I wouldn’t agree that Americans universally trust their military.

Gallup poll numbers are at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as....

I don't know that "people" in the original argument equates to "universally", but the only institutions that a majority of people have either a "Great deal" or "Quite a lot" of trust in are the medical system (just barely, 51%), the military (72%), and small business (75%). So small business is trusted more than the military, and basically nothing else is.

6% of people have a great deal of trust in Congress and 9% in television news which I guess are around the percentage of dentists who recommend sugared gum to their patients who chew gum.

Technically, they primarily recommend not chewing gum at all. The “9 out of 10 doctors agree the 10th is an idiot” is a meme.

The meme is 4 out of 5. So yeah, most of them say sugarless gum, then there's the ones that ignore the rules of the poll and say don't chew gum. Those aren't the dentists we are talking about.

There really are dentists out there that will tell you that if you chew gum, the sugared stuff is what you want. Not a lot of them, but probably about the same percentage as people that have a great deal of trust in congress or television news.

Hard to believe, but these people exist.

People trust the military precisely because in the last several decades it has been studiously apolitical. This is a fragile state of affairs, and unusual by historical and international standards.