Politics & Power Quote by Marcy Kaptur

Kaptur’s line lands like a diagnosis delivered without anesthesia: the public isn’t merely unhappy, it’s rational. The rhetorical trick is the blunt validation at the end - “and they are right” - which flips a familiar civic scold into an indictment of the system. Politicians usually treat “lost trust” as a mood to be managed with messaging. Kaptur treats it as evidence.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it legitimizes grievance that’s often dismissed as cynicism or “anti-government” attitude. Second, it draws a clean causal chain: hope collapses because institutions have been “captured,” and capture is not a metaphor here but a theory of power. “Special interests” functions as political shorthand, but the subtext is concrete: lobbying, donor dependency, revolving doors, regulatory carve-outs. It’s a move that implicates not just the other party, but the operating model of Washington itself.

Context matters because Kaptur isn’t a cable-news bomb thrower; she’s a long-serving member of Congress. That gives the sentence a prosecutorial edge: this is an insider conceding the charge. It also sidesteps the culture-war distraction by framing today’s crisis as structural rather than purely tribal. By stating that people “no longer” believe government cares, she hints at a broken promise - a memory of a more responsive state, or at least the myth of one.

The line works because it refuses to soothe. It names distrust as a logical outcome of capture, then dares colleagues to argue with the public’s verdict.