Nye is president of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. He was a Democratic member of the House from Virginia from 2009 to 2011.
Americans' lack of faith in our political institutions is a deeply troubling challenge to the success of our democracy and serves as an undercurrent in American politics, overshadowing and poisoning our ability to process every other question in Washington. Left unaddressed, this disillusionment will continue to cause serious disruption to all efforts to move our country forward.
While not the hottest topic driving the daily media dramatics, solving this crisis of faith by reforming the corrupted elements of our politics is the best way to get our country back on track.
American voters understand the real problem. A recent Georgetown University poll found super-majorities wanting leaders to stand up for their values, but also expect that compromise and common ground should be their goal. It is reasonable to expect political leaders will be able to express strong values but also cooperate enough to do the basics of governing such as pass a budget on time and avoid government shutdowns. It is unsurprising then that a Congress that consistently fails to do this, as yet another potential shutdown looms, enjoys only a dismal 18 percent approval rating. That profound lack of faith has consequences. In the same poll, 90 percent expressed exhaustion with "politicians in Washington who work with powerful special interests instead of standing up to them." A system awash with campaign cash and unfettered access by moneyed interest drives a deep and destructive derision among the citizens. The story of a payday lender bragging about bought access to the White House doesn't help. Politicians' relentless efforts, on both sides, to rig electoral maps to their partisan advantage only further deepens the mistrust.
Systemic disgust makes every other political process suspect. While the current impeachment drama provides a useful example of the exercise of congressional responsibility to practice oversight on the most troubling presidential behavior, relentless political and media focus on impeachment suggests that the biggest problems confronting our republic boil down to the actions of one individual — that somehow the question of removing or replacing that one person is the key question at hand. It feels like something is missing in that debate, a focus on the larger issue of systemic corruption that has riled the American electorate for many years and put our politics on this seemingly inescapable downward spiral. It is difficult to see the current process resulting in a definitive outcome because it is a case of one mistrusted institution trying to assert a sadly non-existent moral authority over the other.
The Democratic presidential debates also seem to be focused on varying approaches to legislative issue policies that will require some unlikely consensus in Congress to enact. Again, the conversation seems grounded in the assumption that a body deemed dysfunctional by the American people will rise to America's challenges given the right presidential stewardship, a notion which feels disconnected from the current lack of faith in both of these institutions. There is, of course, room for presidential leadership to improve the dynamic. But a successful challenger to President Trump would need to both convince Americans that Trump is part of the same systemic corruption they have always disdained, and present a vision of a reformed system that could restore faith in our institutions. That means a significant focus on electoral system reform and a serious change to the relationship between money and political power.
Trump campaigned successfully on voter anger against a broken and corrupted system. By many measures, his approach has made voter faith in that system worse. In order to restore faith, one would need a specific vision for a convincingly game-changing better way.
One idea would be a ban on federal politicians accepting any campaign contributions until they completed the annual budget and appropriations for the coming year. That would end shutdowns forever and create a "quiet time" for governing and allocating resources, free from the corrupting influences of fundraising calls and events.
There are many other worthwhile ideas for reform, including ending gerrymandering, realigning incentives for compromise and increasing fundraising transparency, but there is an urgent need to restore American faith in our political system by enacting real reforms.
It's high time to fix the system.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.