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As the conversation turns to the central theme of his book, Volcker suddenly sits up in his heavily padded chair by his favorite window in his Manhattan apartment and points at me to make sure I write this down.

“We have a serious problem in this country,” says Volcker, who is fighting cancer. “Here I am trying to defend government in the midst of a world that doesn’t respect it.”

Volcker is aghast at how, he says, Americans no longer trust in government, media, science or about anything else. While he acknowledges the erosion of trust has been going on for years, he chastises Trump for exacerbating the problem.

“I hope we’re at the bottom,” he says, adding he hopes “we’ll begin clawing our away back if not in this election, then in the next election.”

Why don’t young people want to work in government?

People still come up to Volcker on the street to thank him for “saving our country” from inflation in the 1980s, when he took interest rates above 15 percent and caused a recession in an effort to tame double-digit inflation. He is not concerned (much) about inflation now. But he is terrified by how the U.S. government seems unable to do basic functions like keeping up infrastructure, as well as the fact few young Americans are entering public service.

"These days college students interpret ‘doing good’ as going to law school and making $200,000 a year when they get out of law school,” Volcker said, shaking his head.

He has taught numerous courses over the years at Princeton, where he graduated from in 1949 and wrote his prescient senior thesis on how the Fed should not cave to political pressure, in an effort to encourage more people to enter government.

Volcker devoted most of his adult life to public service starting with a stint in the Kennedy administration and then working in some form with almost every administration — Republican and Democrat — that came after until Trump. He admits he had a “guilty conscience” about not spending enough time with his two children, but he felt his country needed him.

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Heather Long, WaPo today.