The Empire’s Mildewed Collapse

From rotting Florida dream homes to global humiliation, Trump’s America is crumbling in real-time while billionaires sip overpriced tequila.

Good morning! In today’s America, the richest man in the world is selling moldy, half-built homes in Florida at a loss, the federal government is being auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the President of the United States is getting booed out of stadiums, boardrooms, and bathrooms alike. Welcome to the Trump economy, where the collapse isn’t just financial, it’s cultural, political, and moral.

Let’s start in Cape Coral, Florida, where the American dream has taken on a swampy, black‑mold hue. After a pandemic‑fueled buying frenzy, thousands of Zoom‑call investors are stuck with properties they can’t sell, neighborhoods they don’t live in, and mortgages they can’t afford. Half‑finished Airbnbs sit rotting on flooded lots, rental prices are plummeting, and foreclosures are climbing again. Locals, many of whom bought at the top of the bubble, are now watching their life savings circle the drain while insurance premiums skyrocket and builders abandon projects mid‑construction. Cape Coral, America’s financial Ponzi poster child, is proof that trickle‑down economics ends with you trickling into bankruptcy court.

This isn’t an outlier, it’s symptomatic of a frozen housing market nationwide. With the typical 30‑year mortgage hovering near 6.7%, still well above the paltry rates of recent memory, affordability is choking off buyers, leaving sales near 30‑year lows . Even the median home price, which hit a record‑high of $426,000 last June, is now appreciating at a crawl, just 2–3% annual growth, and many hot markets are sliding into buyer territory . Worse, inventory is piling up, homes in 39 of the top 50 metro areas are taking longer to sell, with delistings surging as sellers tire of slashing prices. Like Cape Coral, the rest of America is realizing that a market propped up by cheap credit and pandemic bidding wars is now gasping for air.

If you thought America’s internal rot was contained to real estate, Trump’s foreign policy reminds you that global humiliation is bipartisan. This week, the man who doesn’t know Congo is a country and thought he could win Africa over with broken English is being dragged across African media like the imperial stooge he is. Trump invited African leaders to the White House, asked the president of Liberia where he learned to speak English (Liberia’s national language, in case he skipped that day in fourth grade), then bragged about stealing mineral rights from the Congo while gutting USAID. Meanwhile, China and Russia are building roads, ports, hospitals, and media networks across Africa. America? We’re closing embassies and cutting aid, but don’t worry, Trump says we “treat Africa far better than China.” Every dictator has to have a good joke to tell the world before their empire collapses.

Speaking of collapsing, the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files just detonated in their faces. After years of MAGA influencers grifting off binders labeled “Epstein list,” Trump’s Justice Department suddenly declared there is no list, only to have Trump himself claim the list exists but was created by Obama and Hillary as a hoax. That flip-flop, delivered by a president who’s literally named as D-174 in court documents, just handed Ghislaine Maxwell a Supreme Court appeal lifeline. Now Maxwell’s signaling she’ll spill the goods if she doesn’t get a retrial, Trump’s old pals like Prince Andrew are booking U.S. vacations again, and the Epstein conspiracies are no longer coming from the dark corners of the internet, they’re coming straight from the Oval Office. Congratulations, America: we went from “drain the swamp” to helping sex traffickers secure retrials.

Domestically, the rot goes deeper. This week, the Supreme Court quietly enabled the next phase of Project 2025 with an emergency shadow docket ruling allowing Trump’s mass firings of federal workers to proceed while the legality is debated…years from now. The ruling, courtesy of an 8-1 majority with only Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, greenlights the decimation of social services, from the National Weather Service to veterans’ healthcare. Trump’s government doesn’t need congressional approval anymore, they just need enough time to bulldoze the institutions before courts can catch up. This is how you dismantle democracy: not in grand speeches, but in line-item hiring freezes, attrition quotas, and hiring ratios that exempt ICE but decimate public health, disaster response, and disability services.

If that wasn’t enough, Trump is also robbing America blind while hiding the receipts. According to Congress, Russell Vought, yes, the Russ Vought, key architect of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint, is now running the Office of Management and Budget. In Trump’s view, OMB has become his “nerve center” for gutting government programs and orchestrating mass layoffs. Vought and Trump are sitting on over $6 billion in frozen education funding, refusing to release after‑school program dollars labeled “radical leftist subsidies,” even as 300 students in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, face losing tutoring and English‑language programs.

Republican appropriators are furious, but the Trump‑Vought duo doesn’t care, they’re busy redirecting money to their pet projects while slashing foreign aid, public media, VA services, FEMA, and disability payments, all on autopilot and without explaining a dime. Veterans are getting shafted, schoolkids are being punished, and the only people celebrating are MAGA loyalists sipping $1,200 tequila and posing with golf trophies Trump awarded himself, after he got booed out of Chelsea’s championship photo op.

This is late-stage empire, a grotesque combination of corruption, cruelty, and clownish incompetence, delivered daily by a regime too arrogant to hide it and too shameless to stop. America isn’t just bleeding out, it’s being strangled by the very people who promised to save it.

And to anyone still wondering why the world is pulling away from us, maybe they’ve just seen enough.