Why Nobody Trusts Anything Anymore

5-6 minute read From WMDs to Epstein to Gaza

I was reading a New York Times piece yesterday that discusses Trump’s Justice Department “credibility crisis,” and it got me thinking about accountability.

Like many I’ve been helplessly watching a genocide unfold in Gaza - and seeing our complete inability to hold Israeli leadership accountable. The media still debates whether to use the word “genocide” as if the problem is terminology, not the tens of thousands of dead Palestinians.

That got me thinking about Iraq and the lies around WMDs. The media didn’t just report those lies - they attacked anyone who questioned them.

Back in 1996, when CBS’s Lesley Stahl asked then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright about reports that half a million Iraqi children had died from sanctions, Stahl said: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Seven years later, Secretary of State Colin Powell stood before the UN Security Council, holding up a small vial and declaring: “Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax…about this amount… shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001. Saddam Hussein has not verifiably accounted for even one teaspoonful of this deadly material.” None of it was true.

Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. The systematic torture our government carried out while the media largely looked the other way.

Here’s the thing: this isn’t about Trump. This is about a complete breakdown of accountability across every single institution that’s supposed to serve the public.

We’re living through a total collapse of institutional legitimacy. Every single institution that’s supposed to serve the public has been caught lying through their teeth about shit that actually matters - your job, your health, your kids’ future, your safety.

Take the Justice Department. The whole NYT piece treats the lack of confidence in the Justice Department like it’s some brand new phenomenon caused by Trump. As if the department that oversees a system imprisoning more people than any country on the planet - a system that consistently protects the wealthy and powerful while crushing everyone else - was somehow pristine before Trump walked in.

Jeffrey Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal in 2008 proves the point. The Justice Department’s own investigation later found that then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta used “poor judgment” when he allowed Epstein to plead guilty to minor state charges and serve just 13 months in jail - mostly on work release - despite evidence of a massive sex trafficking operation involving underage girls. A federal prosecutor called the deal “completely unprecedented” and “completely indefensible.” The deal granted immunity from federal prosecution not just to Epstein, but to any unnamed “potential co-conspirators” - essentially shutting down an FBI probe into whether other powerful people were involved.

The Epstein case implicates far more than Trump. Bill Clinton took dozens of flights on Epstein’s plane and visited his private island. Prince Andrew paid millions to settle a case with one of Epstein’s accusers. Bill Gates had multiple meetings with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, meetings Gates later called “a mistake.” Alan Dershowitz, Leon Black, and other powerful figures have been linked to Epstein through court documents and victim testimony.

Or consider Operation Fast and Furious, where the Justice Department allowed over 2,000 firearms to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, ostensibly to track high-level cartel leaders. The ATF lost track of most of the weapons, which were later used in hundreds of crimes, including the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. When Congress investigated, the Justice Department initially denied that gunwalking had occurred at all, then spent months stonewalling document requests. Attorney General Eric Holder became the first AG in American history to be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents.

But this goes way beyond the Justice Department. Every institution has been captured.

Economic institutions lie about inflation while people finance groceries on credit cards. CPI says one thing, Zillow shows rents exploding at twice that rate. They tell us wages are growing while people can’t afford housing. Manufacturing is “booming” while the factories in working-class communities are rubble or strip malls. This isn’t incompetence. It’s design. Make the numbers say what you need them to say.

Media institutions manufacture consent while pretending to inform. They pushed WMDs, then Russiagate, then called Hunter’s laptop “Russian disinformation.” They’re not state propaganda - they’re corporate and elite propaganda. They protect power by controlling the narrative.

Financial institutions crashed the economy in 2008, got bailed out, then acted like nobody could have seen it coming - except everyone who did and was ignored.

Political institutions where Congress insider trades while claiming to represent you, and the Supreme Court takes luxury vacations from billionaires while gutting voting rights. Justice Clarence Thomas alone has accepted over $4.75 million in gifts since 1991 - private jets, yachts, luxury resorts, even paying for his mother’s housing and nephew’s tuition. Any other federal employee would face criminal charges for these violations. In January 2025, the Judicial Conference refused to even refer him for investigation.

The corruption was already there. Trump just stopped pretending it didn’t exist.

Here’s what’s fucked up: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump succeeded for the same reason. Not policy. Trust. Bernie’s people trusted he meant what he said. Trump’s people trusted he’d burn down the system that had been lying to them.

Trump lies constantly, but his lies feel different than institutional lies. They’re brazen, obvious, almost honest in their dishonesty. “Of course I’m bullshitting you,” they seem to say, “but at least I’m not pretending otherwise.”

What Trump did was narrow the oligarchy. Instead of a collective elite - business, financial, media, political - all working together to maintain the facade, he’s trying to make it all serve his personal interests. He’s like a vulgar aristocrat who embarrasses the other aristocrats by talking about his money all the time. But he’s using the same system, the same levers, the same corruption - just more overtly.

And here’s the problem with everyone trying to “restore trust” in our institutions: they want to skip the reckoning.

Whether I watch Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg or Kamala Harris on the Democratic side, or Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio on the Republican side, what I notice is that everybody wants to defend some version of the bullshit. They want to continue the charade, return to “normal,” defend the status quo in some way. They want to talk about affordability while defending the cooked metrics we use to measure it. They want to talk about accountability but say they’re not interested in “dredging up old shit” about Epstein or war crimes. They want all the benefits of trust without going through the painful process of healing that would be required to regain it.

You can’t go through decades of deceit, decades of corruption, decades of declining democratic institutions - Supreme Court justices openly taking millions in bribes, a Justice Department that protects sex traffickers, economic systems designed to transfer wealth upward while lying about it - and then not have a reckoning.

This is how democracy dies. Not with jackboots, but with a population that no longer believes anything anyone says. When you can’t agree on facts, you can’t agree on problems. When you can’t agree on problems, you can’t organize to fix them.

There needs to be a reckoning, and that will be painful, especially for those with power and the people adjacent to them. Everyone wants to just get back to people working and having houses and trusting their government - they want things to work again, to be peaceful and normal. But we’ve gone so far down this road that you don’t get back to normal without the reckoning that accountability brings. You don’t restore trust without some semblance of justice.

After World War II, we didn’t just remove Nazi perpetrators from their positions of authority - we executed them, imprisoned them.

That was accountability.

If there’s a ceasefire in Gaza tomorrow and everything just goes back to where it was before, that’s not justice or accountability but a pause before the next atrocity.

So when you’re deciding who to vote for, volunteer for, or follow — listen for the hard truths.

Do they name the rot? Do they admit how deep it goes? Do they offer a real path forward?

Are they willing to lead us through the messy, painful work of accountability — not just post slogans, but push for consequences?

Because anyone who wants to skip the reckoning and go straight back to “normal” is just asking you to trust the same system that’s been lying to you for decades.