His supporters are coming to accept his way of governing
Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:
Here is a simple test: do you think of public employees should work for the public, or for a political party? Until very recently, the vast majority of people, even those skeptical about government, would have said that a nonpartisan public service was better than a politicized one, and that giving politicians more control over public employees was a bad thing. Most people still believe that, but a growing number, mostly Republicans, believe politicians should be able to purge public employees for any reason. For much of my career as a public administration professor, how the public thought about the public sector was a bit of an afterthought. Politicians from both parties broadly criticized the bureaucracy, but did little about it. This has changed. Trump made attacks on the administrative state a central part of his political identity, and acted those claims in his second term. Most of these actions are, in my view, deeply damaging, but in this post I want to consider how it might have affected how the public thinks about government.
Conventional wisdoms about public opinion of government
Before we get into the data about changes in about politicization, here are some useful conventional wisdoms about trust in government. When people talk about trust in government, it is a) good to be specific (trust in what?) and b) be a little informed by what is driving those beliefs. Trust in the federal government is lower than other levels of government, and other parts of society. It has also been declining over time. But much of distrust in government is distrust in national politicians, who are more visible and salient than state and local officials.
[...] If you want to lean into Stier’s cautious optimism, what might this look like? I think it would involve the confluence of two things. First, that consequences change people’s views. Trump’s talk about the deep state, by itself, did not alter views of politicization. His politicization actions did. It may be that the consequences of those actions will cause people to revise these views. Second, people need to be able to connect specific public sector failures to Trump’s broad project of politicization. Trump has a readymade story to explain failures: they are other people’s fault — his opponents, advisors, or bureaucrats. This story has limited appeal but does resonate with his supporters, and they are the ones who have changed their minds. The alternative story is that politicization breeds failure: it puts decisionmakers in bubbles where staff are afraid to question them; it sees competent people purged at the behest of social media nut jobs, replaced with less capable loyalists, or simply does not replaced at all; it removes checks on corruption. The politicization-breeds-failure story has the benefit of being true, supported both by research evidence on the effects of politicization as well as example after example where Trump is undermining capacity. But the story still needs to be told. What this implies is that the media connects specific outcomes to broader actions: public sector failures occur in the context of politicization. For example, Trump basically broke the Inspectors General system by firing anyone he disliked, not bothering to follow the minimal requirement to explain his reasoning to Congress. You don’t have to be an institutional theorist to see the problem with the President firing the people who, by law, are supposed to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in his administration. How hard is it for reporters to connect stories of these firings to stories of failure? (Of course we have fewer of those stories, because Inspectors General were one of the primary sources, which is why they are being fired). Anytime anything bad happens in these agencies, note that Trump fired the cop whose job it was to stop it from happening.
Don Moynihan is on point as usual. Donald Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem have polarized the public on how Americans view politicization of once-apolitical public service agencies and civil services.
