We Can't Trust the Government
The Trump Administration has completely eroded any confidence that Americans once held in our institutions.
Living in a democracy depends on one basic assumption: that government institutions will tell the truth and act in the public interest. When that assumption collapses, citizens are thrust into a climate of uncertainty and distrust. Today, Americans are witnessing this erosion in real time.
One of the most recent examples of this erosion is the Trump administration’s attempt to influence the Federal Reserve’s independence. President Trump has publicly and repeatedly criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting interest rates aggressively and has even taken the extraordinary step of having the Department of Justice subpoena the Fed and threaten Powell with criminal indictment over routine testimony about renovation projects—an unprecedented escalation that Powell and independent economists say appears aimed at coercing monetary-policy decisions than addressing any legitimate legal issue, drawing warnings from former Fed chairs and market analysts about the danger to central bank autonomy.
Trust has also been dismantleed in the arena of immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under Secretary Kristi Noem, issued official lists of allegedly false media reports about local ICE activity—while multiple high-profile incidents have suggested that the government’s own initial narratives were inaccurate. For example, federal officials initially described the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent as justified self-defense, yet multiple bystander and body-camera videos and statements from local leaders show conflicting accounts about whether Good posed an imminent threat, prompting Minneapolis’s mayor to publicly reject the administration’s version of events and sparking widespread protest.
A particularly problematic front in the erosion of trust has been labor statistics—numbers that are integral to understanding the health of the economy and informing everything from monetary policy to individual financial planning. In 2025, President Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner after a weaker-than-expected jobs report and then publicly accused the agency of producing “phony” numbers without offering evidence. The BLS routinely revises its employment estimates as more comprehensive data comes in—a standard practice economists say is necessary and not a sign of manipulation—but Trump’s dismissal of these figures as “rigged” and his replacement of career civil servants with political appointees has alarmed statisticians and economists. These upheavals have raised real concerns that labor data, long considered among the most reliable in the world, could be politicized—undermining confidence in official economic benchmarks that ordinary Americans rely on to judge job prospects and economic policy.
Another consequential marker of distrust has been the government’s handling of the documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act to force the release of millions of pages of investigative material, but the Justice Department has published less than 1 % of the roughly two million documents it acknowledged possessing—even after missing the law’s deadline. Attorney General Pam Bondi and DOJ officials have cited the need to protect victim identities and the complexity of reviewing sensitive material, but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the piecemeal, heavily redacted disclosures as inadequate and possibly politically influenced. In one notable controversy, dozens of documents were removed from the DOJ’s public site shortly after being posted, without explanation, fueling accusations from legislative critics that the administration is obscuring evidence and failing to comply with transparency requirements.
The pattern extends beyond isolated incidents. Independent fact-checking and local political leaders have accused DHS of issuing misleading footage and narratives to shape public perception of immigration enforcement. Investigations have shown instances where “chaos” clips touted by officials were taken out of context or from different locations than claimed—actions that directly conflict with DHS statements defending their operations, and leave residents unsure of what is reality and what isn’t.
When governments twist facts to fit narratives, dismiss inconvenient truths, or leverage federal power against independent institutions, citizens pay the price: cynicism arises and polarization deepens. Living in such an environment makes it harder for ordinary Americans to believe official statements about economic conditions, inflation, employment trends, public safety, or just about anything. Trust is the implicit contract that holds democracy together. When that contract is broken, everything falls apart.
“Resistance is futile.” And apparently deadly. I guess our only hope is a free and fair election this year to start fighting back. But this POSOTUS will probably cancel or rig them.
We the People are our government. We must not let the current regime undermine our longstanding faith in important institutions. They are under attack, just as individuals from all walks of life are. We must defend all and continue to celebrate what we've been doing for the past 250 years -- standing for liberty and freedom. It will be hard to rebuild, but we can do it and get the faith back in OUR government.