"Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct….. "
(C. Wright Mills. 1959. The Sociological Imagination).

The "trap" refers to structural constraints that coerce people to act certain scripts that reproduce their disadvantages. Since this coercion is "invisible", people are trapped by "mistakes they know nothing of".The slaves of the system think that they are doing what they want but they actually do what reproduces their disadvantages and through that a social structure rife with inequality and injustice...and nowhere are structural constraints more encompassing than in bureaucratized social structures like the USA.

The "trap" is elaborated upon in this song that captures the effects of it in the confessions of the Power Elite (that is how I interpret it).