Stephen A. Smith admits he can’t wrap his head around “how the hell” the Clintons and Obamas left office worth upwards of $100,000,000 after “serving” the American people.
“Clinton was a lawyer in Arkansas, grew up poor, relatively broke. How the hell he and the Clinton Foundation are worth hundreds of millions of dollars beats me.”
“Barack Obama was a community organizer who became the President of the United States. And last time I checked, that salary ain’t over $450,000.”
“How the hell you depart from office, [together] you worth over $200 million?”
Clintons’ net worth before office: ~$1,300,000
Clintons’ net worth today: ~$120,000,000
Obamas’ net worth before office: ~$1,300,000
Obamas’ net worth today: ~$70,000,000
The Return of American Industrial Power
At 12:01 a.m. Eastern on July 24, President Trump’s temporary 10 percent global tariff expired, and, without pause, was replaced by a new regime of 10 to 12.5 percent duties on imports from roughly 60 major trading partners, covering nearly all U.S. imports. The short-lived Section 122 stopgap, adopted after the Supreme Court invalidated earlier IEEPA-based tariffs, has now given way to a more durable Section 301 framework grounded in forced-labor findings. The policy did not change, only its legal footing did. What has changed is the candor: the United States is openly wielding industrial policy as an instrument of economic hard power.
For three decades, Washington operated under the assumption that global integration would render such thinking obsolete. Trade was treated as an end in itself, efficiency as the supreme virtue, and supply chains as apolitical. The result was predictable: hollowed-out industrial capacity, deepening strategic dependencies, and a dangerous complacency about how economic leverage translates into geopolitical power. That era is ending, not gradually, but decisively.
The administration has been unusually explicit about this shift. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has framed the new approach in clear terms, the United States must rebuild its industrial base not simply for growth, but for resilience and leverage.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has reiterated the same point, trade policy is not about maximizing imports at the lowest possible price, it is about shaping where and how production occurs. This is the essence of economic hard power, the ability to use market access, supply chains, and capital flows to advance national objectives.
There is nothing novel about this framework. It is, in fact, a return to first principles.
In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, Alexander Hamilton argued that political sovereignty required economic independence, and that tariffs were indispensable to achieving it. Henry Clay’s American System translated that insight into policy, using protective duties to foster domestic industry and bind the national economy together. For both men, trade policy was inseparable from statecraft.
The current tariff structure fits squarely within that tradition. After the courts forced a temporary 150-day surcharge, the administration completed Section 301 investigations into roughly 60 economies’ failure to adequately restrict goods produced with forced labor. The resulting system, 10 percent tariffs for partial compliance or credible commitments, 12.5 percent for the rest, is best understood not as punishment, but as leverage. Access to the American market is being conditioned on behavior, and priced accordingly.
The exemptions make the strategy clearer still. Energy remains largely insulated. USMCA supply chains are preserved. Existing national-security tariffs remain intact. This is not indiscriminate protectionism. It is a deliberate effort to reorient global production networks while minimizing domestic disruption, a calibrated use of tariffs to redirect capital, not simply to restrict trade.
What distinguishes this moment is not merely the policy, but the willingness to name it. For years, American officials avoided the language of industrial policy even as allies and adversaries alike pursued it aggressively. That pretense has now been discarded. The United States is asserting its right to shape its own economic structure and to use its market power accordingly.
Hamilton understood that. Clay systematized it. The United States is now, belatedly, relearning it, and applying it with the full weight of its market power.
🇺🇸 JUST-IN: TRUMP BEAT WALL STREET ON HOUSING AND CONGRESS ACTUALLY LISTENED!
This is what real leadership looks like.
Wall Street was stealing the American dream one neighborhood at a time. Investment firms would swoop in with all cash, outbid young families, and turn homes into rentals. These weren't just properties to them - they were stealing futures from kids who just wanted to own a piece of America.
It was a rigged game designed to lock out ordinary Americans, and it broke our hearts.
Trump made it stop!
In January, the President signed an executive order telling Wall Street to get off Main Street. He made housing reform his priority because he actually cares about working people building their lives. Then something remarkable happened: Congress actually listened and moved fast.
Senate passed it 85-5, House passed it 358-32. Both parties got it done.
Now the game is over.
Large institutional investors who own 350 or more homes cannot buy anymore. Red tape is cut, construction speeds up, supply goes up, and prices come down. That's basic economics working for working people, not Wall Street titans.
First-time buyers finally get their real shot at the American dream again.
This is how you drain the swamp and deliver real results for the families who built this nation.
It’s not often you see someone talking sense on MSNOW.
But he’s right, Dems are out of touch and their primary platform is opposition to Trump.
Then they want open borders and socialism as well lol.
The American People should have the same level of contempt for Democrats that they clearly have for them.
Democrats don't even pretend to care about solving Americans' problems.
They aren't interested in solutions. They don't rationally discuss anything. They refuse to listen.
Here is what the Democrats have to offer the American people.
Name-calling. Hoaxes. Corruption. Lies. Propaganda. Cover-ups. Election fraud. Mass immigration.
It blows my mind how anyone could support this broken party.
1971 Rules for Radicals
By Saul D Alinski
A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals.
Main Point: Personalized Attacks over abstract ideas. Sound familiar Dems?
Pick the target. Freeze it. Personalize it. Then polarize it.
That way you avoid ideas entirely because on that turf as a radical you would lose. None of them can debate.
Their ideas are historically indefensible.
For 50 years the left has transformed culture, removing ideas where you could be wrong and replacing it with persons who can be evil…
Anyone can do it because there’s no need to think. Perfect for dumb people.
You guys can punch Trump supporters, try to kill the president, light Tesla’s on fire and demand us dead…
And some of us end up that way, Charlie Kirk RIP.
- @greggutfeld@TheFive@Gutfeldfox
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the REVOLUTION.”
David Horowitz lived inside the New Left for years, editing Ramparts and working with SDS, and he said that one sentence was their real operating principle the whole time.
Housing, wages, policing, climate, Palestine, all of them were just the excuses they used to keep people angry and organized so the movement could keep growing POWER.
Fix any of those problems and the organizers lose their entire reason to exist, which is why solving the issue counts as FAILURE in their world.
Horowitz finally walked away and spent the rest of his life trying to warn everyone about the tactic he learned from the inside.
And the people running the protests you see today still run the EXACT SAME PLAYBOOK.
🚨 BREAKING: In a bombshell announcement, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent disclosed that the U.S. has achieved its first June budget surplus since 2015, amassing "MASSIVE" tariff income of $27 billion last month.
President Trump economic policies are Making America Wealthy.🔥
The Trump administration says tariffs are delivering real gains for American workers, with manufacturing wages up by $2,067 under President Trump after declining by $830 during President Biden’s four years in office
#NYI
The Working Families Tax Cuts not only delivered historic tax relief and prevented a massive tax hike, but the law also invested in manufacturers across Pennsylvania.
✅223,000 jobs protected
✅$40 billion in GDP saved
✅$21 billion in wages saved
#PA16 is home to one of the highest concentrations of small manufacturers in the country.
https://t.co/F8KJRuRBeQ
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Trump:
He's smart. He remembers everything. Goodness gracious. He sure knows numbers.
He wants the United States to be re-industrialized.
He is single-mindedly about creating jobs.
Nearly half of Canadian manufacturers are moving production to America.
Three-quarters are moving in the next 2 years.
It turns out “elbows up” means giving Trump all of Canada’s jobs.