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Gallup has been asking Americans how much they trust their major institutions since 1973. This summer’s answer: 27%. Not a single major category of American life — not government, not media, not big business, not even the police or the courts — commands the confidence of even a third of the country. This isn’t a one-year dip. It’s the fifth straight year confidence has averaged below 30%, and the story underneath the number is less about any one scandal than about a public that has simply stopped extending the benefit of the doubt.
A Country Running on 27% Confidence
According to Gallup’s June 2026 confidence survey, 27% of Americans express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the 14 core institutions the organization has tracked since 1993 — just one point above the record low set in 2023. Twelve of those fourteen institutions are at or near their lowest points ever recorded. Only banks and organized labor sit meaningfully above their historical bottoms, and even they’re just seven points off.
This isn’t a partisan story about one side losing faith while the other holds steady, either. Gallup finds Republicans currently 13 points more confident in institutions than Democrats — a record gap for Trump’s second term, and wider than last year’s 11-point spread. Confidence in America, in other words, has become a function of who’s currently in power rather than a shared baseline. When trust rises and falls with election results instead of institutional performance, it isn’t really trust — it’s tribal scorekeeping.
Big Tech’s Turn in the Barrel
The sharpest single-year decline belongs to an institution that’s barely old enough to have a “historical low” — large technology companies. Confidence in Big Tech has fallen to 20%, down from 32% when Gallup first added it to the list in 2020. The share of Americans expressing “very little or none” jumped from 32% last year to 41% this year, the steepest one-year erosion of any institution measured. Small business, by contrast, remains the country’s most trusted institution at 67% — a reminder that Americans haven’t lost faith in every part of the economy, just the parts that feel large, distant, and unaccountable.
The Press Fares Even Worse
If institutional confidence broadly is stuck in the high 20s, trust in the specific institution tasked with reporting on all the others is worse. A separate Gallup survey on media trust found just 28% of Americans have confidence in newspapers, television and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” — the first time that number has dropped below 30% since Gallup began asking in 1972, when it stood at 68% to 72%.
The partisan split here is the starkest of any institution Gallup tracks. Republican trust in the media has fallen to 8% — single digits, for the first time ever. Independents sit at 27%. Democrats register a bare 51% majority, itself a return to a low last seen in 2016. Age tells a similar story: only 23% of adults under 30 trust the media, compared with 43% of those 65 and older, suggesting the erosion isn’t just partisan — it’s generational, and unlikely to reverse on its own as younger cohorts age into the electorate.
When confidence tracks who’s currently in power instead of how institutions actually perform, it stops being trust — it’s just scorekeeping.
What This Means for the Index
Social trust and institutional trust are supposed to reinforce each other — a society trusts its institutions because its institutions have earned it, and that trust in turn makes cooperation, compromise and shared reality possible. What Gallup’s 2026 numbers show is that loop running in reverse. Confidence isn’t being rebuilt by performance; it’s being reassigned by partisanship, cycle after cycle, so that no institution — press, tech, government, or otherwise — ever accumulates enough durable credibility to function as a common reference point. A country where fewer than three in ten citizens trust their own institutions, and where that number moves mainly with who won the last election, isn’t suffering a communications problem. It’s operating without the shared foundation democratic self-governance assumes it has.
Friday August 14th 2026
— David, The Moral Decay Index