With the public’s approval of President Donald Trump and Congress underwater amid high-profile controversies, conflicts, and widespread concerns over the direction the U.S. is headed, Americans’ trust in their government appears to be close to its lowest point in decades.
Only 17% of Americans trust the government in the nation’s capital to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” according to recent polling from the Pew Research Center, marking a 5 percentage-point drop since 2024 and a near-record low since the question was first asked by the National Election Study in the mid-20th century.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
Low public trust in the U.S. government isn’t new; that figure has been below 50% in various surveys for more than 40 years—with a notable exception in the aftermath of 9/11—and under 30% for the past two decades, according to Pew.
When the organization first asked Americans whether they trusted the government to do the right thing in 1958, however, nearly three in four respondents answered in the affirmative. And six years later, in 1964, the number was higher still: 77%.
So what happened?
The dramatic fall in trust came in the later 1960s and ‘70s, coinciding with one particular event: the Vietnam War.
“Prior to the Vietnam War, Americans generally had faith in their leaders to govern effectively, to win wars, and to continue U.S. growth,” Columbia University history professor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, who specializes in the Vietnam War, tells TIME. “The Vietnam War revealed that presidents from Truman to Ford, along with their advisors—each Administration with a hand in shaping Vietnam policy—obfuscated, mishandled, or outright lied to the American people regarding decisions that would lead ultimately to American military intervention in Vietnam.”
Before the big drop
While public trust in government was not surveyed for long before polls captured the sharp decline, Robert Putnam, author of the 1995 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, says that people who had lived through the Great Depression and World War II believed that “the government really could almost do no wrong.”
During those Americans’ lifetimes, he explains, the federal government had helped end the Great Depression, win world wars, and defeat Nazism, establishing its reputation as a strong global superpower.
And decades later, in the years just before the fall in public trust, he notes that politicians further invested in policies that supported the American people and their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness: Former President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted a series of welfare programs and legislation known as the Great Society, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid under the Social Security Amendments of 1965. Soon after, amid mounting pressure from the Civil Rights Movement, the President signed the landmark Voting Rights Act—which sought to end racial discrimination in voting—into law.
The Vietnam War
Just a year after the Voting Rights Act and the Social Security Amendments of 1965 became law, polling found that public trust in the government was in decline, slipping down to 65% in 1966 after the high of 77% two years earlier. It has never again come close to those levels in the decades since.
The same year he signed those landmark bills, Johnson also announced an escalation of U.S. military forces in Vietnam, going back on his campaign promise to not send American boys to fight a war abroad. Putnam, who studied the decline on a near month-to-month basis, says that Johnson’s reversal caused “almost all of that drop” in trust in the federal government.
“In early 1965, America’s sustained bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, and the introduction of marines to Danang as the first combat troops jumpstarted eight years of national protest,” says Nguyen. Campus teach-ins emerged at colleges and universities across the U.S. Thousands of Americans took part in the 1965 March on Washington against the Vietnam War, at that point the largest peace protest in American history. As the war stretched on and national television broadcasts brought images and reports on the bloody conflict into U.S. homes, a growing share of Americans said sending troops to the country had been a mistake
Watergate
A second big drop in public trust was recorded in polls in the 1970s amid the Watergate scandal and its aftermath, as a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., in the lead-up 1972 election led to revelations about the White House’s involvement in the crime and subsequent cover-up that ultimately caused then-President Richard Nixon to resign from office. “People trust the government when the government’s trustworthy,” says Putnam. In 1970, early in Nixon’s first term, the share of Americans who said that they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time was already down to 54%. By the time he left office in 1974, that figure had fallen to 36%.
Public trust has not recovered in the decades since, though it has risen back to around 45% on multiple occasions and climbed back over 50% for a short time after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 before once again falling rapidly as the U.S. plunged into years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Younger generations are now coming of age in the long period of decreased trust, which Putnam predicts will impact their perception of the federal government for decades to come.
“Now, people are more cynical,” says Putnam. “A presidential lie under Clinton or a presidential lie under Trump, doesn’t have the same impact as the two presidential lies of Johnson regarding Vietnam and Nixon regarding Watergate.”
Leave a comment
