Fourth & Democracy | Department of WAR Cosplay, Farmers Love Socialism & Trump Is Messing with the Wrong City
Remember when Trump campaigned as the peace candidate?
Trump threatens war on Chicago, farmers say “socialism for me, but not for thee,” and the Department of Defense gets a rebrand.
Welcome to another edition of Fourth & Democracy: where the playbook meets the public square. The right likes to think of Chicago as some decaying war zone, but that’s exactly what Trump is threatening them with. Farmers are in need of another socialist bailout. And Pete Hegseth is leading a disastrous rebrand of the DoD.
Let’s get into it.
1st & 10: Chi-Pocalypse Now —Trump Threatens Chicago
The audacity it takes to look like Donald Trump and then use the weight of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker as a talking point. After posting an Apocalypse Now-themed AI meme, Trump threatened to invade the city of Chicago. The image showed Trump as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore with fires raging behind him and helicopters swarming the skyline.
It was meant to intimidate, to paint the city as a war zone. Instead, Chicago met it with what it’s always had: Fortitude. People in the streets, tens-of-thousands deep, standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the idea that they can be occupied by Trump’s goon squad.
Here’s the thing about Chicago: It’s not like the other cities. Trump can’t just roll through there. This is a place that has been burned down and rebuilt, a place where steelworkers and stockyard laborers fought for the eight-hour day, where immigrants held the line against police clubs at Haymarket, where Fred Hampton built coalitions that terrified the establishment, and where Harold Washington won the mayor’s office against a Democratic machine that swore he couldn’t. Chicago’s toughness isn’t a slogan — it’s their history. It’s their survival.
When Trump threatens to send in troops, when he tries to conjure a movie poster version of urban chaos and cruelty — he’s been grossly misled. He’s facing a city that has seen mayors, mob bosses, and militarized police — and still found ways to organize, protest, and push back. Chicago knows how to fight back because they’ve been doing it for more than a century.
The legal reality is that Trump can’t just send in the National Guard without Governor Pritzker’s consent unless he invokes the Insurrection Act — and that fight would go straight to the courts. The political reality is this: even if he does, the city won’t fold. Chicago doesn’t cower. It fights back.
Authoritarians bluff with bullshit and blunder. Chicago will answer with protests and people
.2nd & Long: Socialism Soy Bean Kings
Funny how socialism is evil until it’s the Trump voters in Carhartt holding out their hands. The same crowd that tells Millennials to cut back on avocado toast so maybe they can afford a house is posturing for another Trump regime bailout.
The receipts: Trump’s “Big Bullshit Bill” dropped nearly $31 billion in new farm aid — $10 billion through the Emergency Commodity Assistance program and another $20 billion-plus in disaster relief. Already, $8 billion has been paid out under ECAP, with farmers lining up to collect through August. The USDA’s new Supplemental Disaster Relief Program adds another $16 billion for every weather event short of an apocalypse. Break it down by crop and it is over $42 per acre for corn and $29.50 per acre for soybeans. A modest 1,100-acre operation — 600 corn, 500 soy — pulls in $40,250 of government handouts.
This isn’t new either. Back in 2018, Trump’s trade war detonated farm exports like they are today, so he bailed them out with $8.5 billion. In 2019, he upped it to $14.3 billion. All while foaming at the mouth about socialism, communism, and Marxism — three words he can barely pronounce without choking on a Big Mac. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nailed it three years ago: When the public invests in itself, it’s “socialism.” When billionaires and rural elites screw themselves and come begging for handouts, it’s “relief.”
When it’s kids in cities, it’s “dependency.” When it’s soybeans, it’s a patriotic rescue mission for “America’s farmers.” Rarely has hypocrisy smelled so much like churned soil.
Trump’s tariffs and complete incompetence when it comes to running the economy caused this — and the socialist-loving farmers voted for it.
3rd & Short: Department of Defense Rebranding
Donald Trump just rebranded the Pentagon like its a failing golf resort. By executive order, the Department of Defense now gets a shiny new secondary title: the Department of War. It’s not even a real rebrand — the legal name stays “Defense” unless Congress signs off — but a bumper sticker Trump can slap on speeches, backdrops, and other propaganda. It’s cosplay militarism dressed up as policy and distraction.
Why? Because Pete Hegseth pitched him on “reviving the warrior ethos,” something Hegseth likely couldn’t recite sober, much less at work. Never mind that in 1947, after two world wars, America deliberately ditched “War” for “Defense” to signal a posture of unity and restraint in the post-war era. Trump doesn’t care about distinction or history; he cares about optics. He wants you to see him as that “Chipocalypse Now” meme or Patton with a spray tan.
Remember “waste, fraud, and abuse”? Because this is it. Rebranding a bureaucracy the size of the Pentagon means real money — and lots of it. Think plaques, seals, stationary, manuals, building signs, websites, ID cards, training materials, and every PowerPoint slide in every staff meeting from here to Malaysia. Early estimates have pegged it at $1 billion just to get started, with some reports warning the final tab could quickly multiply. And none of that accomplishes what Hegseth’s job entails — making the military stronger. It’s just paper, plastic, and a coat of paint.
Meanwhile, the troops are still living in moldy barracks with cockroaches, sewage backups, and broken fire alarms. The Government Accountability Office has dropped reports about unsafe living conditions and nothing in this rebrand addresses these concerns. Pay bumps? Nothing of significance.
Even the basics of this move will descend into chaos. The DoD issues about 4.5 million identification cards a year. Every time you change a label, you’re either reissuing them (at enormous cost) or jury-rigging a half-baked solution that breaks systems and uniformity across the force. And for what? So the Commander-in-chief can thump his chest in front of a new logo for a photo op?
You can stencil “WAR” on whatever you want, Mr. President. It won’t make you tough. It won't repair the barracks. And it won’t teach your Defense Secretary how to do a proper pull-up.
4th & Democracy: Our Role in Gaza’s Genocide
President Donald Trump could end the suffering, starvation, and genocide in Gaza tomorrow if he wanted to. All it would take is the threat of withholding military and financial assistance to Israel unless Benjamin Netanyahu ceases operations in Gaza and lifts the blockade on the Palestinian people — but he won’t.
Not because he has any foundational beliefs about who has a right to what multiple religions deem “the holy land,” but because he wants to see the Trump name adorn the shores of a revamped and Riviera-like Gaza resort.
Meanwhile, here’s what the rest of us have seen our tax dollars complicit in: Tens (most likely hundreds) of thousands dead, most of them women and children. Entire neighborhoods and cities reduced to rubble. Famine already confirmed in northern Gaza, with over 640,000 projected to face catastrophic hunger and another million-plus sliding into emergency levels. UN agencies warn that children are dying every day from malnutrition, while desperate crowds loot aid convoys before they can be destroyed by Israelis. Every new bomb dropped pushes Gaza deeper into man-made disaster, and every U.S. shipment to Israel ensures they keep coming.
Since January, the Trump administration has rushed through nearly $12 billion in new arms deals to Israel, including two emergency packages which bypassed Congress — a $6 billion munitions deal and another multi-billion dollar shipment of bombs and support equipment. At the U.N., the United States has vetoed ceasefire resolutions that every other country on the Security Council approved. We are the shield that allows Netanyahu to carry on.
The legal tools to stop this already exist. The Leahy Law allows cutting assistance to units implicated in gross abuses. The Foreign Assistance Act empowers the United States to suspend aid to governments engaged in systemic violations. Even the Arms Export Control Act gives the president the authority to condition or halt weapons transfers.
If Trump wanted to, he could pull the plug on Israel tomorrow and the law would back him up.
But he won’t. Because war gives him a hard on through leverage, headlines, and the feeding of his ego. Instead of conditioning aid, he conditions the public: keep watching the war crimes, keep waiting, keep believing that he alone can deliver peace in search of his precious Nobel Peace Prize — all while aid shipments are destroyed and the bodies of babies pile up.
Authoritarians distract with promises of deals. The truth is much simpler: If food, water, and medicine aren’t reaching Gaza, it’s because our government has decided to let bombs move faster than bread.
What to Watch
I’ve Had It with Jennifer Welch & Angie “Pumps” Sullivan — Youtube
They’re your fun aunties that go on “Thanksgiving walks” with you and your cousins. The cool ones who are equal parts “holy shit, they just said that” and “Everyone should say it like that.” If politics and the mainstream media have left you saying “I’ve had enough,” Jennifer and Angie are the podcast for you. They’ve got great guests, topics, and a cathartic form of just telling it like it is.
Cankles McTaco Tits with Hasan Piker
What to Read
There’s a generational problem going on right now: Too many young men today are taught to treat trans people as punchlines, political pawns, or enemies in a culture war. The loudest voices in the heads of young men in America tell them that “real men” are under attack, when the opposite is the truth — our definitions of manhood are too narrow, too ignorant, and too violent to sustain themselves.
That’s why Thomas Page McBee’s Amateur matters. An award-winning writer and the first trans man to fight at Madison Square Garden, McBee uses his own story to tear down stereotypes. The book follows his journey into boxing not as a spectacle, but as a way of interrogating what strength, vulnerability, and masculinity really mean. By taking you into the ring and into his childhood, relationships, and sense of self, McBee asks one brutal question: What does it actually mean to be a man?
The lesson? Masculinity isn’t something you defend like turf — it’s something you build, soften, and remake. Young men could stand to read McBee not only to better understand trans experiences, but to realize that empathy isn’t weakness, and that real strength can be found in vulnerability.
The Final Word
Hard times aren’t on the horizon. They’re already parked in the driveway. The car groans after every mile. Your wife can’t register for classes because last semester’s bill still hangs over your head. The carpet is worn flat, and you can’t remember the last time you went out for a date night that didn’t end up being the grocery store.
And that cart of groceries? It’s running you $450. Pet food climbs every week. Gas is back to $3.50 a gallon. Ground beef is pushing $10. Every necessity feels like a luxury — while Dear Leader keeps inventing new ways to light the economy on fire.
A paycheck that used to last two weeks now stretches maybe four days. Utilities are astronomical. Raises are a tumor. Vacations are a memory. Millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, one blown tire or busted furnace away from a desperate situation. This isn’t “bad luck.” It’s the direct result of Trump’s economic vandalism.
And don’t look to Democrats for automatic salvation. Earlier this year, Chuck Schumer handed Trump a spending resolution and called it strategy for an upper hand down the road. By the end of this month, he could seriously piss us off again.
That’s where you come in. Don’t just grit your teeth — call your representatives. Make it clear that Democrats can’t keep rolling over on the budget. Use your voice before they sell it for you.
Survival isn’t about tightening our belts. It’s about tightening the pressure on them.
Stay loud. Stay grounded. Stay up.
The Capitol Caller: Good evening, Soldiers …
Editor’s Note: This piece is written in the style of Hanoi Hannah, who made English-language radio broadcasts for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War directed at United States troops.
I think it is a mistake to make separation of powers the principal ground for attacking Trump’s expansion of executive powers. His actions against democratic cities in the name of law and order is also violative of the very foundations of our federal government. Crime prevention is a state issue, not a federal issue. The Federal government has no legitimate role unless the state requests assistance.
Excellent review of the orange clown and his perverted, dysfunctional admin.
tryump does not give one damn about military personnel, their families, their living conditions, their low pay, or their daycare needs. trump doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself. Always been that way.
The Deot of Defense has become the Dept of Dolts under the drunken foc weekend hangover host kegsbreath. If his actions and those of trump weren't so consequential and disgusting, it would be comical.
trump, bibi, putin, stalin, hitler. They all killed innocent children for political gain.
To hell with cultist, beggars farmers for trump. They steal from the taxpayer than fossil fuel and AI moochers. Welfare red states steal fromblue states and hate blue states for helping thier own people. But when it comes to taking blue state cash to feed red state farmers, these pickpockets are all in. Permanent subsidies for farmers who plow under crops as kids go hungry in school. Classy bunch of the usual trump trash.
Don't forget the trumpstein affair and coverup...