The number of Americans who say they trust the federal government to do what is right was just 22% in May 2024. That’s a slight increase from the previous year, but still among the lowest measures in nearly seven decades of polling by Pew Research Center. Public trust in government tends to track with party affiliation, so self-identified Democrats have reported slightly higher levels of trust in government during the Biden Administration. Overall, Americans across the political spectrum have reported historically low levels of trust in government in recent years, and their turn against institutions is becoming a central theme in the 2024 election.

Trust in news media is also at record lows. According to a May 2024 report from the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 53% of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned that news organizations will report inaccuracies or misinformation during the election.

These two essential measures — trust in government and trust in news media — are distinct from one another, but part of the same accelerating anti-establishment sentiment in the U.S. As the general public feels increasingly alienated from the people, processes and outcomes of major institutions, it seems that they’re turning against all of them at once. A 2023 Gallup poll revealed that Americans have historically low trust in a long list of institutions including government, news media, public schools, banks, the police, and many more. The lowest ranking institutions in the poll were newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business and Congress.

Such distrust can have meaningful consequences for the functioning of public life.

“When people don’t trust their government, they are more likely to opt out of voting and other types of civic participation,” according to President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service Max Stier and democratic advisor Tom Freedman in an op-ed for Politico. “With less engagement, the public feels less empowered to influence government — and, in turn, government “hears” their needs and preferences less.”

The authors described this cycle as a “mistrust loop,” wherein public disengagement from institutions makes those institutions less responsive and accountable to the public, thereby exacerbating that loss of trust.

The notion that all American institutions are broken, corrupt or irredeemable has suffused public discourse, but Republican candidates have relied especially heavily on this argument in recent campaigns. As the The New York Times reported earlier in the presidential primary season, every major candidate for the Republican nomination made railing against major institutions a central tenet of their campaign. From public schools to the Environmental Protection Agency, Republican candidates championed platforms that promised not to improve civic institutions, but to abolish them.

Since then, allies of the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump have been advocating for the dismantling of much of the federal government through their endorsement of Project 2025, the sweeping set of policy proposals from The Heritage Foundation. The Republican party reaffirmed this strategy in early July when it released its official platform, which calls for the closure of the Department of Education among other things. (Trump himself has signaled contradictory messages on the specifics of these plans, as The Washington Post reported.)

Such proposals are appeals to Americans’ distrust of public institutions, but much of that distrust was cultivated by Trump himself over the past eight years.

According to a 2020 report from the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, the Trump administration increased prosecutions of news sources, harassed journalists, and empowered foreign leaders to restrict their own media during his term. “But Trump’s most effective ploy has been to destroy the credibility of the press, dangerously undermining truth and consensus even as the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to kill tens of thousands of Americans.”

Regardless of who wins in 2024, these historically low levels of trust will impact the next administration, and they could portend greater problems for democracy in the long term.

Distrust in news is uniquely problematic because citizens need to agree on a baseline set of truths in order for society to function, and they need to be able to trust at least a few sources for that information. The internet may be flooded with unreliable sources, but there are also thousands of news outlets — at the local and national level — that ascribe to a strict set of journalistic principles (like the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics), ensuring rigorous attention to fact-checking, transparency and accountability.

The danger today is that news consumers have a difficult time distinguishing responsible journalism from everything else and their frustration has driven them toward more conspiratorial thinking about all the information they receive.

“People have greater faith in their own abilities to “fact-check” the news than they have in the news itself,” according to the authors of two 2024 studies highlighted in Columbia Journalism Review.“[Our studies] suggest this faith is misplaced, and that it actually leaves people more likely to believe misinformation.”

According to their research, ineffective fact-checking, compounded by existing skepticism, further exacerbates distrust in news media, accelerating this misinformation feedback loop.

In 2019, Pew Research Center identified a clear correlation between support for Donald Trump and distrust in news media. Five years later, it’s hard to know how much of this correlation can be attributed to Trump’s criticisms of journalists and how much reflects an attraction to Trump by those who had already lost faith in the news.

Both explanations signal an uphill climb for institutionalist candidates in 2024 and beyond.