Trump is playing with Sims money

We use the term “icebreaker” so much in referring to conversations that, when I read the headline for this Times article, my brain really had trouble adjusting to the idea of an actual ice-breaking ship. President Trump bought 11 icebreakers from Finland after “winning” a golf tournament.

This kind of story tickles my brain when I think of writing a video. I’ll explain why below.

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Now, let’s talk about my new favorite TV show …

Months ago, when I still had time to read a book a week, I wrote in this newsletter about Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It had been recommended to me by the good people of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas as someone who really enjoys Kevin Wilson books. In short, it’s about a young woman who finds herself with a new baby by her former English professor. As the book suggests, she has money troubles. She eventually solves those by starting an OnlyFans account. It did not disappoint.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure I was the demographic for the book. But the only qualification to enjoying it is to be a human with a sense of humor and a pulse. And for months now, the TV adaptation has been on Apple TV, waiting for me to finally consume. It was well worth the wait. We’re halfway through and I think it’s safe to say this is an all-time book adaptation. It’s so good at replicating scenes from the book, while also building on those scenes and fleshing out characters. The casting is pitch perfect, too. They’ve got some amazing A-list actors here and each of them knocks it out of the park.

So, go read the book if you can. Watch the show after that. If you’re short on time and/or don’t have the brainpower to read, at least watch the show. Like The Leftovers, this show is officially going off book, as it’s been renewed for a second season. I’m so excited to see what the show creators, along with the book’s author, come up with for the further adventures of Margo, Bodhi, Jinx and Shyanne.

At Local News International, we correct our mistakes. It even says so on our Ethics and Transparency page. This also includes when I rank the local pizza joints in Kansas City, which I did months ago. I must now admit I made a glaring omission. I had not tried SPIN! Pizza up until that point. I hadn’t yet experienced the shockingly good salads or signature sausage and apple pizza. Not once had I tried their after-dinner gelato or marveled at the Jeb! Bush nature of the restaurant’s name and branding.

Now I have. We’ve been probably once a week all summer. For my daughter, Lucia, it’s what Pizza Hut was for me as a kid (something Pizza Hut is currently trying to recapture). SPIN! is family-friendly, a great place to watch any sports game, and also has a surprisingly good local beer selection. Best of all, on Sundays, kids eat free. Speaking of …

We’ve got a lot in the pipeline coming to you, including the long-form show the first week of September. This fills my days and evenings during the week. But the last few weekends, for me, have been all about third birthday preparations for our daughter. Will she remember it? Probably not. Are we spending too much money on it? I think so! Is her excitement so infectious that, in a simulation, I would do the same thing 1000 out of 1000 times? If I may evoke SPIN! Pizza’s name … YES!

Lucia’s room is now a light pink. It’s slowly getting rebranded with her favorite princesses (in no particular order: Jasmine, Rapunzel, Elsa and Tiana). Every trip to the hardware store means a new toy that I cannot say no to (yesterday was a small toy car). I’m building a picnic table for her birthday that’s only meant for small children— as well as an “outdoor easel” because my wife’s TikTok feed has identified us as over-eager parents and keeps pushing out new projects. The birthday splash party has so many moving pieces, it’s actually making me feel less stressed about the long-form show, which now seems like a tiny production compared to this soon-to-be three-year-old’s birthday event.

But, it’s all worth it to watch Lucia and her little friends play together and say the funniest things you’ve ever heard. She is my comedy inspiration.

Remember in the early 2000s, when you were playing The Sims? Or maybe you still play (though I’ve heard the updates they made recently are questionable). Anyway, you might try to occasionally play the game “honestly,” never using cheat codes and slowly, modestly building a home while your Sim got promoted. I remember one time I took a job in the newspaper as a “pickpocket,” as you do, and slowly my Sim climbed all the way up to “mob boss.” It was a real rags to Tony Soprano riches story.

Anyway, sometimes you did plug the cheat code in. You built your dream house, you stuffed it with the best furniture that The Sims, its expansion packs and online downloads had to offer. You never once questioned where the money came from. And you didn’t have to! It was a game, and sometimes games are fun to play without rules.

Imagine now that you are the President of the United States. You’re in your second “lame duck” term. You’ve avoided prison for inciting an insurrection, denied multiple accusations of sexual assault, and although you are the only president to have been convicted of a felony (34 actually), you avoided any further penalties beyond the conviction, fines or jail time. You’ve declared bankruptcy six times. Companies like Meta and Google and Twitter once banned you from their platforms. Now, they pay you millions of dollars to erect buildings. Many of your projects are executed without any oversight or overview. You can just hand out no-bid contracts to anyone, especially your friends, and they’ll break ground. Lawsuits may come, but you’ve got committees and Congress stuffed with loyalists who will help you carry out these projects if there’s any pushback.

President Trump is playing the POTUS game with cheat codes. There is not a lot getting in his way. At one point last year, Trump paired up with the Finnish president in a golf tournament. Finnish President Stubb gave President Trump a picture of an icebreaker ship. Trump had first seen the ships back in the 1990s, and after failing to acquire them during his first term, decided now was the time to fulfill his lifelong dream to get a lot of ships that break ice in the Arctic.

Instead of choosing between two bids (one for four built in Finland and one for seven built in the U.S.) he said yes to both. And why not? He’s got the “rosebud” cheat codes (and nuclear codes).

And unfortunately, the rest of us, The Sims, have little to no agency. Or it can feel that way sometimes. But, as a former legacy media journalist who likes making informative, funny videos, I find my agency in imagining how to make a video about this to inform the masses. It tickles my brain to find the connections across these stories.

The same day this story about the icebreakers came out, the Trump administration dropped its lawsuit against the former Olympian they accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool. For the first time, they’re admitting the obvious truth, that we’ve been saying in videos since May, before the job was even finished: this was bad workmanship from a no-bid contractor. Also on the same day, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed story on Trump’s “princess of darkness,” Meredith O’Rourke, who helps fundraise hundreds of millions of dollars for all of these new projects Trump has taken on.

In telling this story on Monday, I want to connect these pieces in how they are literally related to each other while also using a silly framing device that connects them. Naturally, I think I’m going to park an icebreaker ship in the Reflecting Pool for this video. Maybe I will be literal in this Sims analogy I’ve been making and show the president making all of these decisions about ballrooms, arches and pools on a computer in the Oval Office. Perhaps Trump will remove a ladder from the Reflecting Pool (which, be honest, anyone who played The Sims did this at one point to their poor Sims). The “cheat code” could be literally Meredith O’Rourke, who is able to pull millions of dollars from people any time the president asks.

Be on the lookout for that video, which, in some ways, is my own way of dealing with the insanity that is this administration.

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