When did American distrust begin? Do Americans care about Democracy? Those are the questions that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have asked since the nation’s founding. A November 2025 poll from Johns Hopkins University reveals that only 11% of Americans believe that American Democracy is “doing well.” This isn’t shocking. Over the past 6 years, Americans have grappled with the label of falsified elections, shocking political assasinations and attempts, efforts to blacklist candidates from the ballot, and of course, the infamous storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. It’s clear that Americans know that the current state of affairs is a deviation from the vision of our founding fathers.
More direct evidence of that fact comes from a February 2026 poll from Bowling Green State University that surveyed 1,200 American Voters over the course of 5 days. Only 18% of respondents said that they believed that the Founding Fathers would be “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the present state of American Government. 54% of respondents said that they would be very dissatisfied. But not all hope is lost. The respondents of that same poll were evenly split between believing that America’s best days were ahead of us or behind us.
One explanation for this could be the distrust in America's institutions. In 1964, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, 77% of Americans said that they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time. 1964 is an important year for American trust, because it came just before the United States began ramping up its involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. During the war, there was overwhelming evidence of US-led or ally-led war crimes, but perhaps more importantly, falsification of the war narrative by the Johnson administration. By 1970 (under Nixon), public trust fell to 54%. But what happened next was more detrimental to the already strained relationship between the American people and their government. Watergate. Nixon resigned, and by 1974, trust in the Federal government had fallen to 36%, a 41% decrease in a decade. Today, it’s sitting at 17%, and hasn’t really changed much since the late 2000s.
For more than half a century, each political crisis has chipped away at public confidence in the institutions meant to govern the nation. Rebuilding that trust may prove to be one of the defining challenges of the next generation of American politics.