He Has Been Here Before

I want to tell you something that has nothing to do with polls or politics.

It is about a pattern. The oldest one in human history.

The Greeks had a word for it. Hubris. It did not simply mean pride. It meant the kind of pride that makes a man forget he is mortal. The kind that whispers to him that the rules — the ones that brought down every ruler before him — do not apply to him. That he is different. That he is chosen. That the tide answers to him.

They also had a word for what comes next. Nemesis.

History has given us the checklist. You can run it yourself.

First comes the swelling. The man who won big begins to believe the winning was entirely his doing. Advisors who push back get fired. The circle gets smaller and friendlier. The room fills with people who only know how to say yes. Two cabinet members gone in recent months. The inner ring tightening.

Then comes the overreach. One more country. One more threat. One more line crossed at midnight on social media. Napoleon’s army freezing in Russia. Xerxes whipping the sea because it swallowed his fleet. The move that made perfect sense inside the bubble and looked like madness to everyone outside it. Threatening to level a nation’s power grid by morning. Promising to take out every bridge by midnight tomorrow. That is not strategy. That is a man who has run out of leverage reaching for volume.

Then come the numbers. Not the poll numbers. The real numbers. The ones that do not care about rallies or speeches or truth social posts.

A woman in Texas named Samantha. Mental health social worker. Fills her tank every other day to do her job. Forty to fifty dollars each time. Delivering groceries on the side in the evenings just to cover what her job does not. Choosing between gas and food. Her words, not mine: it is anxiety-ridden right now.

A delivery driver in El Paso checking gas prices online every single morning before he starts his shift because he does not know from one day to the next what it will cost him to go to work. His tips are down. His orders are down. He is applying for lifeguard positions.

A single mom in Connecticut paying forty dollars more a week just to drive her kids where they need to go. Forty dollars a week that used to go to groceries.

Here in Kentucky, the average person is paying roughly forty-seven dollars more per month just for gas than they were before this war started. Kentucky. Not some coastal city. Our people. Our neighbors.

Gas crossed four dollars a gallon for the first time in four years. It got there in two weeks. Thirteen straight weeks of increases before that. Diesel at over five dollars in some places, which means the truck that brings the food to the grocery store costs more to run, which means the raspberries cost forty percent more than they did in January. That is not an abstraction. That is what people see when they open the refrigerator and think about what they can and cannot buy this week.

This is the part of the pattern that speaks louder than anything a ruler can say.

Because a speech fades. A threat fades. A rally fades. But the price on the pump when you pull up on a Tuesday morning does not fade. It is right there. In red numbers. And people read it. Every single day they read it.

That is what eyes wide open looks like. Not reading the news. Reading the pump. Reading the grocery receipt. Reading the electric bill. Reading the silence of a man across the kitchen table who used to vote one way and is now just doing arithmetic.

History does not announce itself. It does not send a press release. It does not hold a news conference.

It shows up at the gas station. It shows up in the produce aisle. It shows up in a woman choosing between filling the tank and buying raspberries for her kids. It shows up in a young man who was certain about everything a year ago and is certain about nothing this morning.

The approval numbers are below forty in some polls. Economy approval at thirty-one percent. The Federal Reserve signaling rate hikes. The same Federal Reserve that cut rates three times at the end of last year. That reversal alone tells you something. When the people who manage the money start moving in the opposite direction from where they just came, it is because the ground shifted underneath them and they felt it.

Midterm primaries are two weeks out.

I have watched enough elections to know that what happens in the voting booth is not about speeches. It is not about television or rallies or which side is louder. It is about how people felt on the way there. What they thought about when they filled the tank that morning. What they said to themselves in the parking lot of the grocery store.

The Greeks called what comes after hubris a Nemesis. Not a punishment exactly. More like an inevitability. The thing that was always going to happen once the pattern was set. The wax melting at altitude is not a surprise. It is physics. It was always going to melt. The only question was how high he flew before it did.

We are watching that altitude right now. Eyes open. Not angry. Not celebrating. Just watching.

An old man who has read enough history to recognize the chapter we are in.

We have been here before. The names change. The country changes. The century changes.

The pattern does not.

“A Working AI Firewall Framework”

“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack