Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is something almost endearing—if one squints hard enough and ignores history—about Donald Trump’s rumored flirtation with rescheduling cannabis. After years of treating marijuana reform like an unattended salad fork at Mar-a-Lago, we are now supposed to believe that a last-minute administrative tweak will suddenly convince millions of voters that this is the man who finally “gets it.” The timing, of course, is purely coincidental. Entirely organic. Nothing to do with elections, demographics, or the unmistakable aroma of desperation wafting through the campaign war room.

The pitch seems to be this: What if, after decades of punitive drug policy, mass incarceration, dog whistles, and performative “law and order” chest-thumping, Donald Trump simply waves a bureaucratic wand and—presto!—young voters, independents, civil-liberties advocates, and people who remember literally anything will forget everything else? What if rescheduling cannabis could function like political Febreze, masking the stench of authoritarian flirtation, cultural grievance, and an administration staffed by people who think “reefer madness” was a documentary?

It’s a bold theory. Bold in the same way that putting racing stripes on a shopping cart is bold.

Let’s begin with the obvious problem: credibility. Cannabis voters—particularly younger voters—are not new here. They’ve watched Democratic and Republican administrations alike slow-walk reform, triangulate, hedge, and occasionally panic when Fox News discovers THC exists. They know the difference between legalization, decriminalization, rescheduling, descheduling, and “we’ll totally get to it after the election, promise.” Trying to sell rescheduling as a grand act of liberation is like trying to sell a coupon as a paycheck.

Rescheduling does not mean legalization. It does not expunge records. It does not release people still incarcerated for marijuana offenses. It does not undo decades of racially disparate enforcement. It does not stop states from criminalizing. It does not magically turn the war on drugs into a healing drum circle. It is, at best, a footnote with better optics.

And optics, let’s be honest, are the entire point.

Because if Donald Trump suddenly cares about cannabis policy, one must ask: where has this passion been hiding? Was it behind Jeff Sessions, who tried to resurrect the war on drugs like it was a canceled 1980s sitcom? Was it under the avalanche of federal executions, “tough on crime” rhetoric, and praise for authoritarian leaders who imprison dissidents? Or perhaps it emerged organically after internal polling showed that younger voters were not, shockingly, lining up to vote for a man who thinks TikTok is a national security threat but authoritarianism is merely a vibe.

The insult here isn’t just the policy minimalism—it’s the assumption that voters are goldfish.

Cannabis reform has been driven from the bottom up: activists, ballot initiatives, state legislatures, medical patients, criminal justice advocates. Donald Trump did not lead this movement. He did not nurture it. He did not defend it when it was politically inconvenient. He has simply noticed it, the way a real estate developer notices a neighborhood after it’s been revitalized by someone else.

And even if we suspend disbelief and imagine that rescheduling happens, what exactly is the campaign expecting? That a generation burdened by student debt, housing costs, climate anxiety, and political nihilism will say, “Well, he undermined democratic norms, but at least weed is Schedule III now”? That voters who watched friends and family arrested, jailed, or permanently marked by marijuana convictions will be soothed by a technical adjustment that leaves the punishment architecture largely intact?

This is not a “Nixon goes to China” moment. It’s more like “Nixon tries kombucha.”

There is also the small matter of trust. Cannabis voters understand that reform without institutional follow-through is just branding. They know that an administration hostile to civil service, regulatory agencies, and the rule of law is not the ideal steward of nuanced drug policy. A man who treats the Constitution like a lease agreement he didn’t read is not suddenly going to become the patron saint of harm reduction.

In the end, this gambit feels less like leadership and more like political rummaging—digging through the couch cushions of policy to see if there’s a forgotten issue that might still buy some goodwill. But cannabis voters aren’t undecided because of weed policy alone. They are undecided—or decided—because of character, consistency, and credibility.

And no amount of last-minute rescheduling can roll enough papers to cover that.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Rob Reiner: The Architecture of Decency in American Life

Rob Reiner’s contribution to American culture is not merely impressive; it is foundational. Like good infrastructure, it is so sturdy and omnipresent that we sometimes forget someone had to build it deliberately, thoughtfully, and with a belief that people could be better than their worst instincts.

He began by helping define one of the most influential sitcoms in television history. All in the Family did not comfort America; it confronted it. As Michael “Meathead” Stivic, Reiner embodied the moral counterweight to bigotry, forcing living rooms across the country to wrestle with racism, sexism, war, and generational change—long before “culture wars” were a cable-news business model. The show trusted audiences to think, and Reiner trusted democracy enough to believe that open confrontation with uncomfortable truths mattered.

Then he did something rare: he left the safety of a beloved role and became one of the most quietly versatile directors in American film history.

Few filmmakers have shaped collective memory the way Reiner has.

He gave us This Is Spinal Tap, teaching America to laugh at its own pretensions.

Stand by Me, reminding us that childhood is not innocent—it’s formative.

The Princess Bride, proving that sincerity and irony can coexist without canceling each other out.

When Harry Met Sally…, permanently altering how we talk about love, friendship, and emotional honesty.

A Few Good Men, etching the question “You can’t handle the truth?” into our civic DNA—because democracy, at its core, depends on whether we can.

These films are not escapism. They are civic education wrapped in story. They argue—gently but insistently—that truth matters, that character matters, and that power should always be questioned.

And when Reiner turned his attention fully to democracy itself, it did not feel like a pivot—it felt inevitable.

His activism, his outspokenness, and his refusal to normalize authoritarianism come from the same place as his art: a belief that systems only work if people defend them. He has never confused fame with authority, nor silence with civility. At a time when many entertainers retreat into “both sides” exhaustion, Reiner has chosen clarity. Not cruelty. Not outrage for profit. Clarity.

He reminds us that patriotism is not obedience.

That democracy is not self-sustaining.

That truth does not survive on vibes alone.

What makes Rob Reiner remarkable is not just what he’s created—but what he has consistently stood for. Decency without naivety. Humor without cruelty. Conviction without nihilism. He has spent decades insisting that America can be funny, flawed, self-critical, romantic, and just—all at the same time.

In an era that rewards loudness over substance and outrage over responsibility, Rob Reiner represents something increasingly rare: a public figure who understands that culture shapes conscience, and that conscience shapes democracy.

His legacy is not just a catalog of beloved films and performances.

It is a reminder that storytelling is a form of citizenship.

And that defending democracy, like making great art, requires showing up—again and again—even when it would be easier not to.

For that, and for all his memory continues to encourage us to do, Rob Reiner deserves not just applause—but gratitude.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

In 1947, the United States unveiled what historians now consider one of the most strategically intelligent foreign policy decisions in modern history: the Marshall Plan. The idea was embarrassingly simple. Europe lay in ruins after World War II, and desperate, unstable societies tend to produce extremism, authoritarianism, and wars that inconveniently drag everyone else back in. So America did something radical—it helped. It invested money, food, infrastructure, and trust into rebuilding Europe, not out of charity, but because stability over there meant fewer problems over here.

Fast-forward roughly seventy-five years, and we arrive at the Trump era, where foreign policy appears to have been redesigned on a cocktail napkin with the words: “What if we just… didn’t?”

Donald Trump’s attitude toward world politics suggests a profound suspicion of history itself—particularly the parts that require patience, alliances, or the understanding that global leadership is not a protection racket. NATO, once the cornerstone of post-war stability, becomes in Trumpian rhetoric less a defensive alliance and more a delinquent HOA whose members haven’t paid their dues. The fact that NATO’s very existence prevented another European world war for nearly eight decades is treated as a coincidence, like the sun rising or gravity functioning.

The Marshall Plan, meanwhile, seems to exist in Trump’s worldview as an example of America being “ripped off,” rather than the foundational reason the U.S. emerged as the dominant global power of the second half of the 20th century. Why rebuild Europe when you could instead loudly complain that Luxembourg isn’t pulling its weight?

This revisionist approach to history replaces strategy with transactional thinking. Alliances are no longer long-term investments in stability; they’re gym memberships Trump insists everyone else is freeloading on. Never mind that American influence—economic, military, cultural—has depended precisely on these alliances. Influence, after all, requires showing up consistently, not storming out because someone didn’t say thank you loudly enough.

The logical endpoint of this worldview is a kind of geopolitical shrug. Europe? Fine, Putin can keep an eye on that. Asia? China’s problem—or prize—depending on the day. Democracy promotion? Exhausting. Multilateralism? Overrated. The Atlantic Ocean becomes a moat again, as if the last century of global interdependence was just a weird phase America went through before remembering it prefers isolation with cable news commentary.

Of course, history has already run this experiment. The United States tried disengagement after World War I, retreating behind oceans and optimism. Europe destabilized, authoritarianism flourished, and eventually America was dragged back into a much worse war at a much higher cost. The Marshall Plan and NATO were explicit attempts to ensure that never happened again. Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, intentional or not, sounds like a rejection of that lesson—an assumption that chaos elsewhere will politely remain elsewhere.

What makes this posture especially ironic is that it doesn’t even align with Trump’s supposed obsession with “winning.” The post-war order was an American win—economically, militarily, ideologically. By questioning NATO, praising authoritarian strongmen, and treating allies as liabilities, Trump isn’t rejecting weakness; he’s discarding leverage. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of folding a royal flush because someone asked you to help pay for the table.

So we’re left with a strange, sarcastic historical question: Is this a bold new doctrine, or just strategic exhaustion dressed up as toughness? Is America consciously abandoning the Marshall Plan’s legacy, or has it simply forgotten why it existed in the first place?

Either way, the message heard across the Atlantic—and increasingly across the Pacific—sounds something like this: “Good luck out there. We’ll be over here. Don’t call unless it’s on our terms.”

History, unfortunately, has a way of calling back.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Red Coats, Red Hats, and the Long Walk from Tea to Irony

Yesterday—December 16—marked the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, that famously soggy protest in which a group of colonists, disguised as Mohawk Indians, hurled British tea into the harbor to make a point about taxation without representation. It was theatrical, illegal, symbolic, and rooted in a fairly radical idea for its time: that a distant authority extracting money without consent was illegitimate.

Fast-forward 235 years to 2008, when a new “Tea Party” emerged, waving Gadsden flags, wearing tricorn hats made of polyester, and insisting it was the true heir to the spirit of 1773. And now fast-forward again to the current MAGA iteration, which has somehow managed to turn a protest against concentrated power into a movement that worships it, so long as it wears the right color tie.

History, it turns out, has a sense of humor.

The original Boston Tea Party was not a tantrum against taxes per se; it was a protest against who was doing the taxing and why. The Tea Act of 1773 actually made tea cheaper—but it reinforced the East India Company’s monopoly and Parliament’s authority over the colonies. The issue wasn’t cost. It was control. The colonists objected to being governed by people an ocean away who neither knew them nor represented them.

Which makes the irony of the modern Tea Party almost elegant in its absurdity. The 2008 version railed against government overreach—except when that government enforced social hierarchies they liked. The MAGA version goes further, embracing tariffs (literally taxes), cheering massive executive power, shrugging at ballooning deficits, and applauding when political opponents are threatened with state force. Representation? Optional. Consent? Situational.

If the Sons of Liberty were alive today, they’d be less likely to be invited to a MAGA rally than arrested at one.

And then there’s the color problem. The British soldiers enforcing imperial rule in 1773 were known as redcoats. The party that now wraps itself in revolutionary cosplay is—coincidentally, hilariously—also red. Red hats. Red flags. Red states. One might say the aesthetic alignment is… historically consistent. The irony that today’s self-proclaimed rebels look more like the enforcers of empire than its saboteurs has not escaped some of us, even if it seems to have missed the dress code committee.

The original Tea Party destroyed corporate property to protest a government-corporate alliance that rigged markets and undermined democracy. The modern Tea Party defends corporations as people, treats regulation as tyranny, and insists that billionaires are the real oppressed class. Somewhere in Boston Harbor, the ghost of Samuel Adams is asking for a drink—preferably something stronger than tea.

Most striking of all is the debt. The revolutionary generation feared standing armies, executive excess, and debt as tools of domination. Today’s MAGA Tea Party runs trillion-dollar deficits, demands a strongman executive, and waves it all away with the confidence of people certain the bill will never come due—or will be paid by someone else.

So yes, December 16 deserves remembrance. But not just as a nostalgic reenactment opportunity. It’s a reminder that rebellion is not about vibes, costumes, or merch. It’s about resisting concentrated power, not cheering it when it flatters you. The original Tea Party didn’t pledge loyalty to a king in exchange for cultural comfort. They dumped the tea anyway.

History is patient. Irony is ruthless. And somewhere between the redcoats of 1773 and the red hats of today, the meaning of “liberty” got lost in the harbor—again.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Literally What’s Next: The White House, Now Featuring a Ballroom (Because Why Not)

Well, it finally happened. Someone, somewhere, summoned the civic energy to say, “Hey—can you do that?” and filed a lawsuit over Dear Leader’s latest home-improvement project: the construction of a ballroom at the White House. You know, the people’s house. The symbolic seat of democracy. The place that’s not supposed to double as a Vegas wedding venue.

And for a brief, shining moment, it looked like reality might tap the brakes.

But silly us.

Within minutes—possibly seconds—the lawsuit was legally cock-blocked by the administration itself, which essentially argued: No one has standing to stop the president from doing whatever he wants to the White House. Translation: this is my house now, and I will knock down walls if I want to.

Standing? Oh, you mean the American people standing there going, “What the hell are you doing?” Sorry, apparently that doesn’t count.

Because here’s the new doctrine, apparently: unless you personally tripped over a pile of imported marble, suffered emotional distress from excessive gold leaf, or were crushed under a chandelier engraved with Dear Leader’s name, you have no legal right to object. Democracy, it turns out, is not a stakeholder.

The argument goes something like this:

The White House belongs to the executive branch while he’s inside it. And since the executive branch is him, and he is very rich (just ask him), and rich people understand buildings better than laws, then oversight is unnecessary. Congress? Historic preservation boards? Ethics committees? Please. Those are for renters.

The rest of us, meanwhile, were apparently confused. We thought the White House was a public trust—maintained on behalf of the nation, preserved across administrations, protected from exactly this kind of ego-driven renovation spree. But no. Rookie mistake. It’s more like a timeshare, except one guy got the penthouse and decided to knock out the Lincoln Bedroom to install a dance floor.

And the ballroom itself—chef’s kiss. Because nothing says “constitutional republic” like a massive hall designed for self-congratulation, donor galas, and speeches about how persecuted you are while standing beneath a crystal chandelier the size of Delaware.

The best part is the precedent. If there’s no standing to sue over this, what’s next?

A rooftop helipad shaped like his initials?

Mount Rushmore, but indoors?

A go-kart track through the East Wing called Freedom Speedway?

Rename it the Executive Estate, because “White House” sounds too… shared?

And when someone inevitably asks, “Shouldn’t Congress approve this?” the answer will be the same soothing authoritarian lullaby: No one has standing.

Not historians.

Not preservationists.

Not taxpayers.

Not the people.

Because in this worldview, the presidency isn’t a temporary stewardship—it’s a personal Airbnb with unlimited remodeling privileges. The Constitution is just a welcome mat, and oversight is something that happens to other people.

So yes, someone tried. Someone filed the lawsuit. Someone raised their hand and said, “This feels wrong.”

And the administration responded with the clearest mission statement yet:

This isn’t the people’s house. It’s his house. You’re just watching the renovations.

Literally what’s next? At this point, don’t ask—apparently you don’t have standing.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Moment the Red Hat Tilted Slightly to One Side

It finally happened. Not impeachment. Not indictments. Not the fraud, the cruelty, the mocking of the disabled, the casual flirting with authoritarianism, or the years of open contempt for anyone outside the faithful. No—the breaking point came when Trump managed to turn a moment of human tragedy (or what the internet assured them was one) into yet another performance art piece titled “Actually, This Is About Me.”

In this imagined moment, the MAGA faithful—battle-hardened veterans of excuse-making—watched as their leader responded to news involving Rob Reiner and his wife not with decency, restraint, or even silence, but with a rambling self-praise monologue. A statement so breathtakingly inappropriate it felt less like condolences and more like Yelp reviews of himself.

“Very sad. Very tragic. Nobody respected Rob Reiner more than me. I was always nice to him. He never thanked me. Sad!”

And somewhere, deep in the cavernous echo chamber where red hats are handed out like communion wafers, a single neuron sparked.

Wait… that was weird.

This, mind you, came after the Charlie Kirk saga—where Reiner, despite decades of being painted as the Hollywood Antichrist, had the audacity to say… nothing cruel. Nothing inflammatory. Nothing that could be clipped into a rage meme. He didn’t attack. He didn’t sneer. He didn’t even tweet in all caps.

Which created a problem.

Because the MAGA worldview depends on villains being loud, mean, and cartoonishly evil—so they can justify being loud, mean, and cartoonishly evil right back. And here was Rob Reiner, refusing to play his assigned role, while Trump—their guy—was out here turning grief into a mirror selfie.

That’s when the discomfort set in.

Not outrage. Not accountability. Just confusion.

Why wasn’t Trump being… human?

Why did every moment—every moment—have to be rerouted through his ego like a toll road?

Why did the supposed “strong leader” sound like a man yelling into a void, demanding applause at a funeral?

And most terrifying of all:

What if being cruel all the time actually isn’t strength?

This is the part where the MAGA faithful didn’t renounce him en masse or burn their hats in the town square. Let’s not get crazy. This was subtler than that.

This was the moment they said:

“I mean… he could’ve just said sorry.” “That wasn’t very Christian.” “Why does everything have to be an attack?”

Tiny cracks. Hairline fractures. The kind that don’t collapse the building—but do let in air. And light. And the horrifying realization that maybe—just maybe—you can’t build a moral philosophy on owning the libs and expect it to hold up when actual humanity is required.

Because cruelty is easy.

Mockery is easy.

Outrage is easy.

But decency? That requires you to care about someone else without first checking if they voted for you.

And in this strange, hypothetical moment—where the villain refused to be villainous and the hero refused to be kind—somewhere under a red hat, a thought formed:

What if being evil and mean… isn’t actually the point?

Now, will this realization last? Will it survive the next rally, the next grievance, the next all-caps post?

Probably not.

But for one brief, uncomfortable moment, the faithful saw it:

Not the liberal elite.

Not Hollywood.

Not the media.

The problem was coming from inside the hat.

And that, more than anything, scared them.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Another weekend, another uniquely American ritual: a mass shooting, followed immediately by the Olympic-level mental gymnastics of the gun rights crowd. Lather, rinse, repeat. We’ve been doing this since before grunge was ironic and MTV still played music, so forgive some of us Gen Xers if we’re not exactly clutching our pearls anymore. We’ve seen this movie. The soundtrack is terrible, and the ending never changes.

This weekend’s tragedy in the United States—insert name, location, and the usual hollow “thoughts and prayers” here—barely had time to cool before the talking points machine fired up. But then, oh joy, a bonus plot twist: a mass shooting in Australia. Australia. The country that famously said, after one horrific massacre, “Yeah, no, this is insane,” and enacted serious gun control laws. The country where mass shootings promptly became so rare they’re basically a historical footnote.

And yet, watch closely, because this is where the narrative alchemy happens.

Step one: False Equivalence.

“See?” they’ll say, pounding the table like it’s a busted Atari joystick. “Australia had a mass shooting too! Gun laws don’t work!” This argument requires the listener to forget about math, context, and the passage of time. One incident after decades of near silence is treated as identical to the American situation, where mass shootings occur with such frequency they’re practically a subcategory on the evening news.

Step two: Ignore the Trend Line.

Australia’s gun laws didn’t magically eliminate violence forever, because reality isn’t a Marvel movie. But they did drastically reduce mass shootings. That inconvenient fact will be quietly shoved under the couch with the remote control batteries and the nation’s collective memory. Trends are boring. Outliers are exciting. Guess which one gets airtime?

Step three: Blame Literally Anything Else.

Mental health. Video games. Social media. Heavy metal. Rap. The decline of cursive writing. Anything—anything—except the easy access to weapons designed to kill lots of people very quickly. Because acknowledging that part would require admitting that maybe, just maybe, other countries weren’t wrong to say, “Hey, civilians probably don’t need this.”

Step four: Freedom, Bro.

This is where the argument goes full classic rock radio: loud, repetitive, and deeply resistant to change. Australia, we’re told, “gave up their freedom.” Never mind that Australians are still free to vote, protest, criticize their government, and not wonder if going to the grocery store is a high-risk activity. But sure, freedom definitely lives and dies with how easy it is to buy a gun.

From a Gen X perspective, this all feels painfully familiar. We grew up with duck-and-cover drills’ spiritual successor: active shooter drills. We were raised on skepticism, irony, and the understanding that adults often have no idea what they’re doing. And yet here we are, decades later, watching the same bad-faith arguments recycled like a scratched CD, pretending the chorus hasn’t already played a thousand times.

Australia’s rare tragedy doesn’t prove gun control failed. It proves something far more uncomfortable: that no policy creates a perfect world, but some policies clearly create a less deadly one. And that’s the part the gun rights crowd will twist, contort, and shout over—because admitting otherwise would mean admitting we could choose differently.

But whatever. We’ll talk about it for a few days, argue on the internet, and then wait for the next weekend. Because if there’s one thing America has truly mastered, it’s the art of learning absolutely nothing—on repeat.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Eight Nights, One Lamp, and the Human Need to Argue With Physics

Hanukkah is, at its core, a holiday about stubbornness. Holy, principled, well-documented stubbornness. It commemorates a small group of Jews—the Maccabees—who looked at the world’s largest empire at the time and said, essentially, no thank you, we’d prefer not to abandon our religion, culture, or identity today. This alone qualifies Hanukkah as one of history’s great underdog stories.

The holiday celebrates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after it was reclaimed from Seleucid Greek rule. According to Jewish tradition—not the Gospels, which have nothing to say about this particular lamp problem—the Maccabees found only enough consecrated oil to keep the Temple’s menorah lit for one day. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days, long enough to prepare more.

And thus, every winter, Jews light candles, eat foods aggressively fried in oil, and remind the world that survival itself can be an act of resistance.

The Miracle (Or: Don’t Touch the Lamp)

The miracle of the oil appears in the Talmud, written centuries after the events themselves, which already tells us something important: this isn’t a laboratory report. It’s theology. It’s memory. It’s meaning. The story exists to say something mattered here, not here are the combustion metrics.

But humans, being humans, cannot leave well enough alone.

Was there actually more oil than they thought? Was the wick smaller than usual? Did ancient lamps burn less efficiently? Was someone rationing the flame and calling it divine intervention? Could impurities in the oil have slowed combustion? Was olive oil in the 2nd century BCE somehow thicker, denser, or blessed by really good agricultural practices?

Possibly. Very possibly.

And none of that ruins the story.

Science Has a Bad Habit of Explaining Things Without Meaning Them

From a scientific standpoint, the miracle doesn’t require the suspension of physics—just incomplete information. Ancient measurements weren’t standardized. Lighting conditions were different. Oil quality varied. Human expectations were based on experience, not precise calculation.

In other words, the oil lasted longer than assumed, not longer than possible.

Which is true of many “miracles,” if we’re being honest.

Science explains how something could happen. It does not explain why the story survived, why it mattered enough to be told, retold, ritualized, and passed down through persecution, exile, and history’s repeated attempts to erase a people.

Why Hanukkah Still Works

Hanukkah isn’t the biggest Jewish holiday. It’s not the holiest. It’s not even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. And yet it persists—eight small flames against the longest nights of the year.

That’s the real miracle.

Not that oil burned longer than expected, but that people kept lighting lamps when it would have been easier to sit in the dark. That identity was preserved not through dominance, but through refusal. That the lesson wasn’t “God intervenes whenever physics fails,” but rather “sometimes survival itself feels miraculous.”

So yes, maybe the oil burned longer because of chemistry, wick design, or human miscalculation.

But Hanukkah doesn’t celebrate oil.

It celebrates continuity.

It celebrates defiance.

It celebrates the deeply human habit of seeing hope flicker and deciding—against all odds—to keep it lit one more night.

And if that’s not a miracle worth celebrating, scientific explanation and all, then we’ve missed the point entirely. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

What’s Next for This Administration? Maybe Fingerprinting Your Feelings, a Loyalty Oath to the Orange Monarch, and a Mandated MAGA Fitbit?

It’s worth noting—before we even get into the latest authoritarian fever dream—that it hasn’t even been twelve months since the Toddler-in-Chief re-entered the White House. Not a full year. Not even a respectable stretch of time where historians might say, “Well, at least he tried.” No, in under a year, he’s managed to treat the federal government like a Lego tower built by someone else and then kicked across the room mid-tantrum.

Like any seasoned preschooler who’s been told “no,” he immediately went for maximum destruction in record time. Norms? Shattered. Alliances? Torched. The economy? Tossed into the blender with tariffs and shaken violently while insisting it’s actually a “smoothie.” Immigration policy? Reduced to a combination of fear, detention, and the bureaucratic equivalent of screaming “You’re not the boss of me!”

And now—because chaos apparently wasn’t moving fast enough—we arrive at the newest demand:

If you want to visit the United States, please submit ten years of your social media history, every phone number you’ve ever had, and the addresses of your immediate family. Why? National security, of course. Or more accurately, to determine whether at any point in the last decade you committed the unforgivable sin of being mean online about the Orange Menace.

Because in under a year, this administration has made it crystal clear that the greatest threat to America is not climate change, not economic inequality, not pandemics or infrastructure collapse—but someone, somewhere, typing “LOL” under a picture of Dear Leader.

Picture a British tourist at JFK, clutching a passport, being interrogated over a 2016 tweet:

“He looks like he lost a fight with a tanning bed.”

And the agent sighs, slides the paper across the table, and asks solemnly, “Do you still stand by this statement?”

This is what governance looks like when a fragile ego is mistaken for a national priority. When policy is driven not by evidence or expertise, but by the emotional regulation skills of someone who responds to criticism the way toddlers respond to nap time—with rage, denial, and throwing things.

So what’s next for Dear King Donald?

An international loyalty registry? A mandatory apology tour for foreign leaders who didn’t clap enthusiastically enough? A full-scale US-against-the-world war, not over resources or ideology, but over vibes?

Because when you’re less than a year into your term and you’ve already tried to dismantle trade, immigration, diplomacy, civil liberties, and basic reality itself, escalation isn’t a possibility—it’s the brand.

And the truly astonishing part isn’t that this is happening.

It’s that we’re expected to pretend this is normal.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Of course it’s not surprising. Not even a little. In fact, if it were surprising, that would be the real shock—a glitch in the ideological matrix. The party that earnestly insists corporations are people (very sensitive people, apparently, who cry if taxed) has always been perfectly consistent in believing that actual people should fend for themselves, preferably with less money and more character-building hardship.

So naturally, unions are bad. Why would a group of workers band together to negotiate better wages, benefits, and protections when they could instead enjoy the rugged individualism of negotiating one-on-one with a multinational corporation and its fleet of lawyers? Nothing screams “freedom” like a warehouse worker sitting across from a trillion-dollar company saying, “I was hoping for healthcare,” and being countered with, “Best I can do is a motivational poster.”

Which brings us, seamlessly and predictably, to healthcare. Specifically, the deep and abiding urge to get rid of ACA subsidies. Because if there’s one thing people struggling to afford rent, food, gas, childcare, and student loans clearly have too much of, it’s help paying for medical care. Subsidies are obviously a moral hazard—people might start getting ideas, like seeing a doctor before their appendix explodes.

Enter the Health Savings Account, the policy equivalent of telling a drowning person to invest in a better swimming pool. HSAs are brilliant, really, if you already have money. If you don’t, they function more like a philosophical exercise: imagine having spare cash. Picture it. Meditate on it. Surely the act of envisioning savings will one day manifest healthcare through vibes alone.

The logic is flawless: what people with no money desperately need is… a special savings account for the money they do not have. Preferably paired with a high-deductible plan so they can enjoy the thrill of paying thousands of dollars out of pocket before insurance does literally anything. It’s healthcare, but gamified—can you survive the year without getting sick enough to bankrupt yourself?

And let’s not forget the core fantasy holding all of this together: that individuals can negotiate better healthcare prices than large groups. Yes, absolutely. A single patient with a fever and a credit card is obviously in a stronger bargaining position than millions of insured people pooling risk and negotiating as a bloc. Hospitals are famously flexible when you say, “Before you stitch me up, can we talk pricing?”

This is the same worldview that tells us unions distort the market, but monopolies are just efficiency; that collective bargaining is coercion, but corporate lobbying is free speech; that healthcare is too complex for government, yet simple enough to be solved by Dave from accounting with an HSA app.

So no, none of this is surprising. It’s perfectly on brand. Corporations get personhood, people get bootstraps, and healthcare becomes a moral test instead of a public good. If you survive without help, you’ve earned it. If you don’t, well—that’s just the market speaking.

Really, really not surprising at all.