Good morning. The Trump administration defended its expulsion of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House in a court filing that described access as a privilege, not a right. There’s more news below. But first, a few words about trust.
The distrust electionMy colleague Sabrina Tavernise has been talking to Americans about the political landscape of the United States since 2016. “This is the first time I’m actually seeing a real shift among working-class conservatives on Trump,” she told me yesterday. Those guys were gung-ho for years about Trump’s drain-the-swamp outsider strength, she said, thrilled by his anti-establishment anger and his ability to make them feel good about themselves. They consistently defended him. But now? “He is the establishment” is how Sabrina put it. What she has heard from some folks on the right: Trump’s not for them any longer. They don’t trust the guy. An insulation salesman in New Orleans is one of them. “I feel like I was sold a bill of goods,” he told Sabrina. He was furious with Trump for starting a war with Iran after campaigning on a promise of no more wars. Then his rage deepened with the rise in diesel prices caused by that war, she reported. “The goods I agreed to buy were nothing like what was delivered.” And it’s not just Republicans. Americans of all political stripes have lost trust in America’s institutions, industries and politicians, Sabrina reports. “Whether on data centers, chemicals in food, the Epstein files or the war in Iran,” she writes, people feel as if “they are being lied to.” One example is Phyliss Paone, a retired utility company worker and lifelong Democrat Sabrina spoke with in Archbald, Pa. Paone said she would not vote for Gov. Josh Shapiro’s re-election because of what she saw as a political reversal on a proposed data center in her town. “He’s just saying what he needs to get votes,” she said. (She doesn’t trust the people behind the data center either. “They just lie to the people because they think we don’t know anything,” she said.)
Trust fallsHere’s the thing. Trust is central to a healthy society. “Without it, people do not cooperate with each other or with the authorities,” Sabrina writes. “That can lead to political paralysis.” And trust is waning, especially when it comes to the government. In the 1950s, as the economy boomed, more than 70 percent of Americans said they trusted their leaders and legislators. But the upheavals of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and Watergate took their toll. More recently, so did the post-9/11 conflicts and the pandemic in 2020. Now, Sabrina notes, we’re facing outbreaks of cyclospora and terrible flight delays. Flock cameras spy on us. We hear little from the Pentagon about progress in the war in Iran. Tech executives talk about the risks of A.I., even as Trump tells voters to ignore those concerns. The health secretary downplays measles deaths even as we see cases mount. Affordability, the president says, is a “hoax,” even as Americans get stung by prices at the gas station and the grocery store. Trust in the federal government is now at just 17 percent, according to a Pew Research Center report released last year. And as the chart below shows, confidence in many other U.S. institutions is in short supply:
It’s always the economyHere’s the other thing. The notion that affordability is a “hoax” isn’t playing well with Republicans. The Times and Siena University released a poll last week that showed 60 percent of likely white voters without a college degree — that’s Trump’s base — disapproved of the president’s performance on the cost of living. And among Republicans overall, only 29 percent said the economy was better than it had been a year ago. That’s down from 72 percent in January. One American Sabrina spoke to helped bring those numbers to life. “We drank the Kool-Aid, and we were wrong,” she heard from Ryan Wagner, 41, a manager at a home restoration company. Wagner, who lives in northern Michigan, used to support the president faithfully. Now when he hears Trump talk about how food prices have gone down, he said, “my freaking eye is twitching.” He added, “I can’t even listen to him talk anymore.” Folks are just exhausted. Wagner said that he had taken down his American flag and that he considered the Republican Party mostly dead. He told Sabrina he didn’t think he’d vote in this election. There’s no upside to that. Related: Republicans in tight races are distancing themselves from Trump and calling for an end to the Iran war.
Strategy: Trump is increasingly using national security as a justification to get what he wants. Is it working? All aboard: Some travel on private jets. Check out these folks who prefer private rail. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
