Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Riley Gaines has lost another lawsuit.

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone in the history of American sports has managed to turn fifth place into such a full-time career.

Because here is the part of the Riley Gaines story that somehow keeps getting lost in the political fog machine: she did not finish second to a transgender athlete who barely edged her out for first place.

She didn’t lose a championship.

She didn’t get bumped from the podium.

She didn’t finish behind Lia Thomas.

She tied Lia Thomas for fifth place.

Fifth.

There were four women ahead of both of them. The official results show Gaines and Thomas touching the wall in exactly the same time, 1:43.40. (Supreme Court⁠)

And yet somehow this fifth-place tie became the origin story for a political career, lawsuits, congressional appearances, media appearances and an entire movement devoted to convincing America that Riley Gaines was robbed of something monumental.

The trophy situation certainly made for an awkward podium moment. NCAA officials initially had only one fifth-place trophy available and Thomas was the swimmer photographed holding it. Gaines later received her own fifth-place trophy. (PolitiFact⁠)

But let’s be painfully precise about what happened in the pool.

If Lia Thomas had never entered that race, Riley Gaines still would have finished fifth.

That isn’t my interpretation. It’s arithmetic.

Four swimmers finished ahead of them. Gaines and Thomas tied for fifth. Remove Thomas from the race and Gaines moves into fifth by herself. She doesn’t suddenly become fourth. She doesn’t become third. She doesn’t become the national champion.

She remains fifth.

And now, years later, Gaines has another legal loss to add to the résumé. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against the NCAA, ruling that the plaintiffs had not established the NCAA as a recipient of federal financial assistance sufficient to support their Title IX claim. Gaines and the other plaintiffs have indicated they intend to appeal. (UPI⁠)

Which brings us to the remarkable part.

Imagine explaining this entire saga to someone who knows absolutely nothing about American politics or college swimming:

“Who was Riley Gaines?”

“She was a college swimmer.”

“Was she an NCAA champion?”

“No.”

“Did she lose the championship to a transgender swimmer?”

“No.”

“Did she finish second?”

“No.”

“Third?”

“No.”

“Fourth?”

“No.”

“So what happened?”

“She tied for fifth.”

“With the transgender swimmer?”

“Yes.”

“And the transgender swimmer beat her?”

“No. They tied.”

“And four other women finished ahead of both of them?”

“Yes.”

“And this became a major political cause?”

“Apparently.”

At some point, you almost have to admire the sheer efficiency of the American outrage machine.

Most athletes spend their careers trying to be remembered for winning.

Riley Gaines managed to become nationally famous for fifth place.

And that’s really the strange irony here. Whatever anyone thinks about transgender participation in women’s sports, policies surrounding eligibility, Title IX or the NCAA, those are legitimate subjects for public debate. They can and should be discussed using rules, evidence, athletic data and actual competitive outcomes.

But turning a tie for fifth into evidence that someone was personally displaced from greatness requires leaving the scoreboard somewhere back in 2022.

Because the scoreboard doesn’t care about the political narrative.

It says:

Five.

Not second.

Not runner-up.

Not robbed of first.

Fifth.

And apparently, after all these years, fifth place is still trying to become first place in the biography.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is something slightly amusing about calling what we have today “artificial intelligence.” The phrase makes it sound as though we have created a digital brain sitting somewhere in a server farm, contemplating the meaning of existence while drinking imaginary coffee.

I’m not entirely convinced.

At least not yet.

What we have feels a lot more like automated intelligence.

AI takes an absolutely ridiculous amount of information—books, articles, images, code, conversations, scientific papers, photographs, history, mathematics, human language—and finds patterns in all of it. Then, when we ask it a question, it produces something that looks remarkably like an answer.

And sometimes it is remarkably good.

Sometimes it is also spectacularly wrong.

Which, admittedly, is another very human characteristic.

That distinction matters because we have a tendency to anthropomorphize technology. We see a machine producing a coherent paragraph, having a conversation, writing code, creating an image or solving a problem, and our brains immediately start filling in the blanks.

“Holy crap. It thinks.”

Maybe.

Or maybe we have simply become exceptionally good at building machines that can manipulate information in ways that look an awful lot like thinking.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Because eventually we’re going to have to decide exactly what we’re building before we discover that we accidentally built something we don’t completely understand.

We have been warned about this for decades.

The Terminator gave us Skynet, which apparently looked at humanity and decided the appropriate solution to the human condition was nuclear annihilation.

The Matrix gave us Agent Smith, who concluded that humanity was basically a virus because apparently even artificial intelligence can develop a superiority complex.

Avengers: Age of Ultron gave us Ultron, who looked at the entirety of human history—the wars, genocides, greed, stupidity and general tendency to repeatedly step on the same rake—and concluded:

“Yeah, these things have to go.”

And then there is Star Trek: The Next Generation, which gave us Data.

Data is considerably more interesting to me.

Because Data doesn’t want to destroy humanity.

He wants to understand it.

He wants to experience humanity. Humor. Emotion. Friendship. Art. Music. Relationships. All those wonderfully irrational things that make us human.

And perhaps that is the real question we’re facing.

Not “Will AI become Skynet?”

The question is:

What are we actually creating?

Because right now, we’re building systems whose capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to establish rules around them.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re ten minutes away from an AI deciding that humans are a disease.

But it does mean we probably shouldn’t wait until the metaphorical computer starts saying “I have become self-aware” before somebody in government asks what the hell we’re doing.

Regulation doesn’t have to mean stopping AI.

We’ve regulated automobiles without banning automobiles. We regulate airplanes without outlawing aviation. We regulate pharmaceuticals, medical devices, financial institutions and nuclear power because we’ve learned a rather important lesson throughout human history:

Just because we can build something doesn’t mean we should build it without rules.

AI deserves the same kind of thinking.

We should care about who controls it, what information it uses, how it affects employment, privacy, elections, intellectual property, warfare and critical infrastructure. We should care about what happens when an AI system makes a consequential mistake and nobody knows exactly why it happened.

And perhaps most importantly, we should care about whether we’re creating systems that become increasingly autonomous without establishing meaningful human accountability.

Because that’s the part that scares me more than Skynet.

Not a computer suddenly developing hatred for humanity.

Humans giving increasingly powerful machines increasingly consequential responsibilities and then shrugging when something goes wrong.

That’s a much more believable science-fiction story.

And maybe that’s the irony of artificial intelligence.

We’re worried that someday AI might become too human.

Meanwhile, we’re still trying to figure out how to keep humans from behaving like idiots with powerful technology.

We’ve spent centuries inventing things before fully considering what happens when those things fall into the wrong hands.

Gunpowder.

Nuclear weapons.

Social media.

Facebook.

Okay, maybe those last two aren’t quite equivalent.

But you get the point.

Perhaps AI isn’t the beginning of the end of humanity.

Perhaps it’s simply the next enormous technological gamble humans have decided to take.

And that’s why I don’t know whether I’m looking at the birth of something genuinely intelligent, an extraordinarily sophisticated information-processing machine, or the technological equivalent of a very convincing parlor trick.

Maybe someday we’ll know.

Maybe we’ll eventually have machines that aren’t merely assembling information but actually understand what they’re doing.

Maybe they’ll become something closer to Data than Skynet.

Or maybe, somewhere deep inside some future server farm, a computer will finally read the complete history of humanity and quietly mutter:

“You know what? Ultron had a point.”

Let’s hope our regulations arrive before that particular software update.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Apparently, we have reached a point in American politics where checking the team name before accusing someone of perjury is considered an optional step.

Senator Eric Schmitt thought he had himself a genuine gotcha moment with former special counsel Jack Smith.

There he was, sitting in a Senate hearing, armed with text messages that he apparently believed placed Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game on February 3, 2024. And not just any basketball game, because Schmitt was trying to establish that Smith had been in Atlanta at the same time Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was dealing with the Trump investigation.

So Schmitt went for it.

He warned Smith not to perjure himself.

Then he essentially announced that Smith had already perjured himself.

And for good measure, he called Smith a “total dirtbag.”

Mic drop.

Except…

Wrong Hawks.

The basketball game Smith actually attended was a University of Iowa women’s basketball game against Maryland in College Park, Maryland, where Caitlin Clark was playing.

The Iowa team is the Hawkeyes.

Not the Hawks.

You know, Schmitt’s entire case apparently depended on confusing a four-letter nickname with a five-letter nickname.

Hawks.

Hawkeyes.

Atlanta.

Maryland.

NBA.

Women’s college basketball.

It’s like accusing someone of being at a Dallas Cowboys game because somebody mentioned the Cowboys, only to discover they were watching Wyoming.

And the funniest part is that the correction didn’t require some 14-month forensic investigation conducted by twelve federal agencies and a guy with a magnifying glass.

Amy Klobuchar basically had to say, “Dude, perhaps look at the team name.”

The texts Schmitt presented apparently didn’t establish that Smith was in Atlanta. They referenced the Iowa game. Smith himself recalled attending the Iowa-Maryland game because Caitlin Clark was playing.

So the grand perjury trap went from “I’ve got you, Jack Smith!” to “Wait… which Hawks are we talking about?”

And that’s where the modern political magic trick begins.

Because when the facts don’t cooperate, apparently the strategy is to simply redefine what happened.

Schmitt’s defense afterward was essentially that he was just asking questions.

Ah, yes.

The “I was only asking questions” defense.

It’s the political equivalent of throwing a pie in someone’s face and then explaining that technically you were only investigating the structural integrity of pies.

The problem isn’t that a senator asked Smith whether he was in Atlanta. That’s a perfectly legitimate question.

The problem is accusing somebody of perjury and calling him a dirtbag before you’ve established that your own evidence actually says what you think it says.

That tiny little detail called being correct tends to matter when you’re accusing someone of lying under oath.

And now comes the part I’m really looking forward to.

Let’s see how this gets spun.

Because somewhere, right now, somebody is probably working overtime to turn:

“Senator confuses Iowa Hawkeyes with Atlanta Hawks.”

into:

“LIBERAL MEDIA ATTACKS SENATOR FOR EXPOSING JACK SMITH.”

Maybe tomorrow we’ll learn that the real scandal is that Caitlin Clark somehow caused the entire thing.

Maybe Fox will spend ten minutes explaining that technically both teams have the word “Hawk” in their name, therefore Schmitt was basically right.

Maybe Donald will weigh in and declare it the biggest basketball scandal in American history.

At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised if somebody blamed the scoreboard.

But here’s the lesson, folks:

Check your facts, bro.

Before you accuse somebody of perjury.

Before you call somebody a dirtbag.

Before you hold up a giant poster board in the United States Senate like you’ve just cracked the Watergate files.

And especially before you build an entire conspiracy theory around a basketball game.

Because sometimes the smoking gun isn’t a smoking gun.

Sometimes it’s just a Hawkeye wearing a basketball uniform in Maryland.

And somewhere in Iowa, thousands of Hawkeye fans are probably watching this whole thing unfold thinking the same thing:

“Dude… seriously?”

Welcome to 2026 America, where apparently even the basketball mascots need fact-checkers.

Hawks. Hawkeyes.

Check your facts, bro.

Seriously.

It’s not that hard.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I never thought I would live long enough to hear this.

Not in a history book. Not in some dystopian political thriller. Not in an alternate universe where the Cold War ended differently.

I mean actually sitting here in my lifetime and hearing other countries at the United Nations talk about the United States in terms that sound suspiciously like something we used to reserve for the Soviet Union.

Western oppression. Economic coercion. Military intimidation. American hegemony.

Well, hell.

Somewhere along the way, America apparently wandered into the international neighborhood and discovered that we were the guy everyone was talking about when they thought we weren’t listening.

China has increasingly been willing to portray the United States as a power that uses its economic and military strength to pressure other nations. And while China has its own enormous record of coercive economic practices and human-rights controversies, that doesn’t automatically make the criticism of American policy meaningless.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

You can disagree with the messenger and still recognize that somebody is hearing the message.

And under Donald Trump’s second administration, the rest of the world has been given plenty of material to work with.

Tariffs. Sanctions. Threats of military force. Pressure on allies. An increasingly transactional approach to international relationships. The administration has openly embraced an “America First” foreign policy while simultaneously insisting that American strength is greater than ever. Trump’s September 2026 United Nations speech itself emphasized American sovereignty, confronting enemies and rejecting what he characterized as global control.

That’s certainly one way to project strength.

But here’s the thing about leadership:

Leadership isn’t the same thing as having the biggest stick.

For most of my lifetime, American influence wasn’t simply about aircraft carriers and the size of the economy. It was also about alliances, diplomacy, international institutions, economic partnerships, foreign aid, scientific cooperation and the idea that the United States was willing to build things that benefited more than just itself.

We didn’t always live up to that ideal. Obviously.

America has never been the spotless hero in the international story. We’ve invaded countries, supported questionable governments, interfered in other nations’ affairs and occasionally demonstrated that our definition of “democracy” became remarkably flexible whenever oil, communism, terrorism or geopolitical interests entered the room.

History isn’t a Disney movie.

But there was still an enormous difference between having power and being trusted with power.

And that distinction matters.

Other countries are not sitting around waiting for America to tell them what to do anymore. They’re building alternative relationships, alternative trade arrangements and alternative institutions. BRICS has expanded its membership and influence, while China has been aggressively cultivating relationships throughout the developing world.

That doesn’t mean BRICS has somehow become the humanitarian Avengers while America twirls its mustache in a dark room. International politics doesn’t work that neatly.

But it does mean other countries increasingly have options.

And options are what happens when the guy at the head of the table keeps reminding everyone that he can flip the table over.

A June 2026 Chatham House analysis described Trump’s economic policies as a major break from the postwar economic consensus and argued that other countries may increasingly need to build economic cooperation that doesn’t depend on either Washington or Beijing. A separate Congressional Research Service assessment notes that U.S. actions perceived as threatening the economic interests or sovereignty of countries in the Western Hemisphere have contributed to some governments seeking stronger relationships with other partners.

That’s the part that should make Americans uncomfortable.

Not because China is suddenly the good guy.

Not because Russia is the good guy.

Not because BRICS is the good guy.

But because America shouldn’t need to be the only good guy in the room to remain a leader.

We should want other countries to look at the United States and think:

“That’s the country we want to work with.”

Not:

“That’s the country we need to protect ourselves from.”

There is a profound difference.

For decades, America’s greatest advantage wasn’t simply that we could threaten someone economically or militarily. It was that we could convince other countries that cooperating with us was better than fighting us.

That’s soft power.

That’s diplomacy.

That’s leadership.

And once other countries begin constructing their own economic and political alternatives because they don’t trust the guy holding the largest stick, rebuilding that trust isn’t accomplished by buying an even larger stick.

You don’t restore leadership by demanding everyone acknowledge that you’re the leader.

You restore it by becoming the country people want to follow.

At 59 years old, I honestly never expected to see the United States described in international forums using language I grew up associating with the enemies of the United States.

That may be the strangest part of all.

The country that spent much of my lifetime warning the world about authoritarian power now finds itself increasingly having to explain how its own exercise of power is different.

Maybe that’s the real lesson here.

Being the most powerful country isn’t the same as being the most respected country.

And if we’re not careful, we may discover that the rest of the world doesn’t have to overthrow American leadership.

They can simply build a world that doesn’t require it.

And that, more than any aircraft carrier, tariff or presidential speech, might be the real measure of how much influence we’ve lost.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is a certain American genius in the way we have managed to turn food into a competition.

Not good food. Not nutritious food. Not food that tastes like anything your grandmother would recognize.

No, we want the biggest chicken breast, the reddest tomato, the largest apple, the most perfectly symmetrical pepper, and a strawberry the size of a small child’s shoe.

Because apparently vegetables have a beauty pageant now.

Walk into an American supermarket and you can almost hear the produce whispering, “I was engineered for the Instagram aisle.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in Italy, somebody is looking at our tomatoes and wondering why they appear to have been manufactured by Mattel.

And here’s the strange part: we have some of the most abundant food in human history, yet we have managed to create a food system that contributes to some remarkably poor health outcomes.

Welcome to the American buffet

One of the things I find fascinating is hearing about people who immigrate to the United States from places like Italy, Israel, South Africa, Greece or any number of other countries.

They arrive with their familiar recipes and eating habits.

Olive oil.
Fresh vegetables.
Beans.
Fish.
Whole grains.
Meat in reasonable portions.
Food that actually resembles the animal or plant it came from.

Then they spend a year living the American lifestyle and suddenly their pants have apparently filed for divorce.

Five or ten kilograms later, they’re wondering what the hell happened.

And it isn’t necessarily because somebody suddenly forgot how calories work.

It’s because the American food environment is different.

Our food doesn’t just come in larger portions. It’s engineered to be convenient, cheap, shelf-stable, hyper-palatable and ridiculously easy to consume. A substantial body of research has found associations between greater consumption of ultra-processed foods and obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular outcomes. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee likewise found that U.S. dietary patterns higher in ultra-processed foods are associated with greater adiposity and obesity risk, although it rated the evidence as limited. 

We have taken the basic human requirement of “I need something to eat” and transformed it into a multibillion-dollar engineering project.

Congratulations, America. We industrialized lunch.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better

Our chickens are enormous.

Our tomatoes are enormous.

Our strawberries are enormous.

Our steaks are enormous.

Our soft drinks are enormous.

Our restaurant portions are enormous.

Apparently the national agricultural objective is:

If it isn’t big enough to require two hands, we’re doing something wrong.

But here’s where we need to separate legitimate concerns from some of the myths that have accumulated around modern agriculture.

People often say the chickens are pumped full of steroids.

They’re not.

The FDA says steroid hormone implants are approved for growth in cattle and sheep, but no steroid hormone implants are approved for growth purposes in poultry. 

Likewise, genetically modified food isn’t synonymous with poisoned food. The scientific question is whether a particular product is safe, not whether the word “GMO” appears somewhere in its family tree.

And that’s important because if we’re going to criticize the food system—and there is plenty worth criticizing—we should criticize what the evidence actually supports.

We don’t need imaginary chicken steroids.

The real food system is already weird enough.

The chemical soup question

Where the conversation gets considerably more interesting is endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

There is legitimate scientific research examining whether certain pesticides and other environmental chemicals can interfere with hormonal systems. Reviews of the evidence have found associations between some pesticide exposures and altered timing of puberty, although the human evidence is complicated, varies by chemical and exposure, and isn’t strong enough to say that pesticides in food are the explanation for early puberty. 

That’s an important distinction.

Because when a nine-year-old boy starts developing facial hair, it’s tempting to point at the nearest carton of milk and yell:

“AHA! THE CHICKENS HAVE DONE IT AGAIN!”

Science is rarely that cooperative.

Puberty is influenced by genetics, nutrition, body composition, environmental exposures and other factors. Researchers are still sorting out exactly how much individual chemicals contribute.

But that doesn’t mean we should shrug and say, “Well, nobody knows everything, so let’s spray away.”

It means we should demand better evidence, better regulation and better understanding of what we’re putting into the environment and onto the food we eat.

Maybe the tomato doesn’t need to be perfect

This is where I keep coming back to the supermarket.

Why does a tomato need to be the brightest red?

Why does every apple have to look like it was polished by a professional?

Why does a chicken breast need to be the size of a catcher’s mitt?

Why do strawberries need to look like they’re on steroids when they’re supposed to be fruit?

Maybe we got the objective wrong.

We optimized food for appearance, shipping, shelf life, yield and profit—and somewhere along the way forgot that food is supposed to be food.

And I’m not arguing that we should abandon modern agriculture and return to everybody standing in a field at sunrise singing folk songs while milking a cow.

I’m a Gen Xer.

I have absolutely no interest in milking anything before coffee.

But there has to be a middle ground between medieval subsistence farming and a handful of enormous corporations determining what millions of people eat.

More local agriculture.

More community-supported farms.

More farmers’ markets.

More regional food production.

More small and midsized farms that can actually sell food to the people living around them.

More incentives for farmers to grow food for communities rather than simply maximizing commodity production.

And fewer situations where the cheapest food available is the food most heavily engineered to make us eat more of it.

Because perhaps the solution isn’t to demonize every modern farming technology.

Perhaps the solution is to stop asking agriculture to produce the most food for the least money and start asking it to produce the healthiest food for the people who actually eat it.

We don’t need prettier food

Maybe we don’t need the reddest tomato.

Maybe we need the tomato that tastes like a tomato.

Maybe we don’t need a chicken breast the size of a football.

Maybe we need chickens raised in a system that doesn’t treat the animal like a biological manufacturing unit.

Maybe we don’t need twelve varieties of brightly colored snack food engineered to survive a nuclear winter.

Maybe we need actual food.

Because somewhere along the way, we confused abundance with health.

We filled the grocery stores until the aisles were overflowing, then congratulated ourselves for having solved hunger while simultaneously creating an environment where eating too much of the wrong things became almost unavoidable.

That’s the great American food paradox:

We have more food than almost anyone in human history—and somehow managed to make eating it complicated.

The answer isn’t necessarily to go backward.

It’s to stop pretending that bigger, cheaper, prettier and more processed automatically means better.

Because if the chicken needs a microscope to determine whether it ever actually met a chicken, the tomato tastes like wet cardboard, and the ingredient list on dinner is longer than the Magna Carta…

maybe we’ve wandered a little too far from the farm.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Am I Being Shaken Down?

Is it just me, or does anybody else occasionally get the feeling that we’re being shaken down?

Not in the traditional sense. Nobody has stopped me on a dark street and demanded my wallet.

No, this is more sophisticated.

This is the presidential version of the shakedown: You keep paying more for everything while the people at the top somehow keep getting richer.

And before somebody fires up the Hunter Biden argument, yes, let’s talk about Hunter Biden.

Because apparently we’re supposed to believe that a son getting a lucrative position because his father was vice president is the greatest example of political corruption since Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma absolutely raised legitimate conflict-of-interest questions. He was the vice president’s son, and his father was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine. Even contemporaneous officials expressed concerns about the optics. But multiple investigations found no evidence that Joe Biden altered U.S. policy to benefit his son. Reuters reported that Hunter served as a non-executive director and provided advice on legal, financial and strategic matters. (Investing.com⁠)

So yes, criticize the appearance of a conflict.

That’s fair.

But here’s where my Gen-X bullshit detector starts making that little beep-beep-beep noise.

Because Donald Trump isn’t merely the father of a guy who once sat on the board of a Ukrainian company.

We’re now talking about a sitting president whose family has continued expanding its business empire while he occupies the Oval Office.

Trump’s family crypto operation, World Liberty Financial, involves his sons, and Trump-affiliated entities control a substantial interest in the company. His $TRUMP meme coin also generated an enormous financial windfall for entities connected to his family. Forbes has estimated that Trump’s net worth reached roughly $7.3 billion in 2025, up from about $4.3 billion in 2024, with crypto and Trump Media playing major roles. (Forbes⁠)

And then there’s the business expansion.

Forbes documented a dramatic increase in Trump’s foreign licensing activity after he returned to the White House. The Trump Organization began announcing new ventures in places including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Vietnam, India, Hungary and the Philippines. (Forbes⁠)

Mar-a-Lago’s revenue reportedly jumped 55 percent in 2025, reaching $77 million. (Forbes⁠)

And now Trump’s sons are involved in the drone business.

Aureus Greenway, backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, announced a merger with Powerus, a drone technology company. Powerus subsequently announced a memorandum of understanding with the Pakistani military and an initial order. The Trump sons have said their investment is passive and that they aren’t involved in Powerus’s operations or contract negotiations. (Reuters⁠)

Maybe everything is completely innocent.

Maybe every deal is perfectly legitimate.

Maybe every dollar was earned without anybody ever considering the political power sitting in the background.

But that’s not really the point.

The point is the appearance of the conflict.

Because apparently appearances mattered enormously when Hunter Biden was involved.

Remember all those conversations about access?

About how somebody might pay Hunter because his last name was Biden?

Well, congratulations.

We have now entered the sequel.

Except this time the family business isn’t something happening quietly in the background while Dad is vice president.

Dad is the president.

And Dad’s name is literally on the businesses.

It’s hard to miss the irony.

Trump built a political identity around “draining the swamp.”

But the swamp seems to have discovered cryptocurrency.

It has golf courses.

It has foreign licensing agreements.

It has meme coins.

It has media companies.

It has investment funds.

And apparently now it has drones.

Meanwhile, the average American is standing at the grocery store staring at the receipt like it’s a ransom note.

Gas costs too much.

Groceries cost too much.

Housing costs too much.

Insurance costs too much.

Everything seems to have developed a personal vendetta against the contents of my checking account.

And somehow the people closest to the president keep finding increasingly creative ways to make money.

That’s the part that bothers me.

I’m not saying every increase in the price of bread is somehow deposited directly into Donald Trump’s bank account.

That’s ridiculous.

I’m saying that when the people running the country simultaneously have enormous private financial interests that can benefit from political access, government policy, foreign relationships, cryptocurrency enthusiasm and the Trump brand itself, we should probably be asking questions.

That’s what transparency is for.

That’s what ethics rules are for.

That’s what congressional oversight is for.

And that’s why the Hunter Biden comparison matters.

If your standard is “The president’s family shouldn’t profit from the president’s political position,” then apply that standard consistently.

If Hunter Biden’s Burisma position was worthy of scrutiny—and it was—then Trump’s family businesses deserve scrutiny too.

Not because they’re Democrats.

Not because they’re Republicans.

Not because we like one president and hate another.

Because the principle should be bigger than the politician.

And here’s where the whole thing gets especially absurd.

We’re told that Donald Trump is a businessman who knows how to make money.

Okay.

Apparently he does.

Forbes currently estimates his fortune at about $7 billion, while noting that much of the recent financial growth has been connected to crypto and Trump-related assets. (Forbes⁠)

Good for him.

But I’m old enough to remember when being president was supposed to mean temporarily stepping away from the business of making yourself richer.

George Washington didn’t launch a WashingtonCoin.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t open a Lincoln-branded resort in Qatar.

Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have his sons negotiating defense technology deals while he was sitting in the Oval Office.

The presidency was supposed to be public service.

Not a family enterprise with a really impressive mailing address.

And that’s ultimately what bothers me.

Not that Donald Trump is wealthy.

Not that his children are wealthy.

Not even that they continue to do business.

It’s that we’ve somehow normalized the idea that the presidency and the Trump business empire can exist simultaneously without creating an enormous ethical question.

And when somebody points at it and says, “Hey, isn’t that a problem?”

The response too often becomes:

“But Hunter Biden!”

Fine.

Let’s investigate Hunter Biden.

Let’s investigate Donald Trump Jr.

Let’s investigate Eric Trump.

Let’s investigate anybody else whose family business intersects with government power.

But let’s use the same measuring stick.

Because if corruption is wrong only when the other team’s family does it, then we aren’t actually fighting corruption.

We’re just fighting for our team.

And after everything we’ve been through, I would really prefer not to discover that American politics has become nothing more than two competing protection rackets arguing over who gets to hold the clipboard.

Because I’m already paying enough.

I don’t need a presidential surcharge.