Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

https://news.gallup.com/poll/713933/record-high-say-government-corruption-widespread.aspx

48•karakoram•1h ago

Comments

java-man•1h ago

Who are these 11%?

slater•1h ago

The ones smiling and holding "their" ladders

Webstir•52m ago

But, not the politicians I voted for. It's always the other guys.

fhdkweig•7m ago

That would have been a more interesting question to ask. It's a shame they didn't.

newAccount2025•2m ago

Nah. At the end of the day it’s candidate A vs. B. Once they’re all corrupt you still have to decide between them and pick the lesser evil as you see it. They’re creatures of ambition and incentives, and the corruption is a feature of the system. It sucks but what can you do but vote for the corrupt dems or the corrupt republicans?

swed420•50m ago

New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)

https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...

trentor•21m ago

Right on track to be the next Russia. Ironic but also incredibly funny.

FpUser•16m ago

He who kills the dragon becomes one.

jeffbee•7m ago

An "independent" in America is a person who greatly desires everything Trump is doing but realizes that makes them a bad person and therefore refuses to admit it.

darth_avocado•4m ago

Identifying as independents means nothing. 67% of independents in 2018 viewed one party more favorable and were unfavorable to other. In other words, the independents have a partisan lean towards one party and are more likely to vote that way.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...

add-sub-mul-div•22m ago

I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.

autoexec•12m ago

Giving someone without common sense and integrity unchecked power is probably not a good way to obtain common sense and integrity in your government.

autoexec•19m ago

Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they think they no longer have to. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.

iAMkenough•12m ago

Sucks seeing the federal government weaponize the U.S. Postal Service to prevent legitimate ballots from being counted.

estearum•9m ago

Well it’s almost certainly not also just more open. But also more common and more intense. There is 100% absolutely no possible comparison to Trump’s personal acts of corruption in any prior White House ever.

jeffbee•8m ago

Implying that it's always been this way is part of the reason we are now here. For my entire life, bad faith commentators insinuated that the federal government was rife with corruption. When under Democratic control, of course. The time that Al Gore made one long-distance telephone call from his official desk, using his own personal calling card, birthed over 200 New York Times articles, 30 of them on the front page. We just had to get to the bottom of all that corruption!

tekla•9m ago

Note the numbers between 2010 and 2025 were in the 72% to 79% range if you read the article. So numbers have not actually increased that much.

ProfessorLayton•2m ago

2010 was right after the great recession, and after the people that caused it got bailed out by the government.

throw0101a•8m ago

Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.

By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025

Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).

surfmike•2m ago

The most blatant recent case is Trump selling early access to his Truth Social posts

https://abcnews.com/Politics/profoundly-corrupt-trump-sued-f...

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Comments

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Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

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