https://news.gallup.com/poll/697421/trust-government-depends...
I wonder if the split would still be roughly the same if a Democrat was in power at the time of the survey.
Edited to add: Answer seems to be in the article, as pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571258
First diagram in the article shows uptick, but since 2010 it's been in the 70-80% range. So it seems pretty party-agnostic.
Since 2024, Democrats went from being the most trusting (57%) to the most skeptical (91%), bringing all groups to within 10 points of each other on the question.
This is not a "both sides" situation: Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics. There is no universal implication here IMO, this is just Democrats joining the 80-percenters, i.e. everyone
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...
It means "I am not firmly affiliated". You still have the ability to make choices on who is a better likely outcome
So I'm pretty content calling it a meaningless measure.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think so. And I don't think my countrymen think so either.
But "the government" is often meant as just the very top. The President is corrupt. Big swathes of Congress are corrupt. We have a Supreme Court justice more or less openly accepting bribes. Among that small group, I would be comfortable saying that corruption is widespread.
* for years people have noticed that many members of congress use privileged information to pick stocks.
* lobbying post-Citizen's United has a very decidedly "buying politicians" aspect to it
* a congressman (Menendez) was literally arrested while holding gold bars from a foreign government. he went to prison, but is the only person on this list who has iirc.
* the former mayor of new york (a long-time police offer) was embroiled in a Very Funny, very obviously true corruption scandal for turkish airline tickets. the prosecution against him was dropped for no good reason.
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
They should have broken it down a bit more.
I think it's more useful to think about the closed operations on the 0% to 100% range. A change of ~75% to 89% does not seem like much, but "only an 18% increase" is not a closed operation, so it's not so meaningful. You'll see this in machine learning, e.g. 70% accuracy to 75% accuracy is not as impressive as 98% to 99%, despite having a larger change.
Yeah, he stopped US military from defending other countries for free.
Soft power doesn’t pay your rent/mortgage.
https://abcnews.com/Politics/profoundly-corrupt-trump-sued-f...
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
Well, maybe a bit less than half these days.
> 35% approve, 61% disapprove, 5% not sure
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
I simply do not understand American politics.
It’s really embarrassing
Yeah, that's not what an scapegoat is.
Similar to The Death of a Euphemism [0], where some politicians decide they don't have to cloak their proposal in the trappings of reasonability any more.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg
My hope is we will, one day, have an administration that roots it out using modern fraud detection, gets rid of waste, shuts down non-profits that funnel monies to their founders (anything where "overheard" is over 50%), stops insider trading amongst politicians and government workers, but I don't see them voting against their greed.
[1]https://ballotpedia.org/Changes_in_Net_Worth_of_U.S._Senator...
Of course the supporters of one particular political party is much more better at gymnastics of the mental kind than the other side. Having no spine makes it quite easier...
At some point you realize there is a game that you were never playing and it becomes a bipartisan issue.
But we didn’t have to vote DJT into office as a counteracting force. Whether every decision is bad or not, not my point. It just seemed obvious that he wasn’t the right guy.
Some people can’t vote against their party. Some people believe write in is the move.
For evidence, refer to TFA.
I read the article too, in what sane world is it okay if 70% of citizens thought their governments + corporations are corrupt over a 20 year time span here. Society apparently has get quite bad for the last 20% to realize the state of things.
The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
I don't know, if we'd had an overwhelmingly Democrat-dominated government, we'd have comprehensive bans on government insider trading and we'd correct the bad ruling in Citizens United. Corporatism is definitely a bipartisan issue, but at least Democrats recognize it as a problem, while to Republicans it's a feature. Not everything in politics is symmetrical, and misguided nihilism is actually how we got where we are. Turns out the road to hell is paved with "it's both sides."
If you think I (or virtually anyone else) am a fan of the two-party system, you probably aren't paying very close attention to... anything.
Things can be varying levels of imperfect. Things can be imperfect and acceptable, imperfect and bad, or imperfect and extremely extremely bad. It's not a sign of intelligence not to be able to discern between them.