How I’m Building a Trump-Proof Tech Stack Without Big Tech

The world can no longer trust American tech. If that sounds dramatic, take a step back and consider the facts.

The United States is a nation in the thrall of authoritarianism, owned and operated almost completely by a far-right doomsday cult intent on betraying every alliance, every contract, every promise it has ever made. A partisan billionaire has largely captured its infrastructure, and its decision-making is either erratic and illogical or dictated by interests that cannot and will not align with any reasonable principles of freedom, social progress, or ethical governance.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and other tech companies operating on American soil can talk a big game about their sovereignty, independence, and encryption. But talk may be all it is; there can be no guarantee that an authoritarian U.S. government will not compel American cloud, email, productivity, and messaging providers to open their databases and records to partisan law enforcement.

Even the tech you can trust is eventually going to run up against Trump and his crime family sooner or later. And there is no guarantee that they will have the resources, the recourse or the legal infrastructure to stare him down. Apple can fight Trump in the courts, but Trump is already testing the courts’ legitimacy and ignoring their judgments. Microsoft — to their credit — didn’t bow and scrape at Trump’s inauguration, but they are far from siloed from U.S. Government contracts and the influence and control of an administration that doesn’t give two fucks about privacy, freedom, or actual free speech, when it isn’t enabling Nazism.

Meanwhile, The EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) — a legal mechanism established in 2023 to enable transatlantic data flows while ensuring EU citizens’ data maintained adequate protection under GDPR when transferred to the U.S. — has been all but abandoned by the United States. The DPF replaced the invalidated Privacy Shield and was built on an Executive Order (14086) signed by President Biden that imposed new binding safeguards limiting U.S. intelligence agencies’ access to European data and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC) where EU citizens could seek redress for privacy violations.