Under Joe Biden’s presidency, there have been multiple bad actors in American courts who have been tapped by Democrats in their lawfare against President Donald Trump.
A New York judge, for example, has demanded Trump pay a penalty of nearly half a billion dollars for business practices that the supposed “victims” said were routine. If fact, they wanted the opportunity to engage in more business with him.
And then there was the New York judge who was found to be partisan, donating money to Democrats, yet refusing to excuse himself from an odd claim by a Manhattan prosecutor who said misdemeanor business infractions weren’t misdemeanors, they were felonies, so they could be brought after the statute of limitations passed.
Then there was the Georgia judge who let stand an “organized crime” case against Trump even though the district attorney hired her paramour, at a taxpayer cost of $600,000 plus, to assemble her allegations.
And multiple federal judges who agreed with special counsel Jack Smith’s wild allegations about the criminality of Trump’s handling of government papers, about his opinions on the 2020 election and more.
Among the results? A massive drop in public confidence in America’s courts.
“The judiciary stands out for losing more U.S. public confidence than many other U.S. institutions experienced between 2020 and 2024. Even though confidence in the national government also declined, by 20 points to 26% in 2024, the decline of 24 points in judicial confidence is somewhat outsized, which is atypical,” Gallup said after a recent polling.
“The net result is that for the first time on record, many more Americans trust the honesty of their elections (51%) than trust their judicial system (35%).”
That result, in fact, sets the U.S. apart from other rich nations where still a majority expresses trust in their judiciary, “an institution that relies largely on the public’s confidence to protect its authority and independence.”
Gallup reported that from 2006 to 2020 Americans’ perceptions of their courts were in line with other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“Since 2020, confidence in the courts across the other OECD countries has been stable, while the U.S. has seen a sharp decline — 24 percentage points — in the past four years. The resulting 20-point gap in confidence between the U.S. and the median of OECD nations in 2024 is the largest in the Gallup trend, which dates to 2006.”
Other nations with similar “drops” include “Myanmar (from 2018 to 2022) overlapping the return to military rule in 2021, Venezuela (2012-2016) amid deep economic and political turmoil, and Syria (2009-2013) in the runup to and early years of civil war…”
There have been other nations where the confidence in the courts has been lower: The Congo, Venezuela and Syria, at times.
The report said the drop under Biden “signals that something profound occurred to atypically shake his opponents’ confidence in the courts — with the various legal cases against Trump likely factors.”
On a partisan basis, the report said, “Democrats’ trust in the judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court fell 25 points (from 50% to 25%) between 2021 and 2022, spanning the Dobbs decision overturning constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats’ confidence in the Supreme Court rebounded a bit, to 34% in 2023, before sinking to 24% in 2024. By contrast, Republicans’ trust in the high court increased slightly between 2021 (61%) and 2022 (67%), and stretched to 71% in 2024.”
