President Trump is, once again, delivering prosperity in real time to Americans. His commitment is straightforward: real gains for working families. Higher take-home pay. Results that show up in the government’s own count, not in a speech.

The 2025 numbers are in, and they belong to year one of the second term. The official rate fell to 10.2%, the lowest since the bureau started tracking it, according to the Census Bureau. Down half a point. Second straight yearly decline. That is not a rounding error and it is not a forecast. It is the government’s own household survey of the first full year back.

Median household income hit $87,460, a record going back to 1967 and up 2.6% after inflation, the number families actually feel and what came in the door after prices did their damage. After taxes and credits, the median rose faster still, 3.1%, from $73,760 to $76,060.

As Breitbart reported, the administration said in a statement: “President Trump’s proven economic agenda delivered historic working-class prosperity in his first year back in office, with record-high real income and record-low poverty, breaking the records he set during his first term.” He set the last records in the first term.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat in front of the House and labeled the report “several inconvenient facts,” CNBC reported. His point was simple. Real wages are outrunning inflation. The bottom 25% of earners are getting larger raises than the people at the top.

The child rate dropped to 13.4%, a historic low. The Hispanic rate to 13.9%, also a record. Black household income jumped 4.8%. White households 3.0%. Asian and Hispanic income held. You do not get a national low in the official measure unless it is showing up in the groups the press usually uses as proof the economy is failing.

Census doesn’t campaign. It counts. Year one already moved income up and the official rate down. The job now is to keep delivering take-home pay and keep raising the bar. That is year one. That is the Trump record.

Next week Kamala Harris campaigns in Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, the Sanders-endorsed nominee who says he’s a capitalist. She endorsed him after he almost lost the primary. This will be their first appearance together.

Michigan is not friendly terrain for Harris on paper. Trump won the state in 2024.

They will appear together Tuesday at a black maternal health roundtable to discuss costs, outcomes, and disparities in pregnancy and birth. In a 2022 interview, El-Sayed said a privatized, partitioned insurance system reimburses “different people’s bodies” differently by income, and that income “differs based on the color of their skin.” He added that racism still blocks investment in public goods and outweighs “the self-interest of … lower income white folks.” That is the racial frame Democrats still try to run on.

Democrats believe they need black voter turnout in Detroit and Wayne County, plus enough suburban and union voters, to keep Rogers from running up the rest of the map.

Harris’s spokesman, Eduardo Negron, pitched the Michigan stop as turnout in a critical state and a chance to flip the Senate against what he called Donald Trump’s corruption.

El-Sayed told Politico that people in places like Detroit look up to Harris as an “inspirational leader,” and that he was grateful she was coming to have “conversations about what it takes to get the turnout up.”

He has never held elected office. In 2018 he lost the Democratic primary for governor to Gretchen Whitmer by more than 20 points. He later rebuilt a public-health resume and ran again on Medicare for All, money out of politics, and a hard line on Israel’s war in Gaza.

In August he narrowly beat Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite backed by Gretchen Whitmer, outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, and Chuck Schumer. The margin was under a point after more than 1.5 million votes. El-Sayed ran against outside money, but the primary was still ugly and expensive. Tens of millions in super PAC ads buried the airwaves for Stevens, including a large share from pro-Israel groups. CAIR Action’s PAC put $175,000 behind him, and CAIR-linked donors gave his campaign more than $100,000. He won the liberal strongholds, the college towns, and Arab-majority Dearborn, home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the country.

After winning, he immediately had to sell himself to the rest of the party. Democrats believe Harris’s endorsement will help with some of that cleanup.

It will not erase the money problem. El-Sayed ran against money in politics. Senate Majority PAC, bankrolled in part by a $61 million dark-money transfer from Majority Forward, plus megadonors including Soros’s Democracy PAC, which gave the group $9 million, and and others still reserving tens of millions to elect him.

Republicans are treating the result as a gift. They have branded him a radical who wants to abolish ICE and impose Medicare for All on a state of auto plants and farms.

On Wednesday, The Detroit News endorsed his opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, and said El-Sayed had deleted posts and taken down roughly 100 YouTube videos. A candidate who hides his past, the paper wrote, is “not someone who can be trusted.”

Cook rates the open Peters seat a toss-up. A Hill/Emerson poll out Thursday had El-Sayed up 48–46. College graduates were with him; non-college voters were with Rogers; independents were barely on his side. A Washington Post–Schar School survey the same day had him 48–45. An August Fox News poll of registered voters, still cited by the network today, had Rogers ahead 51–47, with near-total GOP unity and weaker Democratic consolidation after the primary. That split is why a two-point lead is not a coalition anyone should bank on in a midterm.

Harris remains a familiar surrogate, though the 2024 loss still clings to her name. The Michigan stop is as much about optics as turnout, and it tests whether that name can still move votes among black Democrats, the constituency where El-Sayed ran weakest; and whether a candidate who scrubbed his archive can outrun the record he tried to bury.

MAGA’s strength has always been its willingness to name the ways the system is stacked against ordinary Americans.

A troubling report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy provides a stark reminder of how thoroughly the system remains tilted against the little guy. At least 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025 despite reporting more than $105 billion in U.S. pretax income. At the statutory 21 percent rate, these companies should have owed roughly $22.1 billion. Instead, they collected $4.7 billion in rebates, pocketing a collective $26.7 billion in tax breaks. Measured against the pre-2017 rate of 35 percent, the savings climb to an estimated $41 billion in a single year.

The examples are not obscure. Tesla reported nearly $5.7 billion in U.S. income and paid nothing. United Airlines cleared almost $4.3 billion in U.S. income with the same zero federal tax bill. Southwest Airlines did the same on $561 million. Yum! Brands, parent of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, paid zero on more than $1 billion in U.S. pretax profits. Digital payment firms PayPal, Toast, and Block together wiped out federal taxes on $3.2 billion in income. Live Nation Entertainment joined them with $98 million. These are not struggling firms scraping by; they are household names that thrive while the tax code they helped shape treats them as if they earned nothing.

Let’s be clear: MAGA is not, and should never become, a pro-taxation movement. The long-term goal remains the abolition of the income tax and the IRS itself, which are inherently unconstitutional. Government does not need an army of bureaucrats extracting a portion of every paycheck and every profit statement. Yet as long as an income tax exists, the principle of equal application cannot be optional. Your local contractor, restaurant owner, or machine shop pays mightily or suffers massive consequences. Ergo, the corporate giants must pay as well. In fact, if anything, the largest players should shoulder a heavier burden relative to their size because they already extract disproportionate benefits from the system through regulatory capture, lobbying, corporate welfare, and preferential access to federal contracts and bailouts.

Everyone who has ever tried to start or grow a small business understands the disparity. The rules are written in a language that only armies of lawyers and accountants can navigate. Accelerated depreciation, research credits, immediate R&D expensing, foreign-derived income deductions, and stock-option write-offs are not equally available to the Main Street entrepreneur who lacks a tax department larger than most towns’ police forces. The result is a two-tier system in which the biggest players can drive their effective rates to zero while the rest of the country funds the government that those same players influence. This is not free-market capitalism. It is a rigged game, and the American people know it. That knowledge is one reason the status quo is so widely despised.

The companies themselves are not the primary villains. They are acting in their own self-interest, just as market economics would predict. No rational actor seeks to pay more tax than the law requires. The shame belongs to the bureaucratic system that makes these outcomes legal and routine. The same administrative state that MAGA and the Department of Government Efficiency set out to dismantle is the engine that produces these disparities. Waste, fraud, and bailouts flow from Washington into the balance sheets of the well-connected. The corporations grow fat from that upward flow while ordinary businesses and workers suffer the consequences. Inequality widens. Social trust erodes. A country cannot remain great when the rules are openly disparate for the powerful and the rest.

Radical socialists understand this dynamic and weaponize it. They hammer corporate cronyism with relentless focus. Their solutions—confiscatory rates, industrial policy directed by the same bureaucrats who created the problem, and ever-expanding government—are destructive. But the public often does not care about the details of the alternative. People simply hate the existing arrangement and will embrace whoever appears to oppose it with the most gusto. When Republicans look the other way because those same corporations write large checks to their campaigns and affiliated PACs, the party forfeits credibility with independents and younger voters. Without those groups, the Republican coalition becomes an endangered species. The Left is skilled at demagoguing the issue and placing conservatives on the defensive whenever Republicans appear to defend the indefensible.

The only durable answer is to promote fairness within a free-market framework: capitalism with genuine guardrails that prevent the richest and most connected from exploiting the rest. That does not mean higher overall tax rates or new layers of regulation. It means closing the pathways that allow profitable giants to pay nothing while smaller competitors are squeezed. It means ending the corporate welfare that distorts markets and rewards political access over productive investment. It means treating the administrative state itself as the core problem rather than a permanent fixture to be managed.

Several straightforward steps follow from these principles and align with the DOGE impulse to shrink waste and special privilege. First, simplify the corporate tax code so thoroughly that most of the specialized deductions, credits, and timing gimmicks disappear. A broader base with fewer carve-outs reduces the advantage of scale and legal firepower. Second, terminate federal subsidies, preferential loans, and bailout authority that function as off-budget transfers to favored firms. Third, continue aggressive reduction of the regulatory thicket that large corporations help write and then use as barriers to entry against smaller rivals. Fourth, insist on transparency and accountability for every tax expenditure so that the public can see, in plain language, who benefits and by how much. None of these measures requires expanding the IRS or inventing new restrictions on legitimate business activity. They require the opposite: fewer rules, less discretion for bureaucrats, and an end to the private-public partnerships that enrich the already powerful.

MAGA’s strength has always been its willingness to name the ways the system is stacked against ordinary Americans. Pretending that zero-tax outcomes for multi-billion-dollar firms are somehow a free-market triumph is a betrayal of that insight. The administrative state and the corporate interests that feed on it are not separate problems; they reinforce each other. Defeating one requires confronting the other. If the movement allows the super-wealthy to keep their loopholes while small businesses and workers carry the load, the public will eventually look elsewhere for relief. The radical left is ready with its own false promises. The only way to keep MAGA from becoming a temporary interlude is to apply its core principles—fairness, accountability, and hostility to the deep state—consistently, including to the corporate elite that has learned to game the system for its own benefit. The alternative is a slow erosion of trust that no amount of campaign contributions can reverse, which will make the rise of the far-left socialists an inevitability.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley released another set of FBI records at Tuesday’s oversight hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel. The files show weaponized advocacy: line agents pressing to open and join politically charged cases.

FBI leadership has long said agents do not pick their targets. The newest file says they did.

It is a  February 22, 2025 email from Special Agent Kevin Gounaud. He wanted a “58 matter,” FBI code for public corruption, on Elon Musk and the OPM official behind Musk’s request that federal workers list five things they did last week. Gounaud wrote that the official, “in conspiracy with Elon Musk,” had pushed “thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees to violate government wide security policy.” The request, he said, burned “a colossal amount of official time.” He closed, “And no, I’m not kidding.”

Musk posted that a non-response would be treated as a resignation. Patel told FBI employees that night to pause. Gounaud compared the X post to Hillary Clinton’s private server and said the resignation line “potentially violates 18 U.S.C. 873,” the blackmail statute.

More advocacy was revealed in 2017 messages from Agent Walter Giardina. He asked at least seven times in four weeks to join Crossfire Hurricane and to open a cut on Trump campaign fundraising. On Inauguration Day he wrote Joe Pientka, “I wanted to mention again my interest in joining the case.” Grassley says Agent Timothy Thibault, later found by the inspector general to have violated the Hatch Act, helped him and later wrote “Wow. Great.” on Washington Field Office emails around the 2022 Peter Navarro indictment.

The same names kept showing up when the cases turned into interviews and raids. Pientka and Peter Strzok interviewed Michael Flynn. Handwritten notes later released do not match the FD-302 in the false-statements case. Field office agents questioned probable cause for the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search. Justice expanded it anyway. In a pre-raid email, agents wrote that George Toscas “frankly doesn’t give a damn about the optics.”

Patel later fired Gounaud and Giardina. Musk was the 2025 target.

Flynn, Navarro, Phares, and Trump at Mar-a-Lago were earlier ones. So was I, and Carter Page.

Why the allegiance inside the department? Was the advocacy coming from the agents, or was it solicited?

Grassley told Patel he now holds a December 2019 email to Pientka that “appears to corroborate existing public evidence that President Trump was the target of a political hit, and the government knew it many years ago.” He asked that it be declassified.

Yesterday’s hearing showed the other direction. Round River was advocacy inside the department. The point was to protect Joe Biden.

Grassley said the Foreign Influence Task Force used it to shut down sources on the Biden family under a Russian-disinformation label. Patel said the “Round River” classification banner had no FBI policy behind it. It was “basically made up.” Inspection Division is looking at who created the fake compartment. About 2,000 pages are already out.

An August 2026 inspector general report, also raised Tuesday, found Wray-era officials retaliated against FBI employee Jacob Mercer. Those officials, Grassley noted, are still employed.

These advocacy probes did not begin with the 2025 messages about Musk. They started years earlier. They started with private citizens around the president.

I was labeled a traitor and a Russian spy, then charged in the Mueller probe. The FBI staged an early-morning made-for-TV raid. 29  SWAT agents with M4 assault weapons stormed my home for CNN, claiming I was a flight risk. I was released after arraignment with no cash bond five hours later.

The targeting did not stop with the warrants. It ran through the fake news media. I was treated as the campaign’s back channel to Moscow. Page was written up as a Russian agent. Phares was tied to a militia massacre and called an associate to war crimes before any FISA application. Flynn was the leaked calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then the resignation. Navarro was the airport perp-walk. The public image was the second case. The files supplied the names. The coverage finished the job.

What else did intelligence officials hide while under oath? What else is still buried?

New FBI documents turned over to the Senate show people around wannabe Trump assassin Thomas Crooks saw the engine seize before Butler. He talked to himself. He paced at night. He danced for hours. A coworker said it happened two or three times a week.

Someone confronted him about a jug of liquid he claimed was truck cleaner and watched his ears go red. He denied hearing voices. The behavior still read like a man coming apart. Former FBI agent Jonathan Gilliam said the file looks like a manic, even delusional spiral — and that the motive investigation should not be closed. Crooks took firearm courses in the spring of 2024.

He was seen at a Pennsylvania gun shop with two other men buying ammunition. He shopped online until a site would sell to him. He engaged in all of these odd behaviors, but was still allowed to get on a roof that was suspiciously ignored by Secret Service and get a shot off at the President.

The “lone nut” story is the system’s favorite mop. It ends the questions and gets the focus off of the Deep State that knows how to stage an operation and put a patsy right where they need to be. It protects institutions that missed the red flags and eschews calls for accountability. Crooks also spewed non-stop hatred online. He was part of networks of extremists.

This was revealed months ago. How come he was not on the feds’ radar? Or perhaps he was all along, and the Deep State cultivated him as an asset who could get rid of their biggest enemy, Donald Trump. We will likely never know the full truth, and that is a shame. Because there is nothing stopping the Deep State from running their next assassination plot to get their next enemy off the board.

Lindsay Clancy is the latest incidence of a social contagion tearing through society like a battering ram.

By its very nature, the Lindsay Clancy case was always going to be grotesque. What it became is something worse: a national morality play in which a woman who strangled her three children was recast as a martyr, her husband as the villain, and the one juror who refused to pretend otherwise as a public enemy.

On Jan. 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy, then a labor-and-delivery nurse, sent her husband Patrick out of the house on errands. While he was gone she took her children to the basement and brutally strangled them to death with exercise bands: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, eight months old. Then she cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She has never denied that she did it. Her lawyers admitted it in open court. The only question at trial was whether she should be held criminally responsible.

At the beginning, a certain level of sympathy was not insane. In the four months before the killings Clancy was put on a merry-go-round of dangerous Big Pharma chemicals: Zoloft, Prozac, Seroquel, Ativan, Klonopin, Valium, Ambien, Trazodone, Remeron, buspirone, amitriptyline, and more—thirteen psychiatric drugs, more than thirty prescriptions, handed out by a rotating cast of psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and emergency-room doctors. Anyone who has looked out the national overprescription crisis and the preventable tragedies that have resulted could look at that list and think that the system failed her. But what began perhaps as an empathetic impulse soon gave way to something far more depraved and indefensible.

The defense of Clancy’s actions did not stop at “she was overmedicated.” It demanded that the public treat the murders as an act of love. And a large, loud, mostly female audience on TikTok was happy to oblige. They declared her innocent even as she and her lawyers kept emphasizing that she had done the killing. They invented a husband who hired a body double to walk into CVS. They decided Patrick had framed her, gaslit her, or somehow performed the stranglings himself. There is video, phone records, and a 911 call that jurors later said they will never unhear. There is zero evidence Patrick killed anyone. That did not matter. Jilted, aggrieved women turned the victim into the perpetrator to satiate their Jezebel spirits.

Influencers shamelessly picked apart photos of Patrick with his new wife, a fertility doctor in New York, speculating that he was engaged in an affair with Lindsey Clancy to gain attention and clicks. His lawyer has now threatened legal action against what he called a “relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign” by “minor celebrities, so-called influencers and outright conspiracy theorists.” This only emboldened the mob to attack him further. As the trial arrived, the agenda behind the gynocentric circus became unmistakable.

After five weeks of testimony and some thirty-eight hours of deliberation, eleven jurors wanted Lindsay Clancy incomprehensibly found not criminally responsible for the murders she committed. One man defiantly stood strong and refused to be bullied into joining the consensus. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked the judge to throw that juror off the panel for “refusing to listen to the law” on reasonable doubt. The judge refused as it is a juror’s responsibility to follow their conscience above all else. Reddington raced an emergency appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which was denied. A mistrial was declared, and a tremendous miscarriage of justice was prevented—at least temporarily.

What followed was not the solemn response from citizens who had just spent weeks staring at three dead children. It was a media tour. Foreperson Roni Carlson, a retired fifth-grade teacher, told NBC she was “so sad, so sad that we couldn’t come up with a verdict for Lindsay.” She said she started filling out the not-guilty forms in excitement when the holdout allegedly admitted some doubt—then he added that he still would not say she was not guilty by reason of insanity. Juror Paula Devlin explained that a hospital video helped the room understand “altruistic filicide,” and that “whatever she did, however she did it, it came from a place of love.” Kellie Farina complained that the holdout “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” They found the prosecution “harsh.” They found the defense “compassionate” and “entertaining.” They suggested maybe juries should not have to be unanimous. They were not describing a criminal trial. They were describing a pro-Lindsay support group that was bothered by a man with the audacity to remember the crime.

NBC10 Boston then engaged in a doxxing spree against the holdout, described as a black man in his thirties. They stalked his home, harassed his family, and published a dossier. To impugn his reputation, they drudged up a 2021 domestic-violence allegation that was dismissed, a restraining order involving a nephew and an eviction fight over unpaid rent. Even though the juror list was impounded, it did not stop the media from its irresponsible coverage. This is a direct attack on the jury process. Twelve citizens are supposed to be able to say no without being hunted by media ghouls and a digital chorus that has already decided so-called “postpartum psychosis” means license to kill.

The result they wanted is not merely about Lindsay Clancy. For a generation, feminists moved abortion from a tragic concession to a holy sacrament. The next step, always denied until it is not, is to treat the child outside the womb as a continuation of the same problem. If the infant is an accident of timing, then the three-year-old is an accident of endurance. This is what happens when a nation turns its back on Christianity and secularizes. A child goes from an individual whose spirit should be nurtured and whose life should be venerated; to a parasite whose existence impedes the vaunted notion of female empowerment.

Lindsay Clancy is the latest incidence of a social contagion tearing through society like a battering ram. It happened in the summer of 2020 when fentanyl-addicted thug George Floyd was made into a Christ figure and it became virtuous to raze cities in the name of racial retribution. It happened on a different scale when children were systemically indoctrinated, told that their God-given birth sex could be changed on a whim, and then were drugged and butchered and left scarred and mangled for life. These instances draw lines in the sand within the broader culture war, and those of us with decency and sanity must respond in kind. In this particular case, we must make sure through crowdfunding that the lone juror becomes very wealthy in the aftermath so others are incentivized to stand strong in the future.