Trust erodes in everything from church to schools to the presidency during Biden's first year

As President Biden enters his second year in office, former President Donald Trump enters his second year of forced retirement, and the coronavirus enters its third year plaguing the nation, Americans are questioning their institutions in new ways, sending academics scurrying to understand what it all means.

Gallup regularly polls on 16 different institutions and as of 2021, 13 of them were underwater, with less than 50% of the public expressing confidence.

Small businesses and the military remain well-respected, while the police squeaked back above 50% last year, after slipping in 2020.

“I think the more the public sees anything in government and the longer it sees it the gloomier it gets.”.

Kosar says climbing out will be tough since it’s been a steady downhill march into a world of distrust.

Changing party power in Washington doesn’t seem to fix things.

The Pew Research Center says Americans tend to have more faith when their party controls the White House, but that means those whose party is out of power lose confidence.

Black and Hispanic Americans, for instance, express more trust than white adults in government on Mr.

But during the Reagan, Bush and Trump eras, “White Americans were substantially more likely than Black Americans to express trust in the federal government,” Pew says.

Hamilton, who is also a journalism professor at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication and a global scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said a skeptical public can be healthy for democracy.

He said the country has been through trials like the Civil War and the corruption of the late 1800s, and Americans bounced back.

At that time, the nation had some of the closest elections in American history.

Grinsplan said things simmered down toward the turn of the 20th Century and a more restrained politics reined.

“So, kind of good news for our own era is you can have beneficial reform beginning to take place even as things seem to be getting worse, and it is just a matter of time before they start to kick in,” he said