Trust: America's Best Chance

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg demonstrates how a breakdown of trust has brought our nation to the brink of disaster—and how its restoration for all can reclaim America’s future.

In a century warped by terrorism, Trumpist populism, systemic racism, financial collapse, and a global pandemic, trust—in our institutions, in each other, and in the American project itself—has precipitously eroded. We are now experiencing the disastrous consequences of a “crisis in trust,” writes Pete Buttigieg, former presidential candidate and best-selling author of Shortest Way Home. In this arresting, impassioned account, Buttigieg contends that our success—or failure—in confronting the greatest challenges of the decade will rest on whether we can effectively cultivate, deepen, and, where necessary, repair the networks of trust that are now endangered, or for so many, never even existed. Interweaving history, political philosophy, and affecting passages of memoir, Trust is an urgent call to foster an “American way of trust.”