Disillusioned conservatives lose faith in Trump as issues pile up: 'Can't listen to him'

A wave of pervasive distrust is scrambling American politics heading into the midterms, with disillusioned voters across the political spectrum, including longtime Trump supporters, saying they've finally had enough of being lied to.

Ryan Wagner, a 41-year-old home restoration manager in northern Michigan who once enthusiastically backed Trump, told The New York Times his faith collapsed gradually, starting with doubts about the Charlie Kirk murder investigation and accelerating once Trump launched the war in Iran. Wagner said he can no longer stomach hearing Trump discuss the economy.

"My freaking eye is twitching," Wagner said. "I can't even listen to him talk anymore."

Wagner has taken down his American flag, written off the Republican Party as essentially finished, and doesn't plan to vote at all this November.

His friend Jeff Sieting, the 64-year-old mayor of Kalkaska, Michigan, who once hung a massive pro-Trump banner in town, turned away from the president over the handling of the Epstein files. He was especially stung when Trump told the public to simply move on from the issue.

"When Trump said, 'Let's move on,' that pierced my heart," Sieting said. "I was like, 'Are you kidding me?'"

Sieting called Trump's recent promise of $5,000 checks to Americans if Republicans hold Congress "the most insulting, pathetic thing," and said he now expects Democrats to sweep the midterms, citing multiple Trump-supporting friends who also plan to sit out the election entirely.

And in New Orleans, 66-year-old insulation salesman Paul Carroll said his anger over Trump starting a war he'd promised to avoid has only deepened as diesel prices climb. "I feel like I was sold a bill of goods," Carroll said. "The goods I agreed to buy were nothing like what was delivered."

Polling backs up the erosion. A New York Times/Siena College survey found 60 percent of likely white voters without a college degree, historically Trump's most reliable voters, disapprove of his handling of inflation, while only 29 percent of Republicans overall believe the economy has improved over the past year, a steep drop from 72 percent in January.

Meanwhile, Pew Research Center data shows just 17 percent of Americans currently trust the federal government, down from more than 70% during the postwar boom of the 1950s. It's a strange twist for a country where declining faith in institutions has usually meant people pulling further apart from each other, not finding common ground.