As changes with the second Trump presidency are coming, I wanted to read a book about a place which no longer exists (Tangier International Zone), as it feels that the same will happen with the American empire. It was a place where folks grifted each other, played shadowy games, and trusted nobody, as they knew that people around them were the same as they were — frauds. So there is no surprise that the protagonist went mad while committing acts of grifting, because he was running schemes in his head about how others could grift him.

The ironic part is that the protagonist mistook his madness for clear and rational thinking. And there, I think, are parallels with present-day Americans, because those grifters who just got power are also in the same mindset.