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There’s a reason for that — and it speaks to a big difference between those 1974 hearings and the ones held in 2019. And that difference has nothing to do with what happened on Capitol Hill or that the Senate is unlikely to convict Trump, should he be impeached by the House. Instead, it has everything to do with the public itself: Americans no longer trust their government.
Importantly, this is not inherently a statement about Trump. American trust in the executive branch has been in the high 30s to high 40s since roughly 2006 during President George W. Bush’s administration. The polling suggests Trump’s administration hasn’t really had a major effect on the public’s view of the executive branch; they haven’t trusted the President or his branch of the government for years across administrations from both parties.
In the early 1970s, Americans mostly trusted their government. The release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — which revealed how much the federal government had misrepresented the war in Vietnam — began to shake that trust but even so an average of 53% of Americans trusted the federal government all or most of the time in October 1972, before the Watergate scandal, according to Pew Research Center.
The fact that more than half of Americans trusted the government in Washington meant the revelations in the impeachment hearings in 1974 shocked the country. As the hearings unraveled more details of Nixon’s role in the 1972 break-in and his attempts at covering up that role, the polling shifted dramatically in favor of impeaching and removing him from office. He eventually resigned before the full House took action on impeachment.
The ensuing decades brought historic incidents and broken promises related to war, the economy, elections and more that undermined American faith in the federal government and our democratic institutions.
On top of all of that add the rise of talk radio, cable news and social media (and the subsequent spike in access to misinformation and conspiracy theories), along with the collapse of local journalism and declining trust in the mainstream media. The result is an American public that is no longer shocked by its government and institutions behaving badly but instead expecting it.
Given all of this, all the polling data suggests Americans will be far less shocked at hearing the details of the campaign by Trump and his associates to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into the 2016 election and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
Polling also shows that Americans have lost trust in the branch of government investigating Trump.
In April 1974, just before the beginning of public hearings in that impeachment inquiry, 71% of Americans trusted Congress a great deal or a fair amount, per Gallup. Just 38% of Americans felt the same way in September in a Gallup poll taken less than two weeks before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry into Trump.
Suffice to say that the public’s opinion of Congress is not great overall. Fewer than half of Americans think members of Congress care about their constituents or provide fair and accurate information to the public, according to Pew. Pew also reports that more than four in five people say members of Congress act unethically all, most or some of the time.
That’s not great. And it points to a hard truth: House Democrats are going to have a tough time making their case to people they haven’t already convinced because most people generally think their lawmakers in Washington are lying to them.
Let’s not get it twisted though: the public’s trust in the executive branch has also generally fallen to pieces since the Nixon administration.
In the end, the hardest part of the impeachment inquiry for Democrats may not be proving Trump committed an impeachable offense. It may be convincing a jaded American public that it matters.
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