By Buck Stanley, Senior Correspondent for National Delusion
March 19, 2025
There was a time when the President could look the country in the eye and say, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—and people believed him. They rallied. They marched. They built bridges, highways, and unions. Franklin D. Roosevelt steered a panicked nation through depression and war with a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth and a working-class patrician’s resolve carved into his polio-wracked spine.
Now, fast-forward ninety years and squint hard enough, and you’ll see his spiritual antithesis doing pushups on Truth Social in a red trucker hat that says “Make America Great Again,” while the Republic eats itself alive in a hormone-fueled brawl over what the hat even means.
We are deep into Term Two of Trump, a season of American decline so pungent you can smell it on the subway platform—like Season 2 of a prestige show that never should’ve come back. (Looking at you, Westworld. And for the record, we actually enjoyed Season 1—unlike Trump’s first term, which was just dead-eyed robots, clunky improv, and a timeline so broken it made Tenet look coherent.)
Which brings us to the first stop on today’s Culture War Blood Train: a New York City subway, where an altercation over a MAGA hat ended with punches thrown, phones flying, and some poor commuter muttering “Jesus Christ” while trying to finish her $17 salad in peace. Eyewitnesses say the hat-wearer was loudly explaining why Trump is the only “real man left in politics,” when another passenger asked—perhaps unhelpfully—if he’d also like to die on that hill. And then things got kinetic.
By the time the MTA cops arrived, one guy had a bloody nose, the other was sobbing about free speech, and everyone else had the dead-eyed stare of veterans who’d seen too much. The hat survived, barely. Symbol of the age.
Scene Two: Boston, where Ken Casey of the Dropkick Murphys—yes, that Ken Casey—used his mic like a cudgel to bludgeon some fan waving a white MAGA hat in the crowd. “If you’re in a room full of people and you want to know who’s in a cult…They’ve been holding up a f**king hat the whole night to represent a president.” he bellowed, in a Celtic-punk tirade so righteous it made the amps tremble. Twitter (sorry—“X”) promptly caught fire, with right-wing influencers threatening to boycott the band, which is a little like threatening to boycott Guinness for being Irish.
The band gained a bunch of new followers overnight and lost none of their street cred. The only casualty: a few MAGA egos and a pit-stained Gadsden flag t-shirt abandoned at the venue like a molted snakeskin from a lizard that lost the plot.
Scene Three: Sacramento, where a local LGBTQ+ bar posted a sign banning MAGA hats outright, citing “customer safety” and the bar’s “zero tolerance for hate symbols.” Cue the lawsuits, the cable news pile-on, the Facebook rage cycle, and a desperate Tucker Carlson clone interviewing a sobbing man who just wanted to “have a beer in his hat like a real American.”
That’s the real madness of it all: the MAGA hat has become a modern-day gang sign, a symbol that means everything and nothing depending on who’s bleeding. It’s not just a hat. It’s a challenge. A vibe. A declaration of allegiance in a country where political fashion is just cosplay with better lighting.
And through it all, Trump smiles that crooked salesman smile, like a man who didn’t invent the fire—but sure as hell figured out how to sell it in bulk.
FDR gave us the New Deal.
Trump gave us limited edition merch drops and permanent combat mode.
This is the aesthetic phase of the apocalypse—where the wars aren’t won with ballots or bullets, but with outfits, memes, and how badly you’re willing to get punched for your team.
Filed from the burning edge of America’s cultural no-man’s-land.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/03/20/dropkick-murphys-ken-casey-trump
