Independently Speaking By Brent Olson

Together

I hate writing about politics. Most of the people who read my stuff hate it, too.

The most frustrating part about writing something like this is that right here, this sentence, is when the people I most want to reach are going to stop reading. Plus, there’s always a chance I could get fired or, you know, audited. 

Here in Minnesota, we are in the midst of an absolutely pointless mess. And the reason, the real reason, is that President Trump and his administration don’t like us. 

He has never won an election in our state and our governor was a pain in his neck in the last presidential campaign. To make it worse, we rank as one of the best states in the union for health care, business climate, quality of life — heck, U.S. News and World Report ranked Minnesota overall the Fourth Best State in the Country. And worse yet, Minneapolis was selected as one of the Happiest Cities in the World by the 2025 Happy Cities Index. He keeps telling everyone what a hellhole we are, yet very few people seem to agree. It’s like if your girlfriend dumped you and then got voted Most Likely to Succeed just before she wins the dance competition at Prom.

A bigger person would have just let this go, but that’s not President Trump’s strong suit, as he himself has said many times. And then we had a huge fraud case in the state, and he’s using that as an excuse to torment us.

The fraud story goes all the way back to President Trump’s first term. Shortly before he was out of office, he signed legislation that dumped $2.2 trillion of public spending into the economy, in hopes of jumpstarting businesses as we were coming out of Covid. It was just an ocean of money. I was a county commissioner at that time, and I had to look at the places money was going — a portion of it to people who really didn’t need it. I wish I didn’t know some of the things I learned. There were instances of shuttered businesses making more money than they would had they been open. Even though it was legal, it made me a little queasy. Be that as it may, some folks took advantage of the loose oversight and siphoned off huge amounts of illegal money. The first investigations started several years ago. Almost 100 people have been charged and over 60 have been convicted. It’s a big story, and one well worth the outrage.

Here’s the deal. If you’re going to investigate fraud, you hire people carrying briefcases and wearing suits. You don’t send in untrained thugs carrying automatic weapons and wearing masks to terrorize neighborhoods.

And what’s the deal with the masks? I’ve heard people say, “They need to be masked so they’re not identified and harassed.” Oh, please. Every cop, social worker, and county attorney I know is out there doing unpopular things and never masked. The masks are there just to make us afraid.

That leads us to the original sin of this administration. They want us to be afraid of them. They want to reward their supporters and hurt anyone they think isn’t in line. They like having the country divided into Us and Them. It’s just wrong.

Last night I watched a documentary about the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team. The theme that kept repeating was that this special period in time brought us together as a country; it was something we could all root for. That’s what makes it more than just a story about a hockey game. Watching it crystalized something in my mind that’s been hovering there for a while. The government of the United States is supposed to be there for all of us. While that’s not always true, and probably not true all that often, at least there’s usually a pretense, an attempt to make us believe we’re all in this together. President Trump says he’s here for revenge, for retribution. That’s not great as a governing concept, but what makes it worse is that the revenge this administration seeks is against everyone who’s not exactly like them.

That’s why I so deeply wish the people who aren’t going to read this would. Because we really need to talk.

Copyright 2026 Brent Olson