The chapter finds that trust operates largely as a generalized and partisan orientation: evaluations of institutions and actors covary across levels, turnout and other mobilization behaviours are positively associated with higher trust, and citizens consistently award greater trust to actors closer to everyday life (local/regional) than to national or EU institutions. Crucially, trust is increasingly aligned with ideological and partisan positions—more progressive respondents report higher trust and more conservative respondents lower trust—so that trust now reflects issue-based sorting on immigration, gender, and climate as much as institutional performance. These results imply a double-edged role for trust in Germany’s multilevel democracy. On the one hand, trust remains a vital participatory resource that encourages turnout across electoral arenas; on the other, its ideological embedding risks deepening polarization and disengagement among right-leaning constituencies as party positions shift. The chapter, therefore, concludes that future legitimacy will depend not only on institutional delivery but on political elites’ capacity to bridge ideological divides and convert the 2024 wave of civic mobilization against extremism into sustained democratic support.