Trust in government is a key factor influencing the resilience of societies during crises. The literature on political crisis communication has so far predominantly focused on the role of the messages of governmental communication in shaping trust but it has neglected the role of messenger characteristics. This study addresses this shortcoming of the literature by shifting the focus from messages to messengers. It investigates how individual characteristics of communicators influence public trust during crises. To do so, it matches data on speakers present at government-held press conferences with social media discourse, examining how people reference these communicators online. Social media platforms serve as vital spaces where citizens communicate about their government’s crisis response and thus play an important role in building or undermining public trust. Given their role in shaping public perceptions of government performance, these digital platforms offer an ideal setting to observe how trust is built during crises. The study analyzes 744,000 posts on Twitter (now X) from six European countries during the early COVID-19 pandemic, employing multilingual transformer-based classification models to identify trust expressions and named entity recognition to associate tweets with individual speakers. The findings reveal that political actors generally face more distrust than experts, who tend to inspire greater trust. Gender dynamics also play a significant role, as female communicators tend to receive higher expressions of trust on social media during peak crisis periods. This suggests a “trust advantage” for female communicators, likely linked to relational communication traits valued in high-stress contexts.