Fourth & Democracy | A Firestorm Betting Scandal, the Ghost of Ronald Reagan, SNAP Cuts & War

Welcome to another edition of Fourth & Democracy.

A betting scandal tangled up with the mafia has shaken the NBA’s credibility. A U.S. carrier group is moving toward Venezuela under the guise of “counter-narcotics operations.” And Canada is throwing Reagan’s ghost in Trump’s face during the World Series. Meanwhile, the government is still shut down, SNAP is going dark, and the president is building a ballroom while tens of millions wonder how they’ll eat. All the threads lead to the same truth – corruption is here to stay. The house always wins, the empire always expands, and the people always pay the bill.

1st & 10: The House Always Wins

The NBA’s betting scandal shocked everyone and it’s still metastasizing. What began with the shocking arrests of active players and a head coach has now spiraled into a full-blown credibility crisis. Fans are cutting together highlight reels of suspicious plays and missed shots that line up a little too perfectly with prop bets cashing in.

ESPN’s Brian Windhorst reported that whispers surrounding Terry Rozier’s “mystery injury” had ballooned into a crisis not just for the league, but for the entire sports-industrial complex. In 2024, sportsbooks allegedly caught Rozier placing bets through proxies and instead of suspending him, the league quietly told the star point guard to fake an injury for the rest of the year. With how dependent professional leagues have become on sportsbook advertising, the NBA didn’t want another public scandal so soon after Jontay Porter was expelled.

Now the threads are pulling loose. Investigators arrested former Cavaliers assistant Damon Jones for allegedly passing injury and playing-time information about Lebron James to associates who placed bets before the data hit the books – in exchange for a cut of the winnings. The league is starting to resemble a mafia racket. Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups was also arrested, for allegedly fixing high-stakes poker games with organized crime figures – showing up to his arraignment wearing a Klutch Sports hoodie, the agency owned by Lebron James and childhood friend Maverick Carter. Old footage of Billups has resurfaced showing questionable coaching decisions – pulling star players during critical moments and making lineup changes that shifted betting outcomes.

This isn’t the first time a betting scandal has hit professional sports – everyone knows about Pete Rose. Michael Jordan was the subject of rumors and conspiracies regarding his mid-career retirement and his gambling habits at the time. Major League Baseball had the Black Sox scandal. This is, however, the first time that sportsbooks have been this widespread and legal in the United States. Advertising dollars from companies like FanDuel and DraftKings have gone unregulated and ads have been shown to adversely affect young men and gambling addicts at record numbers.

The result is a sports landscape that once stood as a pillar of American aspiration now drowning in distrust. What used to be family outings and childhood dreams has become another market to be manipulated – where the money moves faster than the morals and the fix looks less like a conspiracy theory and more like a business plan. Grown men making tens of millions are risking everything to hit parlays for pocket change because ESPN runs betting odds across its ticker like social media ads. The games haven’t just been compromised, they’ve been commodified.

2nd & Long: Hegseth Moves Carrier Group to Caribbean

Last week, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group – flanked by two Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, a cruiser, and a nuclear powered submarine – was ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth into the Caribbean. The Pentagon’s line was predictable, “counter-narcotics operations.” They said it was about “monitoring transnational criminal actors and organizations.” But America doesn’t reposition its most powerful carrier group to chase smugglers after conducting extrajudicial killings via missile strike.

When the world’s largest aircraft carrier heads toward South America, its not about drugs. It’s about control – over resources, routes, and political narratives. Because sitting directly on the other side of those waters is Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserve on Earth and vast deposits of rare-earth minerals – lithium, bauxite, cobalt, and gold. Those aren’t just commodities; they’re the backbone of 21st-century power – the batteries, satellites, and defense system every nation needs to compete – and one where the United States is lagging behind China’s efforts in Africa and Russia’s own supply. Whoever holds Venezuela’s ground holds leverage over the next century’s global economy.

As Vladimir Putin digs into Eastern Europe and Xi Jinping locks Asia under a manufacturing empire with plans for Taiwan and beyond, Donald Trump is trying to claim the Americas as his personal sphere of influence. It’s not diplomacy, it’s empire-building with a campaign slogan. And like every empire play, it needs a local partner – someone to sell foreign intervention as liberation, someone who just dedicated a Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump – Maria Corina Machado.

Once considered a reformer within Venezuela’s opposition, she’s now the face of Trump’s South American ambitions. When she accepted the prize earlier this month, she dedicated it not to Venezuelans jailed under Nicolas Maduro, not to the families scraping through inflation and hunger – but to the man she knows can crown her, Donald Trump. It was flattery disguised as diplomacy – a calculated move to bait Trump into war.

Her plan is as simple as it is cynical: He topples Maduro, she takes power, and together they reopen Venezuela’s oil fields to American corporations. The state oil company gets reopened to American business. The mining concessions get sold off. The narrative gets polished into market reform while Trump gets to posture as the liberator of the hemisphere and Machado becomes the face of a “new democracy.” Everyone wins – except the people who actually live there.

Threaded through all of it is Trump’s quiet trial balloon – his claim that a war could justify “postponing” elections. He said it openly in a recent Oval Office meeting where the subject of Ukraine doing so because of their war with Russia. This isn’t speculation; it’s a rehearsal.

The carrier group sitting off Venezuela’s coast isn’t just a show of power – it’s a contingency plan. A manufactured crisis big enough to invoke emergency powers, suspend accountability, and reset the calendar in his favor should the gerrymandering not work. That’s the real war he’s preparing for – not the one in Venezuela, but the one against time and law.

So when the corporate media calls this a “show of strength,” remember what strength means to men like Trump, Putin, and Xi. It’s not restraint – it’s possession. When those carriers cut across the Caribbean, they’re not protecting democracy, they’re partitioning it. The oil, the minerals, the propaganda – all fuel for the same machine. And the next time Trump promises to keep America safe, remember what he really means.

---

---

3rd & Short: Canada Summons the Ghost of Reagan

During Game 1 of the World Series in Toronto, Canada’s government bought a thirty-second ad slot that detonated like a diplomatic grenade. It was a montage of Ronald Reagan’s 1988 speeches praising free trade released by Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford. The ad automatically drew Trump’s ire. By the 7th inning stretch, he was on Truth Social saying that he was terminating all negotiations with Canada. By midnight, the White House announced a 10 percent tariff increase on steel, timber, and dairy – an economic blow aimed squarely at Canada.

The move shocked markets but didn’t surprise anyone who’s been watching this slow divorce unfold. What started with the president threatening to annex our northern neighbor, has become a politically tense situation. Prime Minister Mark Carney, the former central banker who spent his career stabilizing economies Trump destabilized for sport, responded with precision. “We remain committed to constructive trade,” he said in a press conference. “But prosperity requires predictability.” That’s diplomat for: We’re done being bullied.

Markets flinched the second Trump opened his mouth. Futures slid overnight, and the Canadian dollar dipped. Energy, auto parts, and agriculture – the backbone of cross-border commerce – are now suspended in uncertainty. Economists warn the ripple could hit both sides of the border and drive up prices. It’s the same pattern every time Cankles McTaco Tits picks a fight: short-term politics, long-term economic pain, and another opening for Beijing to eat our lunch.

And all of it playing out against the backdrop of the World Series – Blue Jays vs. Dodgers – a cultural reflection of the trade war itself. The Jays took Game 1 in Toronto as Reagan’s words about free trade echoed over the broadcast; the Dodgers answered in Game 2, splitting the series, but the symbolism stuck. For decades, the U.S. and Canada built prosperity on partnership. Shared markets, shared values, and a shared stage. Now, even the World Series feels like a border dispute. Reagan’s ghost is in the stands, Trump’s fat ass is in a suite, and Mark Carney is leading his people from Ottawa, reminding the world that stability might have a new partner.

4th & Democracy: SNAP Goes Dark and the Country with It

This week, the clock runs out.

The Trump regime announced that the SNAP program – the country’s largest food-assistance lifeline – will go unfunded. Forty-one million Americans will wake up to a zero balance, not because the money vanished, but because the grifter-in-chief decided a ballroom, a rumored bunker renovation, and protecting the Epstein files were more important than feeding children.

The government shutdown that has paralyzed Washington for three weeks and left federal employees furloughed and lining up for mutual aid, has gutted everything from air-traffic control to federal courts, but it’s the end of SNAP that’s about to light the fuse. Agencies that normally keep the program afloat through emergency reserves have been told not to act. The Department of Agriculture has warned states that they’ll have to front the money themselves – a logistical impossibility for most. The Capitol going dark hasn’t prevented Trump from missing a beat. He’s secured a private donation from a Carnegie-Mellon family heir to keep paying active-duty troops, a headline stunt meant to prove he can “run the country without government.”

Meanwhile, the economic machinery that keeps food on the shelves is about to seize up. SNAP isn’t charity; it’s cash-flow infrastructure. When those benefits stop, grocery and corner stores lose guaranteed revenue. Chains that survive on thin margins – rural grocers, dollar stores, neighborhood markets – will be hit first. Prices will spike to compensate for the loss of SNAP spending, and the rest of us will pay for it at the checkout stand when prices are already astronomical. What the administration calls a temporary budget impasse is really a controlled demolition of the consumer economy.

Major corporations will feel it, too. Walmart, long notorious for paying wages so low that many of its workers rely on SNAP to survive, now faces a crisis of its own making. When those benefits vanish, so do the purchases that keep its profits alive – and shareholders won’t stomach the hit. The Walton family, among the richest dynasties on earth, isn’t going to cover the gap. Alice Walton just cut a $250,000 check to support Andrew Cuomo’s New York City mayoral run – not to feed hungry kids. There’s no cavalry coming. The billionaires will be fine. Everyone is about to find out what hunger really feels like.

People are already angry. They’re watching federal workers line up at food banks while billionaires get tax-carve outs and ballrooms are built on the rubble of our history. They see a president who’s still hosting dinners, golfing, and grifting off the chaos while pretending to wage war on government waste. They see an economy to keep them desperate – and desperation has a limit.

When forty-one million people can’t feed their families, that’s not a budget crisis – it’s a rebellion waiting to happen. Hunger doesn’t stay quiet. Parents terrified about feeding their kids, caregivers watching their elderly parents running out of food, single mothers who just lost jobs through no fault of their own – all are about to see their worst fears come true. Hunger has a way of cutting through propaganda. It can unite people once divided by party, race, and geography. Because when the fridge is empty, the slogans stop working.

A government closed for business. A president living like a king. And a nation beginning to realize it’s been left to starve while the powerful keep feasting. When that realization hits, it won’t just be the markets that break – it’ll be the spell. Because you can only starve people for so long before they remember how to fight back.

What to Watch

We all need a break from the chaos and there’s plenty worth tuning in for – and maybe a little meaning behind the distraction.

It: Welcome to Derry (HBO) – The prequel to the original IT takes place in 1962 in the small Maine town of Derry, where strange disappearances and hidden horrors begin to surface – and Pennywise the Dancing Clown is back.

Mob War: Philadelphia vs. the Mafia (Netflix) – The family that brought Phil “The Chicken Man” Testa, Nicky Scarfo, and the Atlantic City parking lots that built Donald Trump’s casinos – is the subject of a three-part true-crime series on the brutal 90s power struggle between John Stanfa and Joey Merlino to see who would head the Philadelphia Crime Family.

World Series Game 5: Blue Jays @ Dodgers 8 p.m. ET

Game 5 in Los Angeles before the series heads back to Toronto. The Jays and the Dodgers continue to battle it out for the World Series Title.

What to Read

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)

The book that ripped the veil off America’s conscience. I first read this in undergrad and the lessons were extraordinary. Du Bois called the color line “the problem of the twentieth century,” and a century later, he’s still right. It’s part history, part sermon, part prophecy – a roadmap for anyone trying to understand how race shaped this country and why the fight for equality never really ended.

And before you go, keep your eyes on the people telling the truth out loud here at Lincoln Square:

Catch First Draft with Susan Demas for sharp interviews with journalists and authors, The Strategy Session with Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and Joe Trippi for expert political insight, and Two Joes with

Joe Trippi

and

Joe Klein

for the straight talk and debate. Watch Protect & Serve with Michael Fanone and Maya May for what accountability looks like, and Behind the Numbers with Rick & Andrew Wilson to get the data corporate media isn’t giving you.

Stay loud. Stay grounded. Stay up.