Not trusting the government is how you get Russia.

There's obviously a nuanced position to build a government that is trustworthy, but we've ignored that for the sake of greed, racism and other human vices.

Unfortunately the US government has always been a government for people who do not want to be governed, if you view it from that lens it's much easier to understand the idiosyncrasies of the system.

I don't think it's possible for the USA to move into a high civics-educated, high-trust society, those are cornerstones for a society to have a government made up of representatives of the population's interests, in turn earning respect.

The relationship between USA's population and its government is absolutely adversarial, making it very easy for financial elites to exploit the common people. Tack on top of that the power corporations have developed over the government since the 1980s and you get contemporary USA.

>Unfortunately the US government has always been a government for people who do not want to be governed

I don't think that's the entire description of the problem. The US government was setup to strictly govern a certain subset of the population (non-voting citizens, later non-voting people), but allow freedom to people who don't want to be governed.

The clash between the two has "generally" been helpful since it is a largely symbolic reality that we do both want structure and regulation but also freedom to do things outside that structure.

The current regime demonstrates that to a tee. That there is no clear intersection between who should be strictly governed and who should be imbued with freedom, and that there's no simple tests of them.