Gallup has released its annual poll of Americans asking about their trust in 16 major U.S. institutions. You can see the horrible results above. Ethics Alarms has covered this poll for many years, because trust is both a prime ethics value and also the most important one for a democracy. I wrote years ago on the old Ethics Scoreboard about how Democrats were playing with fire by seeding distrust in our elections and the Supreme Court by hammering on the too-close 2000 Presidential election as a “stolen” while claiming the Gore “won.” I called the strategy “pulling at the fabric of democracy,” if I recall, noting that our system uniquely requires public trust in our processes, institutions, leaders and fellow members of the public. Since then, the level of distrust has both fallen and widened.
Even applying the obligatory distrust of polls themselves, Gallup’s conclusions are frightening, in part because they feel accurate. Not only is the public less confident in major U.S. institutions than it was a year ago, it is the worst it has been across the board since Gallup started checking. There were significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The Supreme Court fell lower than it ever has been, not surprising since two of the institutions regarded correctly as less trustworthy have been cynically and irresponsibly deriding it for purely ideological motives. The Presidency has dropped in trust even more than SCOTUS, which shows that the public is paying attention. Congress hasn’t fallen as far in percentage points, but only because it had fallen so far already. The five points it lost in trust almost cuts its previous low in half.
Thus it is not, perhaps, coincidental that less than two weeks ago,the Presidency and the news media were further exposed by the discovery of a 2018 voicemail from President Biden that proved his repeated denials about speaking with crooked Number Two Son Hunter Biden about his foreign business dealings were outright lies.
