Who Trusts Who in the USA? (w/Sonali Kolhatkar)

The paradox behind the polls.

Polls say Americans distrust each other and think most other people in this country are immoral. But is that a verdict on our humanity, or on the failure of our politicians and media to let us see the humanity in each other?

In this conversation, Zero Hour Senior Correspondent Sonali Kolhatkar and I take a slightly different approach. It’s less like a news report and more like a brainstorming session between two people who want to improve society. Let me know what you think.

(Transcript is below.)

Sonali’s Main Points

On the data and its limits: She wanted to know things the Pew survey didn’t capture — like whether Black Americans’ lower trust is specifically toward white people versus within their own community. She found the education/trust correlation counterintuitive and worth unpacking.

On why lower-income people show higher trust: Her theory is practical and grounded — people who can’t afford to outsource childcare, home repairs, and daily needs have to rely on neighbors, which builds genuine trust. She linked this to the documented finding that lower-income Americans give a higher percentage of their income to charity.

On legitimate distrust: She argued that women’s lower trust in men and Black Americans’ lower trust in the broader society aren’t character flaws — they’re rational responses to real, documented harm. She drew a direct parallel between racial scarring and gendered violence as trust-eroding forces.

On economic precarity as the key variable: The Pew finding she kept returning to was that people who said they didn’t “live comfortably” were more likely to lose trust — regardless of education level. To her, this indicts the economy more than anything else.

On media and political manipulation: Demagogues exploit the gap between people’s lived experience of community and their abstract fear of strangers — the Trump voter whose immigrant neighbor got deported being a sharp example.

On mutual aid as the answer: She pointed to grassroots mutual aid traditions and the NDLON slogan — “only the people can save the people” — as the practical framework for rebuilding trust from the ground up.

Her closing message: Don’t leave the country. It’s not irredeemable. The people aren’t — even if certain people in government are.

Richard’s main points

The abstract vs. personal distinction: His single most important methodological point — surveys measuring trust in “Americans” as a category can’t tell you anything about how people actually treat each other face to face. His own comfort with MAGA-adjacent neighbors, and their comfort with him, was his lived illustration of this.

The grandmothers story: His Jewish grandmother from Russia and Catholic grandmother from France spent thirty years demonizing each other, then immediately bonded when they finally met — over shared grievances, shared values, and shared contempt for their grandchildren. It was his most vivid illustration of how stereotype and personal encounter produce completely different results.

Media amplification of difference: He argued that regional differences in the U.S. are actually smaller now than in the 1950s — same pop country, same hip hop crossing racial and geographic lines — but mass media amplifies and monetizes division, making differences feel larger and more threatening than they are.

Vulnerability and powerlessness as trust-killers: When people feel economically precarious, unheard, and voiceless, trust collapses. He used the Cracker Barrel vegan burger backlash as a small but telling example of how resentment builds when people feel others are deciding their lives for them.

Dehumanization as the mechanism of fascism: He connected the stereotyping of immigrants and minorities to the historical machinery of dehumanization — explicitly naming what’s happening in the U.S. right now as fascism, not proto-fascism.

The organizing implication: If progressives read this data correctly, the gap between abstract distrust and personal warmth is actually an opportunity — a foundation for building coalitions across difference, because the underlying decency is already there.

The cultural and narrative stakes: He closed by emphasizing that stories are the medium through which trust gets built or destroyed — which is why culture, journalism, and narrative are important.

Transcript

Richard: We’re going to do something a little different today—I think of it as a brainstorming session. Sonali has been putting together some thoughts for an article, and I’ve been doing the same. There’s a kind of Venn diagram overlap there, I think. So let’s see what happens.

First of all, Sonali, welcome back.

Sonali: Thank you so much, Richard. Good to be with you, as always.

Richard: Same here. I’ll start by telling you what I’ve been thinking about. These aren’t new surveys, but they’ve stayed on my mind. I was hanging out with some MAGA folks in my town the other day, and it got me thinking about this again. A Pew survey—conducted in 2023 and 2024, published in 2025—found that Americans’ trust in other adults has declined significantly. Specifically, the share of adults who said most other adults can be trusted dropped from 46% in 1972 to about a third of the population in 2018. So people don’t really trust each other.

And in addition to declining trust, another Pew survey—this one covering 25 countries—found that Americans are especially likely to view their fellow citizens as morally bad. Earlier this year, 53% of U.S. adults said that Americans have bad morals and ethics. I have a number of thoughts about that. So what were you thinking about, Sonali?

Sonali: Well, reflecting on that data you sent me around trust, there are some interesting correlations. Some of them I buy, some I think are more important than others. For example, Pew found that Black people have lower trust levels than other groups. The speculation is that for people who’ve been victims of racial discrimination, the resulting trauma scars them and causes them to have lower levels of trust in fellow citizens.

What I would have liked to have seen—and I don’t know if Pew got into this—is, for example, how does the trust that Black people feel toward other Black people compare with how they feel toward white people? Do members of minoritized and racially discriminated groups trust one another at higher levels than they trust people outside their race—particularly white folks or people seen as perpetrators of racism? They didn’t quite go into that. But that’s one thing.

Another interesting correlation was that people with lower levels of education have higher levels of trust. That’s something I need to wrap my mind around a bit more, because we’ve often seen correlations between conservative values and lower levels of education—particularly with Trump. People with a high school diploma as their highest level of education tend to be more pro-Trump than people with graduate degrees.

But what’s really interesting here is that in this particular survey, lower education levels correlate with higher trust. And of course, we also associate conservatism with less trust in one another—the idea that we can’t trust our fellow Americans not to defraud the government when it comes to benefits, so we have to assume everybody’s a potential fraudster and make them fill out reams of paperwork and jump through all these hoops. So it was interesting to see that actually people with lower levels of education had higher levels of trust in one another.

It makes me reconfigure my expectations. And it’s what people have been finding out—non-Americans visiting the United States during the World Cup. You’re seeing a lot of Europeans, Asians, and Africans come here and be really pleasantly surprised by how nice people are, particularly in the Southern United States.

Richard: Right. Alabama and Arkansas.

Sonali: Yeah. They’re sort of like, “Oh, people are so nice.” And there’s this whole Southern hospitality aspect to it. So there are lots of interesting things there.

Richard: Well, you know, I love that you honed in on one of the thoughts I was turning over in my mind—which was as follows: the problem with surveys like this is that a person might think that other adults in the United States are morally bad or untrustworthy, while at the same time liking, trusting, and feeling comfortable with everybody they actually meet. The MAGA people—or MAGA-adjacent people—I saw this weekend, they know I’m a, you know, communist, Bernie-crat, whatever. They trust me. They liked me. I helped them out, they helped me.

The point is, you can never tell in a survey of this kind whether we’re talking about “other people” as an abstract concept versus your actual experience of other people. And why I say you honed in on that is—for one thing, because you talk about Black people. Well, what’s their experience of other Black people? We also had variations by gender—women were more likely to say, for example, that pornography was morally bad. But if you consider the experiences women have had, yeah, that fits, right?

And we talked about religion there. I don’t think it’s a big surprise that seriously religious Christians think abortion is morally wrong, and are more likely to say extramarital affairs and premarital sex are morally wrong. But it made me think about my Jewish grandmother from Russia and my Catholic grandmother from France. When my parents got married, neither attended the wedding. They spent thirty years demonizing each other. When my parents wouldn’t send family pictures to my French grandmother, she was sure it was because they were in a communist underground cell and didn’t want to distribute pictures—because all Jews were communists. And my Jewish grandmother just thought that they were, you know, Jew-persecutors and so on.

So when they finally met thirty years later, they completely hit it off. Because they agreed on so many issues: their children are terrible, they were wrong to marry outside the faith, their grandchildren are—as my French grandmother used to say in French—”savage little beasts.” What else did they bond over? America sucks. They hate it here. They wish they’d never come here. So, you know, that’s why—

And the education thing is interesting. I wonder if that’s because people with less education may be less likely to read the newspapers or watch certain broadcasts where different opinions are presented to them as this abstract notion of “the other.” But I’m totally—

Sonali: Well, and I have another theory. People who have lower levels of education—if you expect they’re also going to have lower levels of income—might be folks who are forced to rely on neighbors and friends for support. Right? Like, you can’t afford childcare, but your neighbor babysits your kid in exchange for you helping her clean her house, etc. This is pure speculation on my part, but it may be a reason why people with lower education have higher trust—because they have to rely on one another more than people who can afford to hire out.

Richard: Which is consistent with—I haven’t seen any updates on this research—but it’s consistent with research from roughly a decade ago showing that people at lower incomes contributed a significantly larger percentage of their income to charities than people at higher levels.

Sonali: Right. Absolutely. Yes. And I think there’s definitely something to be said for that. This is, you know, also a subgroup that is disproportionately taxed more, needs benefits more, but doesn’t actually, in financial terms, get to reap those benefits.

Another thing—going back to the issue around racial scarring and correlations with trust levels—women were less trusting than men. And I was surprised by that. Less trusting, sorry, not less trustworthy. Completely opposite. Yeah, they were less trusting than men. And then when I thought about it, it’s similar to being scarred by racism. Women are, quite rightfully, generally suspicious of men—because they are disproportionately impacted by gender-based violence and sexual violence. Any woman who gets into an elevator with a lone strange man or goes hiking with one is not going to trust that man outright, just because of the way we live in a patriarchy. So I thought that was also interesting.

But on the issue of trust—I’ve been following, just because it’s quite delightful—I am not a sports fan at all, so I haven’t been following the World Cup. But what interests me as a journalist who’s interested in human nature is seeing these reactions of non-Americans visiting the United States for the first time and posting their reactions online.

There’s the Japanese person whose post about eating at a Mexican restaurant in the U.S. has gone viral—they were blown away by being given chips and salsa for free when they sat down, before they’d even ordered anything. They pointed out that this is a level of trust that’s just so strange for them—because whenever you give somebody something for free, you immediately become indebted to them. And when they finished the basket of chips, the server brought another basket for free because it was bottomless. He was so pleasantly blown away by that.

And just the responses of non-Americans in the U.S.—they feel like they can trust Americans, and their impression of Americans is vastly different from what they’ve read in the news. They do, of course, say that Americans are really loud, which I can completely understand. And the thing that creates the “clash of civilizations,” if you will, to use that terrible term, is tipping. They hate American tipping culture, and they can’t make sense of it. And some American cities that expect tips are really upset with the non-American visitors.

I thought this was really interesting because people are so confused. There was an article about how New York restaurants are so upset that non-American World Cup visitors aren’t tipping properly that they’re automatically adding 20% to the bill. Which is so silly—because then why don’t you just hike up the price of every item on your menu by 20% and leave it at that?

Richard: Yeah. You know, it makes me think of a movie I thought was great—*Office Space*, which is a satire of modern capitalism. Jennifer Aniston plays a waitress at a kind of TGI Fridays-style restaurant. They’re supposed to wear “flair,” as they call it—buttons and things. Her boss says, “You’re only wearing four buttons.” And she said, “Well, I thought the requirement was at least four buttons.” He says, “Yeah, but if you’re not wearing at least seven buttons, you’re not showing enthusiasm.” And she says, “Oh, so the minimum is seven buttons?” He says, “No, the minimum is four buttons. But if you’re not wearing seven, that shows you’re not dedicated to the job.” And she keeps saying, “Well, then the minimum is—” you know. This whole idea that there’s an artificial voluntariness.

But again, it’s cultural. I had an experience with the Japanese where—I remember when I was a kid getting in a New York City taxi, a Japanese couple had just gotten out, and the driver was complaining: “They don’t open the door. It’s like they expect me to come out and open the door for them. It really ticks me off.” A few weeks later, I took my first trip to Japan. The first time I got in a taxi, the driver—their drivers at least then wore white gloves, extremely sterile cab by our standards—presses a button and the door opens automatically. Right? So they were just waiting for him to press the button. They weren’t being rude. But it read as rude to the driver.

Sonali: Yeah. I mean, these cultural differences show up all the time. Here in Los Angeles, famously—among the triggering incidents around the 1992 L.A. riots—was the cultural difference between Black people and Koreans. Korean store owners would never put change back into the hands of the person—instead of handing it to you if you held out your hand, they would always put it on the counter. Culturally speaking, it was rude or bad luck—I don’t know the exact intricacies of putting it in someone’s hand versus on the counter. But Black Angelenos took that as racist or insulting, and they didn’t understand it. And that was one of many cultural misunderstandings.

For me, what our whole conversation is circling around is that a lot of these cultural differences are fairly superficial. I mean, they’re not trivial—they do make us unique. As an immigrant, my cultural traditions are really important to me. They give me that particular flavor that makes me feel unique. But they’re still superficial aspects of who we are as humans. Actually, we share ninety percent of the things we have in common. Our commonalities are so much more than our differences. In the end, our cultural differences are like the skin on top of the human.

So the World Cup is revealing that. And I think our big challenge is to figure out: how do we increase trust between our fellow humans?

So I’m honing in on another aspect of the Pew research around trust: people who said they didn’t live comfortably were more likely to lose trust than those who did live comfortably. So we were talking about income levels and trust. And this, to me, is important—you can be low-income and low-education but still live comfortably. But if you struggle—if you struggle to keep food on the table, which plenty of people with graduate degrees are struggling to do—

Richard: Sure.

Sonali: —right, because of our economy—you are less likely to have trust. So to me, it actually says more about the economy. There’s less and less correlation between education and income than we think, because the economy is so poor. And maybe those people who are newly struggling haven’t had the chance to build those ties with one another, unlike people who’ve been low-income for longer, or families with generations who didn’t go to college. Again, speculation here.

And I’m looking at places like New York City, where people trust their new mayor—and nationally, a Fox News poll showed that trust in the federal government is lower than it’s ever been. So the difference between Mamdani in New York and Trump in the U.S.—high levels of trust with somebody who actually promises things and makes them happen, versus somebody who promises lots of things and doesn’t make them happen.

And our trust in one another—based on the poor state of the economy—suggests to me that we need to fix our economy so people aren’t struggling day to day. I think trust levels will automatically go up. We need politicians who are responsive to the public and actually keep their promises. And I feel like we will start to see trust levels go up—with one another and with our government.

Richard: And I think it ties into what you’re saying, Sonali. I think it ties into the fact that when people are vulnerable, it’s very hard to trust. When you’re in a state of vulnerability—for survival, health, well-being—when people feel powerless and voiceless. We’ve talked before about how resentment works. The example I keep coming back to is when Cracker Barrel introduced its vegan burger and people supposedly went nuts—it might have been overhyped, but it reflected people not feeling that they were heard, that they were seen, that they were represented, that others decided for them what their lives would be.

And I might argue that in the 1950s, regional differences in the U.S. were greater than they are today. In the 1950s, the Deep South had very different music than the Deep North, and so on. Today in the Deep South, they’re listening to the same pop country that’s popular on urban country stations. And there’s a lot of hip-hop happening in both white and Black communities.

Sonali: And immigrants—immigrants are in rural America.

Richard: Immigrants are all over. But we’ve also got mass media that amplifies those differences. It’s very easy to say, “Those folks in New York City, they live immorally because they have, like, a drag queen feature on Tuesday night”—or whatever it is they’re not accustomed to seeing.

Sonali: Right.

Richard: It might just be—this all might be to the good, Sonali. That’s where I’m going with this.

Sonali: I mean, it’s also reminding me of those anecdotal stories we saw when ICE agents were rounding up—and of course they still are—but in the thick of it, when they were rounding up people suspected of being immigrants in areas that voted for Trump quite heavily. Some white Trump supporters were really upset when their immigrant neighbor—who they loved and trusted and didn’t think of as “an immigrant,” but thought of as a human being—was deported or disappeared. And they thought, “No, that person is my friend, my neighbor. I love them, I respect them, I trust them. I meant those *criminal* people over there.”

And yes—cultish, manipulative leaders exploit media, use mass media to exploit people’s fears and go against what they are actually experiencing in their day-to-day lives. People have high levels of trust with the people they interact with. It’s easy to say, “Don’t trust those *others*”—vague, faceless, nameless figures you can dismiss as criminals.

Richard: Criminals. Right. And that have been stereotyped in the mass media by Fox and whomever.

So the reason why I say this may be all to the good—obviously the polarization, the lack of trust, the judgment of one another is not to the good. But if there’s an underlying trend toward empathy that manifests itself on the personal level, and these impersonal stereotypes—I hate to bring up Nazi Germany because that’s overused, but I mean, Jews in Nazi Germany were stereotyped: the hook noses, the coins, the stinginess.

Sonali: Yeah, stingy, right.

Richard: And—that dehumanization is what enables a kind of—I don’t even say “proto-fascism” anymore; the fascism we’re seeing in this country. And another kind of dehumanization—”the basket of deplorables”—maybe not as severe, but it contributes to the polarization. If people can start—if those of us who want to really build movements in solidarity read this data correctly—maybe we can start to get smarter at building coalitions that work with people who may be different from us in some ways, but are fundamentally just as decent, nice, moral, and trustworthy as we are. If not, in my case, more so.

Sonali: I would argue that what you’re talking about is very much the basis of what grassroots activists have long called mutual aid. Right. In times of crisis, when disaster strikes, instead of relying on government—because government has often let people down—or relying on charities—because charity can be a one-way street that doesn’t necessarily preserve people’s dignity—people rely on one another. It becomes: we can mutually benefit one another. We will all help each other out. And that adage I always love to cite from the National Day Labor Organizing Network—”Only the people can save the people”—is at the heart of that.

So, yeah, I think all of this is to say that we’re living at a time when climate disasters will keep striking us, and we really do have to learn to love and trust our neighbors, create community wherever we go. Ultimately, it’s good for us and good for society as a whole.

Richard: And it’s a good lesson to bear in mind as we move into an era of increasing inequality, social destabilization, and increasing climate crises. I think about New York City after 9/11, and how people who would normally have nothing to do with one another—

Sonali: Yes.

Richard: —would, out of nowhere, just look somebody in the eye and say, “How are you doing?”

Sonali: Yes. And my correlation with that is after the Eaton fires in Altadena. Same thing. And during COVID, people who formed pods—if you were lucky enough to not succumb to the distrust sowed by Trump and Fox News—you ended up becoming closer to your neighbors. Some people did, of course; some people didn’t.

Richard: Yeah, well, of course. But this is so important. This is why I think we both care so much about culture, why you’ve written so much about narrative and so on. It’s because these are stories of people, these are stories of one another. And we can’t organize, we can’t build change if we don’t hear these stories, tell these stories, share these stories.

Sonali: Yes, exactly. And ultimately—I know it’s really easy—there’s a huge trend now of more people leaving the United States than coming to the United States, and that includes native-born Americans. My message to those folks who feel like this country is beyond salvaging is: don’t leave, because we need you here. We have to rebuild trust in one another and ensure that there is a country. This country isn’t irredeemable. Certain people in government are, but we are not irredeemable as a people.

Richard: Absolutely not. And that’s a great note to end on.