Honestly, I can’t say that I trust any of them. I’ve been burned too many times by hoping politicians will actually do something while in office. I’m tired of all the corny, vague cliches they come up with for their campaigns. Things like, we have to fight for America! or It’s a new morning in America, etc. They don’t mean anything.
Lee Rodgers, a talk show host in the Bay Area (died a few years ago) used to say “Never fall in love with a politician, he’ll eventually break your heart.”
The best you can hope for is someone that “is going your way” at least for a stretch. And it isn’t that politicians are worse than you and me, rather they’re human like you and me.
And like you and me, they put “number one” first, so you can trust them to put their self interests first (like you and I do). To the extent that their interests overlap yours, then you can trust them to do what you would do, more or less.
What you never want to do is give anyone, no matter how righteous, too much power, because the temptations that go along with power can be too much for just about anyone to resist.
Potentially the politicians that could have the most power are the ones that have the opportunity to rule over all of us - i.e. the central government, in our case the federal government.
The founders understood this weakness of human nature very well - that is why they gave the central government very limited and well defined responsibilities and associated powers. They left the rest of the powers to the individual states and lower jurisdictions, thus allowing for a) each jurisdiction to experiment with different laws, essentially experiments in governance, thus allowing for evolution in governance, where the better ideas would be copied and the bad ideas would die out, and b) the individual resident to easily vote with his feet if he didn’t like the laws where he lived.
Of course over the past 240 years not much of this beautiful framework remains. What we have today the founders would not recognize as their offspring - they would despair at the mess we’ve made of things and probably call for another revolution.