How not to restore trust in government
- Rich Moniak
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
Last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy approved the deployment of Alaska National Guard members to Washington, D.C., “to help the Trump Administration restore public trust.” But if that was really important to him, he’d start by telling the president that incompetence, rank hypocrisy and retribution aren’t part of the formula.
In August, Trump issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in DC. “I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety,” he declared, “and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly.”
However, you don’t reestablish law and order by breaking the law. Which is what federal judges have ruled the Trump administration did by ordering deployments to DC, Portland, Chicago and Memphis.
You don’t restore trust by making up facts to justify the deployments. Trump referred to Portland as a “War ravaged” city with “our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” He said “anarchists” were trying to “burn down buildings, including federal buildings.” The judge determined those statements were “simply untethered to the facts.”
Such a conclusion can be readily applied to thousands of statements Trump has made over the years. The most damaging occurred following the 2020 election. He’s not only repeating most of them today. He’s taken actions that are grounded in a complete denial of reality.
In his pardon of everyone who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection, including those who violently attacked law enforcement officers, he referred to the official election outcome as “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years.”
He used similar language two weeks ago when he pardoned 79 people who were active participants in one or more of his illegal schemes to overturn the election.
Trump’s mass deportation program hasn’t inspired public trust. During the campaign, he frequently promised it would focus on the “worst or the worst.” But because he grossly exaggerated how many were actually criminals, ICE began arresting tens of thousands of law-abiding illegal immigrants.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia had never been convicted of a crime. In 2011, at the age of 16, he entered the U.S. illegally. In 2019, an immigration judge determined it wasn’t safe for him to be returned to El Salvador.
Garcia is married to an American citizen and was employed at the time of his arrest in March. The Trump administration fired the lawyer who had the integrity to admit an “administrative error” resulted in his deportation to El Salvador. And that’s just the beginning of a case filled with misconduct by Trump’s Department of Justice.
You don’t restore the public’s trust by issuing an executive order for the purpose of ending weaponization of the DOJ and then start prosecuting your political enemies.
Consider the case of former FBI Director James Comey. In a public post on social media, Trump declared he “is guilty as hell” and demanded his Attorney General prosecute him. A few days later he was indicted for lying to Congress.
Last week, David French called DOJ’s prosecution of that case a comedy of errors. “I was a litigator for 21 years, and it’s safe to say that I never witnessed the level of legal incompetence that we are witnessing from the Trump administration.”
You don’t restore trust by telling Americas that grocery prices “are coming down very substantially.” We know they’re not because unlike Trump, we actually go to the grocery store to buy food.
And we know he knows because it’s the reason he recently lifted the tariffs he imposed on coffee, beef and bananas. That also contradicts his frequent statements that tariffs don’t result in higher prices for consumers.
Last but not least, the way he and his administration handled the Epstein files has been a big loser on the public trust front.
I suppose it’s possible that the ideological bubble Dunleavy lives in is sealed so tight that he doesn’t recognize any of the contradictions I’ve described. But I think it’s more a matter of having no sense of shame about giving credibility to the never ending flood of lies coming out the White House. And that’s a public trust problem of his own making.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
