AP-NORC\/ USAFacts survey<\/a> from 2019. That includes education \u2014 which has risen from 37% in 2019 to 53% now \u2014 with a 9-percentage point spike in the last year.<\/p>\nThe findings come after a year and a half of upheaval in the executive branch. Trump began to dismantle key parts of the federal bureaucracy soon after entering the White House for the second time, moving to end longstanding programs and shutter entire agencies.<\/p>\n
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Since then, thousands of federal employees have been fired or left their jobs, substantially reducing the ranks of the government statisticians and leading experts to warn about risks to data quality.<\/p>\n
Shifting regulations and recommendations have also led to dramatic changes in government policy. Recent changes to longstanding health advice have put doctors and medical organizations at odds with the Trump administration on vaccination recommendations. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a scientific finding that has underpinned government action to fight climate change for more than a decade.<\/p>\n
Jeremy Cove, a 44-year-old Republican from Missouri, trusts the Trump administration’s guidance on matters like vaccines, but he disagrees with their assertion that climate change is not happening, or that humans are not contributing to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love Trump; I voted for Trump, but some of the things he\u2019s doing just makes me distrust more,\u201d Cove said. \u201cStuff like renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, it just makes you think about what their priorities are. Then you realize it\u2019s not what it should be, which in turn, makes you distrust even more.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Belief in government information has become more partisan<\/p>\n
The gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ trust in government information is much wider than it was during Trump’s first term, a shift that first began to appear under former President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n
Democrats were generally less likely to trust government information in Trump’s first term, but not dramatically more than Republicans. That shifted when control of the White House changed hands. Republicans’ mistrust in government information rose while Biden was president and fell after Trump took office. Meanwhile, Democrats’ doubts declined under Biden and spiked when Trump regained power.<\/p>\n
For example, 61% of Democrats now have low trust in information about the federal budget, compared with 42% of Republicans, while 60% of Democrats have low trust in information about crime, compared with only 32% of Republicans.<\/p>\n
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Larry Haith, a 76-year-old Republican from Idaho, says he tends to trust the federal government \u2014 though, he acknowledges that it can vary based on the current administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenerally speaking, I\u2019ve got more confidence in the federal government today than I\u2019ve had in years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Independents, meanwhile, became more mistrustful of government information under Biden and haven’t shifted under Trump.<\/p>\n
The only issue without a substantial partisan divide in the new survey is vaccination recommendations and safety: about 6 in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents trust the federal government on vaccination recommendations and safety \u201conly a little\u201d or \u201cnot at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Few trust political messages, even from their own party<\/p>\n
As the 2026 midterms approach, public concern about the accuracy of the election results is widespread. Just under half of U.S. adults are \u201cextremely\u201d or \u201cvery\u201d concerned the federal government will publicly discredit or question election results, tamper with election results, or pressure state election officials to change how they certify or report results.<\/p>\n
Over the past few months, Trump has repeated long-debunked allegations of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election, attempted to place new restrictions on mail voting in time for the midterms and pushed Congress to enact a proof-of-citizenship requirement to register and vote. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also warned state officials that they could lose funding or face investigations if they fail to go along with Trump’s election security demands.<\/p>\n
At the same time, few Americans trust the information they get from political campaigns. Only about 1 in 10 U.S. adults say the Democratic Party or Republican Party campaign messages are \u201calways\u201d or \u201coften\u201d based in factual information.<\/p>\n
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In a sign of how deep the mistrust runs, only about one-quarter of Democrats trust their party’s campaign messages to be factual at least \u201coften,\u201d while a similar share of Republicans say this about their party.<\/p>\n
Less than half of Democrats, 44%, trust government certifications of election results \u201ca great deal\u201d or \u201cquite a bit,\u201d a substantial decline from 65% in 2024.<\/p>\n
Even with Trump back in the White House, though, Republicans haven’t seen a similar increase in confidence. Only 29% of Republicans have high trust in government certifications of election results, up just slightly from 2024.<\/p>\n
Trust in other sources of information about election outcomes \u2014 such as national news outlets or cable news networks \u2014 is also low overall.<\/p>\n
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Kim Murza, a Democrat from Colorado, has faith in the country’s ability to run fair elections but blames the Trump administration for eroding Americans’ trust in the process.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy concern is more about what the current administration is doing,\u201d said 45-year-old Murza. \u201cI think they are doing whatever they can to try to put that distrust in people\u2019s minds.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The AP-NORC\/USA Facts poll of 1,036 adults was conducted July 29 to Aug. 10 using a sample drawn from NORC\u2019s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 6.4 for Republicans overall and plus or minus 6.0 for Democrats overall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FILE – President Donald Trump holds up an image taken from his Truth Social account as Health and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1053124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,4439,69,421795,82,421796,421794,146870,184754,184755,421792,184750,184752,327109,325469,324520,7202,7203,421793,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1053123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-america","tag-colorado","tag-donald-trump","tag-jeremy-cove","tag-joe-biden","tag-kim-murza","tag-larry-haith","tag-markwayne-mullin","tag-package-100024-ap-online","tag-package-100373-mc-complete-state-national","tag-poll-government-trust-trump-2026-election-results","tag-product-30598-ap-national-news-report-a-wire","tag-product-31998-ap-online-national-news","tag-product-32510-ap-online-general-election-news","tag-product-32520-ap-online-other-u-s-government-news","tag-product-46986-ap-online-top-stories","tag-san-antonio","tag-sanantonio","tag-shannon-ingram","tag-texas","tag-tx","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1053123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1053124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1053123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1053123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1053123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}