Trump Destroyed Our Faith in Government. How Do We Get It Back?

Trump has done irreparable harm to Americans’ faith in government, and the public’s tolerance of bureaucratic malfeasance may have reached a point of no return

Jared Keller
GEN

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Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty

Fresh off Michael Cohen’s testimony, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee last week unveiled a slate of 81 individuals and organizations subject to investigation as “threats against the rule of law.” For Democrats, the goal of these investigations is relatively simple: gather as much evidence of obstruction and wrongdoing as possible in the hopes of unearthing a “smoking gun” in their case against Trump, all to bolster an argument for drafting articles of impeachment against the president.

Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s independent investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian operatives is coming to a close, albeit with less of a legal dragnet than past scandals (27 charges and seven guilty pleas in Mueller’s investigation, compared to Watergate’s 69 charges and 68 guilty pleas, according to Axios). And, throughout all this tumult, a remarkable number of cabinet secretaries and senior officials have resigned amid corruption and ethics scandals of their own. Nine cabinet positions turned over in Trump’s first 14 months in…

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Jared Keller
GEN
Writer for

Deputy editor at Task & Purpose. Other words for Aeon, The Atlantic, LARB, Pacific Standard, TNR, Slate, Smithsonian, the Village Voice, and elsewhere