Looking Beyond Trump: Random Thoughts from a Dirty Shower

I run a little motel out here in the middle of nowhere, one of those flyover places where the interstate exit dumps you straight into the cornfields. Most days you’ll find me down on my knees in the showers, scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush because that’s the only way to get the mess out before the next guest checks in. While I’m working that tile I have plenty of time to think about what’s really going on in this country. Because I’m knocked out from the latest cleanathon, I don’t have time for the usual sort of article the Libertarian Alliance demands. Here instead are some of the semi-random thoughts that pass through my head.

The Trump presidency didn’t just fail. It committed suicide. It was always a rickety marriage between genuine crazies and people so thoroughly compromised that the term “Epstein Syndicate” fits them like a cheap suit. The war in Iran was the final proof: the same crowd that owns half the politicians in Washington pulled the strings, and the man who ran on ending forever wars walked right into their trap. By the time the 2026 mid-terms roll around, that coalition is shattered and the managerial state is still standing—meaner, tighter, and more honest about who it serves.

But here’s what I see while I’m scrubbing: the system is doubling down on control, and ordinary people are quietly making that control irrelevant for the things that actually matter. Technology is a double-edged sword. The ruling class uses it to cement its grip—surveillance, programmable money, algorithmic gatekeeping. At the same time, regular folks are using the exact same tools to route around the whole rotten machine. That’s where the hope is. Not in some grand revolution, but in millions of small, stubborn acts of defection that the state and its corporate partners can’t quite stamp out.

The Iran war poured hundreds of billions more into the black hole of deficits that were already running north of $2 trillion a year. Energy prices spiked. Supply chains got snarled. As ever, the bill landed on working families. Official numbers still get polished up for the evening news, but out here the math is simple: households are getting squeezed by sticky inflation and the slow creep of fees that replace honest tax hikes. Boomers are pulling their savings out for nursing homes and medical bills, while younger folks carrying student debt and gig-economy wages can’t replace the old consumption engine. The state doesn’t announce austerity. It just lets services degrade, and the cost of everything edge upward while corporate profit margins stay fat. I see it in the guests who used to stay two nights and now push on after one because diesel and a room have them counting every dollar.

The municipal bond market—over $4 trillion and still growing—sits on top of underfunded pensions and optimistic revenue forecasts that everyone knows are fiction. War spending and the demographic drawdown only make the cracks wider. We won’t get one dramatic 2008-style crash. Instead we’ll see rolling liquidity crunches in weaker cities and pension funds, followed by selective Federal bailouts that protect the big banks and asset managers while taxpayers eat the moral hazard. The Fed will step in just enough to keep the system from blowing apart. It’s not collapse. It’s rot—steady and very profitable for the insiders who know which bonds to hold and which to dump before the downgrade hits.

Big Tech isn’t being regulated anymore. It’s being partnered with. The old Section 230 protections have been traded for de-facto compliance regimes where platforms moderate content to stay on the right side of government priorities while keeping their monopoly rents. AI is moving from wild-west innovation to licensed, audited infrastructure—compliance costs and liability insurance are now the real barriers to entry. The same companies that track every click on your phone are helping the state decide whose voice gets amplified and whose gets quietly throttled. Out here I watch small-business guests trying to run everything from their phones and I know the game is rigged from the top down.

The full retail CBDC got killed politically, but the banks and the state didn’t lose. Stablecoin legislation and frameworks like the GENIUS Act let JPMorgan and the rest issue regulated digital tokens while tokenized real-world assets—already over $24 billion and climbing fast—are being used as collateral in DeFi protocols. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and similar vehicles put Treasuries and private credit on-chain, earning real yield that flows straight into smart contracts. This is programmable money: it can be timed, restricted, or incentivized without ever needing a full government digital dollar. The legacy banking cartel just built the on-ramps it needed. Most people will stay inside the compliant system because the cost of leaving is high in convenience and access. But the door is still open for those who learn to operate on the edges.

Smart contracts already let people do zero-reserve, fully collateralized lending and savings outside the fractional-reserve casino. Real-world assets are being tokenized and used as collateral, creating genuine yield that doesn’t depend on the Fed’s balance sheet. DeFi isn’t replacing the old system yet, but it’s running alongside it in a tense standoff. Regulators raid the parts that get too loud, but the infrastructure is too useful—and too hard to shut down completely. While I’m scrubbing showers I think about how the same technology that lets a guy in a flyover motel lend against tokenized assets also threatens the entire rent-extraction model the banks and the state have built their power on. Ordinary people are using it to make the control redundant for the things that really matter: saving, lending, transacting without asking permission.

The American Society of Civil Engineers just gave the country a C—the best grade in years—but that still means a multi-trillion-dollar backlog in deferred maintenance. War spending diverted money that could have gone to bridges, roads, water systems, and the grid. Critical stuff for the elites and the military gets patched; everything else gets kicked down the road. You see it in the potholes that wreck suspensions and the rolling blackouts when demand spikes. China keeps building. We keep managing decline.

Public schools are failing on every measurable level, so families are pulling kids out in record numbers—over 3.4 million now and climbing. Red states loosen the rules to attract them; blue states tighten up with more reporting and testing requirements. The managerial state hates losing control over the next generation, but the numbers don’t lie. Homeschooling and micro-schools are the rational response when the institution you’re supposed to trust has become an ideological and fiscal wreck. Parents aren’t asking permission anymore. They’re just doing what works.

Against all this, people are building real workarounds—encrypted networks, local economies, self-reliant communities, decentralized tools. They’re still small, but they matter because they prove the system isn’t inevitable. The state and its corporate allies will harass them, regulate them, and call them dangerous, but they can’t kill the incentive. When the official path offers nothing but managed decline and surveillance, folks start looking for the back door. Technology cuts both ways. The ruling class thinks it’s building a perfect cage. Ordinary Americans are using the same tools to walk right out of it.

By 2030 this country won’t have collapsed. It will just be more of what it already is: a high-tech managerial oligarchy that extracts from the many to protect the few. The illusions are gone. The war exposed the limits of American power, and the aftermath is exposing the limits of American consent. I keep scrubbing the showers because that’s my job. But while I’m down there on my knees I can see the cracks in the tile, the places where the grout is failing and the water is starting to seep through. The system looks solid from the lobby, but anyone who spends time in the back rooms knows better. The post-Trump era isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of something quieter and more stubborn: millions of people learning to live outside the cage, one smart contract, one encrypted message, one homeschooled kid at a time. The ruling class has the headlines and the balance sheets. We have the tools to make them irrelevant for everything that actually matters. That’s hope enough for me.