David Frum

But the people who are in the middle or in the lower part of the income distribution, they feel it most.

And they are many of the people who trusted Donald Trump to help them because through campaign 2024, he promised that would be his first priority.

Not just that he would stop prices from going up, but that he would make them go down.

Now, Trump lies about a lot of things, and a lot of the things that he lies about are things that it's difficult for people to check, or maybe they just seem too abstract to check.

Our economy is the hottest in the world.

How do you prove that right or wrong?

But the people who decide elections, they know what everything in the grocery basket costs, and they know that the president is lying to them again and again and again.

And that has an impact on their faith on him personally and directly.

It has an effect on the political calculus, but it has an effect generally on the way politics works.

The Americans who turned to Donald Trump were those most distrustful of the political system, most inclined to believe that the political system is indifferent to them, deceitful to them.

And they put special and unique trust in this one person.

whom they regarded falsely, but whom they regarded trustingly as a great business leader, to tell them the truth and to deliver them relief.

When he breaks his word to them, of course he breaks the special political bond that he once had.

And you can see that in all the polls that show him down, down, down, and especially down on economic issues.

but it's an attack on their faith in the general political system.

Because if this one unique figure that they were willing to trust, if he too is deceptive, then what is there?

It raises the question again of how we go on from here and how we restore the relationship of trust between the American people, their government, and the president who leads the government and symbolizes the government.

If he's not a person who can trust, how can anything be trusted?

It's a haunting, difficult question.

One probably that won't be resolved so fast.