I think it's worth pointing out that the 2008 financial crisis came on the heels of another event that had already done much to discredit elites and elite-adjacent "experts": the Iraq War. More specifically, the discrediting was caused by a combination of the deliberately dishonest or at best wildly inaccurate intel, the sense that pro-war elites in government and media were manufacturing consent for the war, and wrong predictions about how the war would go.

The Snowden revelations of a few years later did not have as great of an impact as I would have wished, but I think that they too played some role in further discrediting elites. Given how much Trump's criticism of the Iraq War did to make criticism of that war a bi-partisan phenomenon, I find it unfortunate that he was too authoritarian to pair his criticism of that war with criticism of the NSA and that instead, he hinted that Snowden should be executed as a traitor.