When people don’t trust the government to hear them, they don’t vote. And even when they do vote, their mistrust too often results in a negative “throw the bums out” rather a considered vote for policies they approve of.  Voters are not outraged by outrageous presidential or congressional actions because they don’t expect anything better.

President Trump has profoundly intensified that process.  Over the next several posts I want to look at his attack on our trust.  Here are a few of the areas to explore.

• Since the beginning of his campaign, the President has been claiming, without evidence, that the electoral system is “rigged.”  A Hillary victory, he reiterated, would prove it.  Even after he won the election through the Electoral College, Trump has continued to insist that he won the popular vote, too.  Or that he would have won if three-to-five million people hadn’t voted illegally.  If elections are rigged, how can you trust government?

• Similarly, even after he won, he has continued to assert that Clinton should be criminally prosecuted, again without providing evidence. This is unprecedented in modern American history; after a presidential campaign— no matter how vitriolic—the winner and challenger have always congratulated one another and moved on, sustaining basic trust in the election.  If a “criminal” can almost win a presidential election, how can we trust government?

• The President lies repeatedly and usually persists even when there is documented evidence he’s lying.  The content of the lie may be very important in itself, for instance, if there are millions of people voting illegally then we need to tighten the voter rolls … excluding whole categories of people.  But when wholesale lying, regardless of content, becomes politically acceptable, the possibility for trust is shattered.  The public belief—inaccurate in my opinion—that you can’t trust anything any politician says becomes obvious.

• The President constantly attacks the mainstream press as “fake news,” even when the reports are demonstrably true. If the media are not a reliable source of truth, we can rely only on propaganda, Internet websites, rumors, and so on.  Perhaps most importantly, truth becomes relative.

• Trumps’ recent pardoning of Sheriff Arpaio is an unprecedented assault on the Constitution’s basic principle of the separation of powers through “checks and balances.”  Presidents legally do have complete freedom to pardon almost anyone, but that power has always been used sparingly, after the judicial process has completed, and usually as a way to right an obvious wrong.  Arpaio, on the other hand, had been convicted of criminal contempt of court for ignoring a court order to stop arresting immigrants without reasonable suspicion they had committed a crime.  Arpaio’s guilt was obvious; pardon came even before sentencing.  The clear message is that the President determines guilt or innocence.  The President must usurp judicial power because we cannot trust the judiciary to provide truth.

Rather than concentrating on each of these events as “one more outrage,” it seems to me important to view them as a pattern of assaults on our democracy and to explore their impact.  Although no single one of these actions by a President is completely new in American politics, their breadth and depth, especially, from the President of the United States is certainly unprecedented.  Trust in government is at an all-time low, threatening our democracy.  We must at least understand it before a new normal is created.