The Pothole and the Pivot

The unions voted overwhelmingly for this nut. Don't believe the hype or what their leadership is saying. You can hear the hollow echo of their paid endorsements bouncing off the walls of deserted factories across the rust belt, but the membership, the actual men and women with dirt under their fingernails and bills in their hands, they pulled the lever for him anyway. It’s a spectacular, nauseating display of manufactured consent masking genuine, deep-seated economic anxiety that was cynically exploited and then thoroughly betrayed. The leadership puts out statements about job protection and collective bargaining, yet their collective endorsement was nothing more than political stagecraft, a rubber stamp on a strategy of self-destruction. The rank and file fell for the spectacle, the bombast, the sheer, theatrical lie of the strongman act, and now the entire working class is left holding the empty bag, wondering where the hell the promised boom went.

The man never built anything. That’s the core, sickening truth of the whole enterprise, and it’s a truth that defines every single policy decision, every erratic tweet, and every vengeful rally speech. All he has done is license a spoiled brand, which is now justly in the toilet—a rusted, tarnished, morally bankrupt toilet, suitable only for flushing away the last vestiges of dignity associated with the name. What does it mean to license a brand? It means selling the illusion of creation while committing the sin of non-production. It’s the ultimate shell game, the financial equivalent of a phantom limb: you feel the wealth, you see the name, but there’s no substance, no brick-and-mortar reality, no actual, honest-to-God physical object that he can point to and say, "I conceived this, I designed this, I built this, and it will last." His entire career is the triumph of the signature over the structure. It’s the victory of the glossy brochure over the hard hat. It’s the perpetual refinancing of a fiction. And when you lack the ability to build, you invariably destroy. This isn't philosophical poetry; it's a natural law of economics and governance.

The walking disaster started first on a white hot economy, a massive engine humming along thanks to the years of painful, grinding recovery that preceded him. He inherited a rising tide, and instead of tending to the engine or securing the hull, he set about systematically sabotaging the controls. How did he fuck that up? By elevating ignorance to policy, by replacing expertise with sycophancy, and by launching pointless, self-defeating trade wars that destabilized reliable international supply chains. He treated the complex, interconnected global financial system like a low-stakes negotiation over a failing golf course lease. The result was predictable economic hemorrhage. The confidence evaporated. The slow, steady wage growth stalled. The engine choked on tariffs and uncertainty.

After he fucked that up, after the gears began to grind and the economic indicators started flashing red, he instantly, reflexively rekindled his culture war. Because what do you do when the main promise—the promise of material, palpable prosperity for your base—collapses? You create a spectacle of hatred. You find a scapegoat. You manufacture moral panic about flags, statues, and pronouns to distract from the catastrophic mismanagement of pensions and paychecks. It’s a cynical, brilliant, and ultimately devastating political pivot. It ensures that the people who should be demanding accountability for their shrinking savings are instead screaming at each other over entirely irrelevant cultural grievances designed to keep them docile and distracted.

The human cost of this distraction is staggering, and it's never evenly distributed. Consider the hard, cold, unblinking number: 300k unemployed Black women later. That is not just a statistic; it is a profound indictment of his economic and racial priorities. These are the single heads of households, the essential workers, the bedrock of communities, who were the first to be crushed when the economic steamroller ground to a halt. It’s a consequence of both malice and breathtaking indifference.

When you deliberately destabilize the economy, the most vulnerable, the groups who have the least margin for error, are the ones who are annihilated first. He didn't care. He was too busy selling the outrage, stoking the racial fires, and ensuring that the narrative stayed focused on who was kneeling during the national anthem, rather than who was standing in the unemployment line. Their suffering was merely collateral damage in his ongoing, low-grade political warfare against the very concept of a multi-racial, functioning democracy.

And now, having thoroughly crippled the financial stability and poisoned the civic discourse, he has now embarked on ensuring the country becomes a second world nation—a failing, fading global power content to run on fumes and outdated technology. Look around: we are now faced with sagging bridges that literally threaten to collapse onto commuters, dilapidated highways that chew up tires and productivity, and antiquated rails that move freight at speeds better suited to the 1950s.

Our infrastructure is a physical manifestation of his governmental philosophy: decay is acceptable, maintenance is for losers, and visible degradation is simply a feature of his broken system. This extends far beyond concrete and steel; it infects the digital arteries of the nation. We suffer from insufficient internet connectivity that strangles rural economies and cripples education, and a perpetually lagging technology sector that has lost its innovative edge and its global confidence.

We are failing to invest in the future because he and his political disciples are too busy weaponizing the past.This is why the Chinese are eating our lunch. It’s not some grand, secret master plan they deployed; it’s merely the predictable result of one country (China) making massive, sustained, nationalized investments in high-speed rail, advanced 5G networks, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and manufacturing superiority, while the other country (us) squanders its political capital arguing over conspiracy theories and whether to fund the repair of a two-lane overpass.

The lunch isn't being stolen; it’s being left on the table, cold, untouched, and utterly unappetizing Our national ambition has been reduced to a squabble over which old grievance to re-litigate next, while Beijing is quietly building the framework for the next century of global economic and technological dominance. We are sacrificing our competitive edge, our national security, and our children's future for the sake of one man’s narcissistic need for perpetual outrage and distraction. The rot runs deep, and until the source of the destruction is removed, the decay will only accelerate, leaving us a nation defined by rust, resentment, and a profound, embarrassing inability to build or maintain anything of lasting value.