What would it take to put the swirling conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein to bed? Nothing complicated; just an authoritative, trusted voice articulating the truth about what occurred and what is or isn’t still being kept under wraps. The sort of thing that might have come from an attorney general or a president a few decades ago and offered, if not a perfect defusing, at least a credible counternarrative. But those days are very much over. The current attorney general and president did try to stamp out the rumors, but both because of their own personal track records and because of the decreased confidence that Americans have in their positions, it simply didn’t work. President Donald Trump has since attempted to strong-arm his supporters, demanding they accept his presentation of the case, but even that hasn’t worked — in part because he has spent the past decade doing everything in his power to erode the trust in authority that would really be useful for him now. On net, of course, the slow, steady obliteration of trust in American institutions has worked to Trump’s advantage. His political career has been built on establishing himself to his supporters as the only reliable source of information, a presentation that depends on their distrust in any other source. But Trump didn’t create that distrust. He just leveraged and exacerbated it. We can see that in annual polling data compiled by Gallup. The percentage of Americans expressing confidence in institutions has fallen broadly. Sometimes those declines have been temporarily reversed. But for a range of central elements of American society — Congress, the police, the church, the news media, the presidency — confidence has gotten lower and lower as the decades have passed. Often, partisanship plays a role. Partisan confidence in the presidency, for example, depends on which party occupies the White House. Confidence in newspapers or police often depends on party as well, but the overall trend is downward. [...] Trump’s return to the White House was heavily dependent on his ability to present an artificial world to American voters, an effort that succeeded because trust in institutions had withered. It’s true that inflation played a significant role in his victory last year, but it’s also true that he turned his actions after the 2020 election and the criminal cases against him into political assets. All the fulminating from newspapers and politicians about what Trump was likely to do if he returned to power plinked quietly off the wall that Trump had built around his base. The people most supportive of Trump were also those most distrustful of the media. When Trump won, the institutional collapse quickened. Congress was unsurprisingly pliant, but the extent to which it was joined by the Supreme Court in abdicating its efforts to check the executive branch was striking, even given the court’s recent decisions. Business leaders, college administrators and media outlets opted to defer to and pay off Trump in exchange for access or leniency. When they didn’t, Trump targeted them, just as he targeted federal agencies and programs that didn’t align with his politics and priorities. Pillars of American society were knocked down or preemptively collapsed. What Trump wants, quite explicitly, is for there to be no authority in America but his own. He wants nothing to be trusted but himself and no guidance offered but his own. And he’s aided in that by the lack of alternatives. What other institutions will Americans actually trust, particularly when they so often conflate “trust” with “what they want to hear”?
Phillip Bump at Washington Post on the dangers of crumbling institutions being prime real estate for authoritarianism (07.17.2025).
Phillip Bump, in his final WaPo column, wrote a solid opinion column on why the decline in social trust and support for institutions paved the way for Trumpist authoritarianism to take hold in the USA.
