Surveys suggest that in many western democracies, political trust is at rock bottom. Scandals, corruption, faltering economies, conspiracy theories and swirling disinformation are all playing their part. But is it really such a bad thing for people living in a democracy to distrust their government?
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we talk to political scientist Grant Duncan about why he thinks a certain level of distrust and skepticism of powerful politicians is actually healthy for democracy. And about how populists, like Donald Trump, manage to use people’s distrust in political elites to their advantage.
Grant Duncan says most people don’t grow up thinking “Do I trust the government?” unless they’re asked by a pollster. And yet when things go wrong, he says, “we have good reason to stop and ask about promises kept or not kept”.
Duncan, who is from New Zealand, is currently a visiting scholar in politics at City St George’s, University of London in the UK. His research focuses on the problems with political trust and how to get better governments. He argues that in democracies, people are not supposed to trust their government.
"Democratic constitutions are built on the premise that you can’t trust anyone with power. That’s why we have separation of powers, why we have periodic elections, a free press, people monitoring constantly what’s going on, because we trust no one in a democracy with political power.“
Populists fill the gaps
Duncan says, for example, that there would have been no United States of America without the American colonists’ deep distrust of the government of King George III in England. Yet, he admits there is a paradox at the heart of democratic systems, which rely on trust to function. If you vote in a representative system, you’re "placing a huge amount of trust in a very small number of people who will pass laws and governments and make decisions on our behalf”, he says.
Duncan believes Donald Trump’s re-election as US president directly reflects the mood of political distrust in the country. Trump, alongside other populists from both the left and the right around the world, has exploited this paradox around representative government which means a small elite are entrusted with a lot of power.
“ Often what happens is that a large section of society feel that changes are going on around them that they don’t understand, they don’t like, they haven’t approved. And it only takes one smart leader to think, I can make political capital out of this by getting up on the hustings and saying, ‘I speak to you, the real people the forgotten people … I speak for you’.”
Getting better leaders
There are ways to improve the trust that people have in their democracies, and while it’s not just about blaming the government, Duncan believes those who wield power bear the much greater responsibility:
“If politicians and senior public servants are worried about how to rebuild public trust, the first thing they need to do is take a look in the mirror, because we need trustworthy leaders. We don’t want misconduct and scandals.”
Alongside that comes actually competently delivering public services, and ensuring people’s safety and security. And having leaders, who are conscious of their limitations, and transparent about the challenges they’re facing, particularly in the face of technological developments like artificial intelligence. Charismatic leaders aren’t going to come along and fix the problems for us, he says.
"I think we get too entranced by charisma and on the other hand maybe too angry about leaders who don’t meet our expectations. So we need a kind of dedication to the task of government because so much is going to change and we need to remember that political trust is not a thing that gets broken and rebuilt like a machine. It’s a human phenomenon that we all share in.“
Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear Grant Duncan talk about his research on political trust.
Newsclips in this episode from CBS News, ABC News (Australia) and PBS Newshour, Sky News.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
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Ware is host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation
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Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.