As public approval of President Donald Trump and Congress lingers amid high-profile , , and broad concerns about the direction the U.S. is taking, Americans’ trust in their government appears to be nearing its lowest point in decades.

A mere 17% of Americans have faith that the nation’s capital government will do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” , marking a 5-percentage-point drop since 2024 and a near-record low since the National Election Study first posed the question in the mid-20th century.

Low public trust in the U.S. government isn’t a new issue; Pew data shows this figure has stayed below 50% in various surveys for over 40 years—with a notable exception in the wake of 9/11—and under 30% for the past two decades.

However, when the organization first asked Americans if they trusted the government to act correctly in 1958, nearly three-quarters of respondents said yes. Six years later, in 1964, that number rose even higher to 77%.

So what led to this shift?

The steep decline in trust occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with a pivotal event: the Vietnam War.

“Before the Vietnam War, most Americans trusted their leaders to govern effectively, win wars, and sustain U.S. growth,” says Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, a Columbia University history professor specializing in the Vietnam War, in an interview with TIME. “The Vietnam War exposed that presidents from Truman to Ford, along with their advisors—each administration having a hand in shaping Vietnam policy—either obscured the truth, mismanaged decisions, or outright lied to the American people about choices that ultimately led to U.S. military intervention in Vietnam.”

Before the steep decline

While public trust in the government wasn’t measured for long before polls captured this sharp drop, Robert Putnam—author of the 1995 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community—notes that those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II believed “the government really could almost do no wrong.”

In their lifetimes, he explains, the federal government helped end the Great Depression, win world wars, and defeat Nazism, solidifying its reputation as a strong global superpower.

Decades later, in the years just before public trust fell, he points out that politicians further invested in policies supporting the American people and their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness: Former President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted a series of welfare programs and laws known as the Great Society, including the of Medicare and Medicaid under the 1965 Social Security Amendments. Soon after, amid mounting pressure from the Civil Rights Movement, the president signed the landmark Voting Rights Act—which aimed to end racial discrimination in voting—into law.

The Vietnam War

Just one year after the Voting Rights Act and 1965 Social Security Amendments became law, polls found public trust in the government was declining, dropping to 65% in 1966 from the 77% high two years earlier. It has never again come close to those levels in the decades since.

The same year he signed those landmark bills, Johnson also announced an escalation of U.S. military forces in Vietnam—breaking his campaign promise not to send American boys to fight abroad. Putnam, who studied the decline nearly month by month, says Johnson’s reversal caused “almost all of that drop” in trust in the federal government.

“In early 1965, America’s sustained bombing campaign Operation Rolling Thunder and the deployment of marines to Danang as the first combat troops kickstarted eight years of national protest,” Nguyen says. emerged at colleges and universities across the U.S. Thousands of Americans participated in the 1965 March on Washington against the Vietnam War, which was at that point the in American history. As the war dragged on and national TV broadcasts brought images and reports of the bloody conflict into U.S. homes, a of Americans said sending troops to the country had been a mistake.

Watergate

A second major drop in public trust was recorded in 1970s polls amid the Watergate scandal and its aftermath. A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., ahead of the 1972 election led to revelations of White House involvement in the crime and subsequent cover-up—ultimately forcing then-President Richard Nixon to resign. “People trust the government when it’s trustworthy,” Putnam says. In 197O, early in Nixon’s first term, the share of Americans who trusted the Washington government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time” was already down to 54%. By the time he left office in 1974, that figure had fallen to 36%.

Public trust hasn’t recovered in the decades since, though it has risen back to around 45% on multiple occasions and climbed over 50% briefly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001—before falling rapidly again as the U.S. entered years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Younger generations are now coming of age during this long period of reduced trust, which Putnam predicts will shape their perception of the federal government for decades to come.

“Nowadays, people are more cynical,” Putnam says. “A presidential lie under Clinton or Trump doesn’t have the same impact as the two presidential lies from Johnson about Vietnam and Nixon about Watergate.”