Clean up efforts have started in several US states which endured destructive storms that killed more than 40 people over the weekend.

The massive storm system in question swept across at least eight states in the south and midwest over the weekend, with multiple tornadoes, wildfires and dust storms descending on the region, destroying thousands of businesses and homes.

The governors of Arkansas, Georgia and Oklahoma each declared a state of emergency over the weekend in the wake of the storm. Red flag warnings still remain for states in the midwest and south, including Texas and Oklahoma, meaning those states are still at risk of high, dry winds that could lead to wildfires.

There were 96 tornadoes reported in the region on Friday and Saturday, according to the National Weather Center’s Storm Prediction Center.

The death toll from the storm continued to go up on Sunday after two children were killed in Transylvania county, North Carolina, after a tree fell through their family’s trailer.

Missouri has the highest death toll, with 12 dead from tornadoes and wildfires that hit the state. At the storm’s peak, more than 140,000 homes and businesses lost power. As of Monday morning, more than 20,000 customers in the state were still without power.

In a statement on Sunday Mike Kehoe, Missouri’s governor, said: “The scale of devastation across our state is staggering.”

Hurricane-force winds in Texas and Oklahoma led to wildfires that spread in multiple communities across the two states. In Oklahoma, at least 130 wildfires had been reported in the state by Friday, with the dry, powerful gusts setting large swaths of land aflame. A ranch outside of Oklahoma City owned by the governor, Kevin Stitt, was burned in one of the wildfires.

In a video taken for social media, Stitt showed the remains of his ranch, saying that he is “rebuilding with all of Oklahoma”.

“You never think it’s going to happen to your place, and these wildfires just come out of nowhere and can really take over,” Stitt said.

In Kansas, at least eight people died after a 70-vehicle pileup on an interstate highway during a dust storm on Friday afternoon that led to near-zero visibility on the roads.

On the Louisiana-Mississippi border, two powerful tornadoes formed concurrently and took the same path, ultimately leaving three dead in Tylertown, Mississippi, a town of fewer than 2,000 people.

William Shultz of Tylertown told NBC News that he was “holding my wife to my chest and just watching everything disappear and watching everything get ripped out away from me”, he said. “I’m just thankful to be alive.”

In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Donald Trump said that the national guard had been deployed to Arkansas, where tornados have left three dead. The president also said: “My administration is ready to assist state and local officials as they help their communities to try and recover from the damage.”

Trump’s statement notably lacked any mention of help from the Federal Emergency management Agency (Fema), which helps with disaster reliefs after severe weather events. The president and Elon Musk, the head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the architect behind the mass government layoffs, have come under criticism for laying off workers in agencies including Fema.

Advocacy groups have pointed out that it appears hundreds of Fema employees have been terminated over the last few weeks. In January, after being sworn into office, Trump floated the idea of scrapping Fema completely, calling it “very bureaucratic” and “very slow”.

Young Americans’ confidence in the apparatus of government has dropped dramatically to one of the lowest levels in any prosperous country, a Financial Times analysis of Gallup data shows. 

The Gallup polls, conducted by surveying 70,000 people globally over the course of 2023 and 2024, found that less than a third of under-30s in the US trust the government. The proportion of US young people who said they lack freedom to choose what to do with their lives also hit a record high at 31 per cent in 2024 — a level worse than all other rich economies, bar Greece and Italy. 

“[For younger people in the US] the future seems kind of bleak,” said Julie Ray, managing editor at Gallup. 

While the Gallup poll does not cover the direct repercussions of US President Donald Trump’s second term, experts believe that rising political polarisation is likely to lead to a sharp drop in trust in future surveys. 

Connor Brennan, a 25-year-old financial economics PhD student at the University of Chicago, and disillusioned Republican, said he trusted the “big figures” in politics “a little less” now than in the past. 

“Friends, families these days are more and more torn apart by politics and seeing that (politics) taken as almost entertainment,” Brennan said. “It should be boring . . . it really has become more and more like, you watch the latest episode of the sitcom.”

The proportion of young people in the US reporting no confidence in the judicial system also hit a record high in 2024, while more than a third of under-30s also do not trust the police. 

“I would not say I trust the government — a lot of things that have changed quite recently that call the government’s ability to be honest with the American people into question,” said Daniel Quezada, a 22-year-old substitute teacher in Arkansas, adding that he also had a “profound, profound sense of scepticism” regarding the police after being peacefully involved in protests in 2020. 

Elsewhere in the world, young people in Greece and Italy are among the most dissatisfied with public services and confidence in institutions. Nordic economies, such as Finland, Denmark and Norway, tend to be the best performers.

Some 61 per cent of young people in the US also reported having recently experienced stress, the third-highest proportion among advanced economies after Greece and Canada. 

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show US emergency department visits for self-harm reached 384 people per 100,000 population among those aged 10 to 29 in 2022, up from 260 a decade earlier and four times the rate for those aged 30 and over.

The collapse in young people’s happiness in the US and elsewhere has been pinned on factors ranging from political polarisation, stagnating quality of life to difficulties in getting on the property ladder.

Haifang Huang, an economics professor at the University of Alberta, referred to “a laundry list” of factors, including labour-market challenges after the 2008-09 global financial crisis, the high cost of housing and rising inequality among the young exacerbated by inheritance and parental supports. “It is hard to evaluate their relative contributions.”

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation, blames the mental health crisis in all main Anglosphere countries on the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming.

John Helliwell, a founding editor of Gallup’s World Happiness Report, said that the trends in the data supported the view that the decline in trust and wellbeing among young people “has something to do with the kind of stories being told on social media”. 

Political polarisation, meanwhile, had also resulted in a “situation where there’s no agreed set of common information”. 

“If there’s nobody who you believe, then of course, your trust is going to be low in everybody,” Helliwell said. “That’s been increasingly happening in the US, because people are denying each other’s facts and living in their own media isolation.”

While young Americans are relatively upbeat about their economic prospects — a reflection of their higher-than-average earnings and low unemployment rate — some are becoming gloomy about growth too.  

“The economy isn’t doing great — there were a lot of issues with relatively high inflation and high cost of living, massive wealth inequality, concerns with employment that were iterated by both sides in the election leading up to this year,” said Misha Newbold, a 20-year-old student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who grew up in Kansas. 

Newbold added that he disagreed with cuts to federal agencies undertaken by technology billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). “I think cutting employment opportunities, shrinking a lot of the government agencies that make this country run . . . is actually counter-productive to the employment concerns.”

Brennan, meanwhile, said he was increasingly concerned about the US’s fiscal position, with the national debt set to balloon over the coming decade. 

He also thinks an economic crisis borne of Trump’s policies would not be viewed by the president’s supporters as being down to mistakes made by the White House.

“That’s what worries me the most — that, even if we are confronted with issues that should cause us to have some sort of come to Jesus moment, I don’t think we’ll come to Jesus.”

Data visualisation by Valentina Romei and Alan Smith in London