Trust in Our Institutions
An honorable, resilient federal government is important for many reasons, but one of the biggest is that it’s essential the American people have trust in our institutions, including federal agencies, state and local governments, public and private universities, election commissions, the media, U.S. intelligence agencies, and the American judiciary.
The most destructive thing Donald Trump has done over the past decade is his attempt to destroy faith in each of these. No political figure – much less U.S. president – in modern history has undermined and assailed democratic norms like he has.
The election doesn’t go his way, it’s rigged. The press says something that doesn’t flatter him, they are the “enemy of the people.” The FBI comes to get documents he has unlawfully taken, it’s corrupt. The Justice Department does exactly what it’s supposed to do, it’s weaponized. He doesn’t like what our intelligence agencies say about Russia interfering in our elections, he sides with Vladimir Putin and against them. His own intelligence agencies.
Donald started planting these seeds the moment he descended that golden escalator – railing against the “Deep State” and “fake news” – so, it didn’t take long for many of his supporters to lose trust in not only the media, but in the dedicated Americans who work in every level of government, along with the agencies they work for.
His job was made far easier by the fact that many Americans had been losing faith in their government for decades. Political scandals like Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair – along with the corruption introduced by powerful lobbyists and well-financed special interests – started to erode the public’s trust in its leaders and plant seeds of disappointment and disrespect toward most of Washington and other government institutions.
At the same time, the energy crisis in the 1970s, the savings and loans fiasco, and massive accounting scandals planted seeds of anger and animosity toward private enterprise, well before the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis solidified the outrage. The subprime bank bailout was particularly hard to swallow because the United States has consistently had the largest wealth divide between the rich and the poor practically since the beginning. Meanwhile, moral catastrophes like Vietnam, Guantánamo, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Hurricane Katrina called into question our national core values and threatened our global image.
The loss of trust is understandable, but we must reverse this trend – quickly – because American institutions are the backbone of our democracy. To be a healthy, highly functioning society, we must all have confidence that all our institutions are competent and acting in all our best interests.
This can absolutely be done, but we have A LOT of work to do. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, while the American peoples’ trust in the federal government has been low for decades now, it reached an all-time low in 2023, with only 16 percent of Americans saying they trust the federal government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. In earlier surveys, three in four Americans said public confidence in the federal government was shrinking and around two in three agreed that a low level of trust in the government makes it harder to solve the nation’s problems.
Faith in individual institutions isn’t any better. Congress has faced a growing decline in confidence for years. Roughly seven in ten Americans have an unfavorable view of Congress and 85 percent of Americans say they don’t think elected officials care what people like them think.
Then there is the U.S. Supreme Court where, according to the analytics and advisory company Gallup, Americans’ opinions “are the worst they have been in 50 years of polling.” In September 2022, Gallup found that “47 percent of U.S. adults say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in the judicial branch of the federal government that is headed by the Supreme Court.” However, that number “represented a 20-percentage-point drop in just two years, including seven points since just the year before, and was the lowest in Gallup’s trend by six points.” Less than one year later, that number had dropped to 40 percent.
This is a huge problem. We cannot have Americans lose trust in the American judiciary. It just cannot happen.
In our minds, the primary reason the highest Court in the land has gotten such a bad rap is the perception that it has become insanely ideological and political. This is highly concerning – understandably – to Americans since the Supreme Court essentially has the final word on our fate as citizens.
…. which is why Justice Clarence Thomas must be held accountable for his corrupt behavior (as described earlier), and what makes Justice Samuel Alito’s breathtakingly bad judgement so damaging.
On May 16, 2024, The New York Times reported that an upside-down American flag had flown outside Samuel Alito’s home after the 2020 presidential election. Although the upside-down flag has always been a sign of emergency and distress for the military, in the weeks after the 2020 election and subsequent January 6th insurrection it was embraced by supporters of “Stop the Steal” (i.e., those who believed the false narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump). In fact, many Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th carried upside-down American flags for this reason.
This is obviously not a great look for a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice on any day, but especially not at a time when the Supreme Court was actively deciding – and would continue to decide – whether to hear cases surrounding the 2020 election, the Capitol riots, and Donald Trump himself.
But it didn’t stop there. Less than a week after the first New York Times report, it was discovered that a second flag – known as the “Appeal to Heaven” flag – was flown outside the Alito’s vacation home during the summer and fall of 2023. The Appeal to Heaven flag, also carried by Trump supporters on January 6th, is yet another flag that has been embraced in support of the “Stop the Steal” movement (as well as Christian Nationalism and other far-right causes).
Justice Alito’s actions don’t rise to the level of impeachment – since, according to the U.S. Constitution, impeachment should be reserved for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” – but, at a minimum, given the circumstances he should have recused himself from any case involving January 6th and/or Donald Trump’s involvement on that day.
Justice Alito repeatedly said that his wife was “solely responsible” for flying the flags – which is not hard for anyone to believe after she was secretly recorded at a party saying “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month” – but he is delusional if he thinks he can just blame outrageously bad judgement on his wife going forward. In our minds, Justice Alito gets one mulligan. That’s it.
< Just a gossipy side note: The secret recordings almost make you feel bad that Justice Alito has to put up with this from Martha-Ann. She said at one point that, after her husband asked her to please not fly flags, she agreed but then told him, “When you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m going to send them a message every day, maybe every week. I’ll be changing the flags.” How old is she, twelve? Ugh. And can you imagine her telling her husband – A U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE – that his job is nonsense? >
This entire episode is unacceptable, and behavior like this is causing enormous damage. For the American judicial system to work, there must be enormous trust between judges and the American public – meaning our judges must be seen as fair and impartial. If they are not, the entire thing falls apart. This goes ten-fold for the Justices that sit on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only can Justices have no conflicts of interest; there cannot be even the appearance of any.
< Sidebar: In November 2023, under enormous pressure, the Supreme Court Justices released a Code of Conduct to “set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court.”
The language is broad – for example, it prohibits Justices from letting “family, social, political, financial or other relationships influence official conduct or judgment,” and engaging in activities that “detract from the dignity of the justice’s office,” “interfere with the performance of the justice’s official duties,” or “reflect adversely on the justice’s impartiality” – and offers no ideas on how to enforce the code or specific examples of compromised “activities” (i.e., expensive trips, R.V.s, and other perks given to them by rich friends). We guess we’ll just have to wait and see if this is a serious attempt at changing behavior, or just a b.s. move to try to simply squelch bad press… >
So, how can we restore the American peoples’ faith in our sacred institutions? First, we need to make sure Judges stop doing stuff like what was just described. Next, we need to tighten up the rules and regulations that govern the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government (read more here).
However, a quick word here about the U.S. Supreme Court. In a nutshell, there are simply not enough justices on our highest court. A small Supreme Court has outsized power and tends to be more unrepresentative and non-collaborative.
If you have any doubt that this is where we are, just look at the partisan warfare that is ignited every time a seat becomes vacant. These nasty political fights are damaging to our country and only serve to divide us even more than we already are, not to mention that appointing like-minded Supreme Court justices becomes the most important decision(s) a president makes.
There are two ways we should deal with this. The first is to end lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. The appointments can now be ten years, and the terms should be staggered to ensure that the terms expire fairly across presidential terms. (Warning: This is a heavy lift because it requires a constitutional amendment.)
Second, we should expand the Supreme Court, but not for the reasons Democrats claim (i.e., to right past wrongs, or to ensure the Court is more “liberal” or “conservative.” In fact, that politically based thinking is exactly the problem).
We should double the number of justices to 18 – then add one justice because we need an uneven number – although a strong case can be made for an even larger number. The additional justices should be phased in gradually to avoid an advantage for any one political party. This is much easier to do than enacting term limits because the current number of justices was set forth by Congress in 1869. Therefore, Congress can simply pass a law to change the size of the Court.
All these things are a good start, but the most important thing we can do to restore the American peoples’ faith in our sacred institutions is to make sure they get the facts about them – instead of the usual political propaganda. These days, for example, the prevailing narrative from the political left is that the U.S. Supreme Court is doing the bidding of Donald Trump, steering the Court to the hard right. However, the facts don’t support this.
Although cultural topics that are typically viewed as partisan get the most attention (i.e., abortion, gay marriage, transgender rights, religious liberty), in the Supreme Court term that concluded at the end of June 2025, only six cases overall – or 9 percent – resulted in the liberal Justices dissenting as a bloc (resulting in an ideologically split 6-3 outcome). In only four cases – or 6 percent – there was an ideological split in the other direction, with Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissenting as a bloc.
Given the panicked chatter from the left, it also may come as a surprise that 42 percent of the rulings in the last term were unanimous. These decisions included a ruling to eliminate the “background circumstances” test for reverse discrimination claims under Title VII; a decision that found Wisconsin was wrong to deny a tax exemption to a Catholic Charities nonprofit; a decision that constrains lower-court judges who tried to intervene in federal environmental reviews; a decision that said American victims of terrorism are not prevented from suing the Palestine Liberation Organization in American courts; and upholding a law that effectively banned TikTok in the United States unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company.
Yet another surprise may be that Justice Elena Kagan – one of the Court’s most liberal Justices – was in the majority of the non-unanimous outcomes 70 percent of the time, while super conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were each at 62 percent (tied with Justice Sonia Sotomayor). Justice Neil Gorsuch clocked in at 61 percent.
… and then there is this. In this past term, the Justices repeatedly reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is in New Orleans and covers Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. This is significant because the 5th Circuit is widely considered to be one of the most conservative appellate courts – if not THE most conservative appellate court – in the entire nation.
In the latest term, the Court overturned over 75 percent of the 5th Circuit’s rulings – a stinging rebuke of the 5th Circuit’s performance – including rulings involving ghost guns, the Affordable Care Act, and an $8 billion fund that provides Internet service to rural and poor communities. This doesn’t sound like a super partisan Court to us.
Don’t get us wrong, Donald Trump’s second-term activities have dominated the Supreme Court’s time, energy, press and emergency docket… and likely will for the rest of his time in office. The president and his administration are facing over 380 lawsuits over his executive orders, and a huge amount of that litigation is finding its way to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.
< Sidebar: The Supreme Court’s emergency docket, referred to as its “shadow docket,” is the mechanism the Court uses to address urgent matters as quickly as possible, especially in cases where lower courts have issued orders that parties want to challenge or stay. The shadow docket is controversial because the Court issues orders and summary decisions outside its normal procedures, allowing the Justices to make decisions without the deliberation and transparency that is usually achieved through full briefings, oral arguments, and/or written opinions. Many say this undermines the rule of law because the public often gets little to no explanation of the reasoning behind the decisions. This includes cases involving immigration, abortion and voting rights – all issues that have a significant impact on the lives of Americans. >
While it’s true that Donald Trump has not fared so well in the lower courts, he has been on somewhat of a winning streak at the Supreme Court. In fact, while federal district courts have ruled against the Trump administration over 94 percent of the time, the Supreme Court has done the exact opposite, siding with the administration 94 percent of the time.
The Justices have, among other things, allowed him to fire independent regulators; deport migrants to countries where they aren’t citizens; deny temporary protections for immigrants amid ongoing litigation; and allowed DOGE to temporarily access sensitive Social Security data. Naturally, these decisions have caused outrage among the left, feeding directly into the we’re going to lose our democracy because the U.S. Supreme Court is doing the bidding of Donald Trump and steering the Court to the hard right narrative. But that’s not really what’s going on here.
What’s really going on is that the left is confusing “losing our democracy” with losing. Just because you don’t agree with the Court’s decisions doesn’t mean our entire democracy is necessarily crumbling. It means that the current Supreme Court takes a more textualist and originalist view of legal questions than you do.
When it comes to the Supreme Court, people get so caught up in the topic of the case that they forget there are also underlying legal questions involved.
Take abortion, for example. While it’s true that most conservative judges probably don’t support abortion in their personal lives, the 2022 Dobbs decision centered around the 10th Amendment, which reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states. Roe v. Wade, which established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires that all citizens be treated equally under the law, prohibiting states from enacting discriminatory laws.
When it comes to anything involving Donald Trump, it feels like the subject (him) overshadows any legal question that may be involved – at least from the perspective of Democrats.
Take the case of Trump v. United States, a case the Supreme Court ruled on in July 2024 where Donald claimed he could not be prosecuted for his official acts as president, and that a former president cannot be prosecuted unless he has first been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. The specific question before the Court was: Does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office, and if so, to what extent?
In a 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents are entitled to “presumptive immunity” from prosecution for all “official” acts, but not for “unofficial” ones. The high court left it in the hands of the lower court to decide whether Trump was acting “officially” or “unofficially” when he challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Well, it goes without saying that Democrats went berserk, saying that the Supreme Court was in Trump’s “pocket” and that they had essentially made him “a king.” President Biden said that “this nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each of us is equal before the law” – but that had now “fundamentally changed.” Senator Chuck Schumer chimed in, saying: “This disgraceful decision by the MAGA Supreme Court – which is comprised of three justices appointed by Mr. Trump himself – enables the former President to weaken our democracy by breaking the law.”
In her dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor went as far as to write that the ruling reinvented post-presidential immunity “through brute force,” and that it “makes a mockery of the principle” that “no man is above the law.”
These reactions are ridiculous. That IS NOT what the Court did in the least. Chief Justice Roberts was 1000% right when he said that Justice Sotomayor’s words “strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually” did.
Apparently, Democrats believed the Supreme Court should have ruled on whether Donald’s actions in this case were “official” or “unofficial,” which wasn’t the question before them.
Let’s get real here. Democrats were only saying all this because they were mad that Trump’s attorneys were able to delay his trial until after the 2024 election, meaning they were mad that the Supreme Court didn’t play better politics – WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAY REPUBLICANS DO! They were outmaneuvered yet again and it infuriated them. So, what do they do? They start disparaging the Supreme Court, which undermines our institutions and cause people to lose trust in our system – WHICH, AGAIN, IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY ACCUSE REPUBLICANS OF DOING!
Make no mistake, Democrats doing things like this is every bit as dangerous as anything Donald Trump has said or done regarding the Supreme Court. Undermining our institutions is undermining our institutions, regardless of how pious and patriotic you try to sound when you do it.
Unfortunately, the same pattern emerged after the Court, in Trump v. CASA, significantly limited the power of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions – a decision Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called “an existential threat to the rule of law” that created “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes,” where “all bets are off.”
< It’s important to remember that, even though this case involved birthright citizenship, the Court didn’t address the constitutionality of Trump’s Executive Order to end it. The decision they made was specifically about what the proper role of the federal courts are within our constitutional system. >
Based on their horrified reactions to the ruling, the left evidently believes that universal injunctions – which are court orders that halt the enforcement of government policies for everyone across the country, not just the parties involved in any specific case – are a tool that should be used to provide a check on the Executive Branch (at least as long as Donald Trump is president).
But it’s not the job of federal courts to conduct general oversight of the Executive Branch. The role of federal courts is to resolve cases and provide relief to plaintiffs consistent with the authority given to them by Congress. All the Supreme Court did was confirm that nationwide injunctions give individual judges, particularly at the district court level, outsized power – which they do.
It’s also important to remember that, at the same time they made this decision, the Court paused Trump’s birthright-citizenship order for thirty days, giving potential challengers time to block the order in one of several other ways.
One way is to reframe the legal challenge as a class-action lawsuits that seeks to protect all children born to families without permanent legal status (class action lawsuits allow large groups of people who have the same issue a chance to come together and sue as a group. If a judge sides with the group against a federal law or policy, the judge can then issue a binding order that protects everyone in the group from being subject to the law or policy).
… which is exactly what happened. Within hours of the Court’s decision, one of the groups challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship policy refiled it as a class action and, within two weeks of that move, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante of New Hampshire approved a request to certify a class-action lawsuit against the administration on behalf of U.S.-born children or future children whose automatic citizenship could be jeopardized by the president’s executive order. Then he placed a new nationwide block on Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship.
Listen, we get that many of Donald Trump’s actions are frightening, and we also worry about the long-term effects many of his decisions will have on our democracy.
But the idea that, since he is such a “danger” to this country, we have the right to fight back with anything and everything we have at our disposal – even if it means sacrificing a few basic rules and norms of our own here and there – is even more dangerous than he is. When it comes to preserving democracy, two wrongs do not make a right.