When institutions crumble, strongmen step in

Washington Post

3 days ago

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.
That's partly because confidence in and reliance on the parties themselves have decreased. Fewer Americans identify as Democrats or Republicans than used to, with independents (albeit often independents who lean toward one party or the other) making up the difference. You can see that in polling from the biennial General Social Survey.
The trend over the past few decades has been that the percentage of Americans who say they aren't strong partisans has declined as the number of independents has risen.
It is increasingly every voter, every American for his- or herself. Not trusting the government or the Supreme Court and not organized in parties, people instead offer their trust elsewhere — including to the internet.
The internet was intended to have a democratizing effect, allowing people access to information that would otherwise be locked up in libraries or journals. Even before social media use became pervasive, though, one eventual development had been predicted: Granting people broad access to information would allow them to construct an argument or a worldview by cherry-picking what they believed would support their case.
It is hard to overstate the extent to which this occurred. Conspiracy theories thrived in heavily weeded gardens. The emergence of social media allowed the formation of entire communities detached from reality, places where consensus could be constructed. This presented a business opportunity: Unscrupulous or blinkered parties could sell these artificial realities back to their audiences. That business opportunity proved also to be a political opportunity.
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'?
It's easy to collapse into defeatism here, particularly given the events of the past six months. But the Epstein-centered events of the past few weeks offer one caveat: There are limits to Trump's ability to compel his supporters to believe what he says. He can't point to the Justice Department's assertions because he told his followers that the Justice Department was dishonest. He can't point to the justice system for the same reason. He's centered his politics so thoroughly on distrust that his base doesn't even give him an immediate pass.
This is nonetheless more favorable terrain for Trump than for the American system. As New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote (here in The Post), 'Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.'
Trump has for years stoked the idea that actually, having your own facts is fine. And even as his base chooses facts that he finds inconvenient in the moment, he's still pushing toward the next phase: Everyone is entitled to the facts that Trump presents.
What institutions of power will be left to disagree?