[doom2]

It doesn't help when a political candidate campaigns on promises of "radical transparency" and breaking up "corruption" and "the deep state" in DC and then gets in power and is even less transparent, more corrupt, and filling the DC bureaucracy with more yes men than the person before him.

How are you supposed to build trust with those kinds of outcomes?

[lkrubner]

Nothing you said is true. The fact that you didn't name a single person is an example of the style of reasoning that has increasingly shaped USA discourse over the last 60 years. If you don't have specifics then you are simply giving into the trend towards distrust. Since 1960 every institution in the USA has been made more transparent and more directly democratic and yet this has done nothing to increase trust in those institutions. The distrust comes first and the distrust does not reference anything in reality. If Americans are more worried about corruption when corruption is decreasing then something is going on in the minds of Americans which does not have a correspondence with any external reality. Likewise, Americans are increasingly convinced that crime is increasing when every statistic we have shows that the crime wave lasted from 1960 to 1990 and has been in decline since 1990. Again, that Americans are more worried about crime when crime is decreasing shows that the concern about crime is being driven by something other than crime. The distrust comes first. The distrust shapes people's perception, separate from facts. The distrust shapes people's narratives, in opposition to the facts.

[TheCoelacanth]

It's pretty obvious that they are referring to a specific person and which specific person they are referring to.