Trust and whoppers

Dan Walters goes after Jerry Brown for equating the importance of a California high-speed train with the Golden Gate Bridge. (More on this from Ken Orski.)  Tyler Cowen cites Americans' declining trust in state and local government. 

Whoppers or mistrust; which comes first? 

Or is it simple a nasty vicious cycle? The less trust, the greater the partisanship, the bigger the whoppers.  And the bigger the whoppers, the less trust extended by anyone but by true-believer partisans.  Once the odds of discourse with anyone beyond the choir are diminished, feeding the faithful with whoppers is all that is left.  This is why it only gets worse.

Add to this the simple idea that trust is very hard to establish, but very easily broken, "years to earn and seconds to break".