Trump is wrong that the election could be fixed, but there’s a reason many Americans have ingrained suspicions

problems. But these are not normal times. Because of historic rates of polarization — both in attitudes toward government and in beliefs about basic facts — people do not believe favorable data about the economy or government performance. Roughly half of Donald Trump’s supporters, for example, do not trust the economic data that is coming from the government. Similarly, confidence in the media — whose bias has been a key subject in the presidential campaign — is at historic lows. Only 32% of respondents to the Gallup Poll express either a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in the mass media. Other institutions, such as the church, banks, big business, and public schools have likewise suffered a loss of confidence in recent years.

Distrust in government and the media has a feedback effect in preventing objectively good news from restoring people’s confidence in government. We are a long way away from the times when Walter Cronkite routinely commanded 30 million viewers for the nightly news broadcast. He, and a few others, were able to provide an authoritative account of the facts on the ground – whether the ground was in Vietnam or in the American polling place.

His concluding refrain at the end of a broadcast — “and that’s the way it is” — not only seems corny and quaint to a present day audience, but rings of the “mainstream media bias” that has become a rallying cry in this campaign.

Fast forward to 2016 and people opt into news sources online and on cable that confirm their hardened biases. It is not just that liberals choose MSNBC and conservatives choose Fox News. The panoply of news sources on the internet allows for tailor-made descriptions of reality to fit even the most discerning consumer. Such an environment naturally gives rise to widespread beliefs in falsehoods, and midwifes conspiracy theories propagated by birthers, truthers, climate deniers and the like.

Indeed, there are no arbiters of “truth” in a world where people choose the truth and truth-purveyors they want to hear. As a result, even when things get “objectively better,” if we can use such phrases these days, Americans “may not believe their lying eyes” because the sources they trust have told them a different story.

Is there a way to break this cycle of distrust? Well, a crisis could focus our attention in unprecedented ways. Much of the division left in the wake of Bush v. Gore evaporated in the immediate wake of 9/11, for example. And if the next president needs to deal with something of that magnitude, perhaps Americans will “rally round the flag” again.

Short of that, the only hope for restoring confidence would be for leaders inside and outside of government to take on the mission of legitimizing the government they routinely criticize. In doing so, however, they further confirm the existence of the vast conspiracy that led a candidate like Trump to emerge in the first place.