Better in their words…

Supporter Bonus: Trump’s Christmas trolling nets an 80/20 win; Claremont charts Never-Trump collapse; no-name reporter exposes MN $millions in fraud as feds swarm; Trump tees up refunds; media whispers the “o” word.

Source: SYSTEM PURPOSES ☙ Sunday, December 28, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥🔥🔥

There has never been a Trollmaster like President Trump, and there never will be again. No competitor is even close; his record stands alone. Whether or not you believe there was coordination behind the faith-filled Christmas messages from Trump officials blanketing social media on Thursday like a dusting of freshly fallen snow, it’s clear the President captured another 80/20 issue and dragged the Democrats and their media allies back out into the antiseptic sunshine.

Media’s predictable shrieks about “norms and customs” accomplished exactly one thing: they lit the fuse of debate and exposed the brittle, low-grade quality of corporate media. Contrast this week’s breathless angst over a few Merry Christmases and references to the Savior with a Boston Herald op-ed from 2019, coolly titled, “Presidents invoking religion is a part of American history.”

The Herald reminded readers that Democrat icon Franklin D. Roosevelt personally sent a Bible to every single servicemember at the outset of World War II— each bearing an inscription above the President’s own signature:

After watching the allergic reaction from corporate media this week to a few encouraging Christmas tweets, can you imagine how crushed and terrified the delicate snowflakes on the left would be if War Secretary Hegseth sent all our servicemembers new Bibles, and encouraged them to read it regardless of their personal faith?

In his Second Inaugural Address (1865), President Lincoln openly suggested bloody Civil War casualties were divine judgment for slavery, quoting Matthew verbatim: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Today’s press corps would run that under “Theocracy Alert” and demand a presidential cognitive assessment.

How quickly the media forgets that, when Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, the national motto was E Pluribus Unum. Eisenhower changed it to In God We Trust. So. The Pledge of Allegiance also acquired the words “Under God” during Eisenhower’s term. If something like that happened today, the “No Kings” crowd would have to print a whole new line of t-shirts.

In 1950, President Harry S. Truman launched a national Bible-reading campaign and warned that America could not survive without moral and religious grounding. In 1950, he declared, “The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount.” It is difficult to imagine the panicked delirium such a presidential declaration would provoke today.

I mean it, literally. Try to imagine President Trump launching a Truman-style national Bible-reading campaign: Read it!! Tremendous book! Best seller for thousands of years! Incredibly durable! The best book of all time!

I think he should do it. The meltdown would be better entertainment than the hysterics following his first election in 2016.

I thought it would be helpful to gather these few additional examples to make the point (once again) about America’s rock-solid Christian roots, since even a few C&C readers in yesterday’s comments questioned the country’s religious history. That’s how well the left has promoted secularism. But we must never forget.

“We are trying to do a futile thing,” President Woodrow Wilson once observed, “if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.”

Indeed.

🔥 🔥 🔥

Earlier this month, the Claremont Review published a deliciously wicked book review titled, “Never Trump After 2024—When the people vote against democracy.” It’s long, but well worth the read. The piece repeatedly skewers the so-called conservative elites —most now functionally indistinguishable from Democrats— who midwifed and then clung desperately to the Never Trump movement. The artwork captures the tone perfectly:

The reviewed book, Never Trump—the Revolt of the Conservative Elites, is not exactly a publishing juggernaut. It has amassed a grand total of 34 reviews since its 2020 release. Worse still for its thesis, it pre-dated Trump’s landslide re-election by four years, and therefore lacked the clarifying benefit of watching Never Trumpism go down in flames twice.

The story opens with the now-forgotten but revealing episode of Bill Kristol attempting to assemble a conservative third-party spoiler in 2016— an effort that would have guaranteed Hillary Clinton the presidency. Kristol, then still masquerading as a conservative fixture and editor of The Weekly Standard, frantically tried to recruit figures like Condoleezza Rice, Ben Sasse, and Mitt Romney to split the ticket and stop the inevitable nominee: Donald Trump.

To their credit, every one of them declined. Kristol did not.

Fast-forward to Trump’s second and final term, and Never Trumpism is no longer a movement so much as a historical reenactment. The Claremont Review noted that Trump’s 2024 victory leaves public intellectuals “firing from the battlements of the Never Trump Alamo.” The roll call of holdouts reads like a museum placard: David Frum, David Brooks, Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Jonah Goldberg, Stephen Hayes, and —inevitably— Kristol himself.

Each now serves as a token conservative for outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. It’s genuinely hard to tell them from liberals anymore. Several —including Kristol— even endorsed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor. In September, Kristol’s latest venture, The Bulwark, solemnly informed its dwindling conservative readership that “Mamdani represents liberal democracy and Trump represents authoritarianism.”

That sentence, alone, is the movement’s inglorious epitaph.

After decades preaching small-government conservatism, Never Trumpers have now submerged every value and principle beneath a single overriding objective: Never Trump. Even though Trump can’t run again! Mamdani, fresh off his victory, promised: “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”Apparently, to Kristol, the essence of conservatism is: anti-Trump uber alles.

In reality, what happened was simpler and more humiliating. The self-designated “public intellectuals” who once dominated Republican thought in the post-Cold War era didn’t lead a civil war. They staged an exit. Figures who had always played at conservatism finally dropped the act— moving seamlessly from quietly boosting haglike Hillary Clinton behind the scenes to openly endorsing socialists on Bernie Sanders’ left.

And after the 2024 election, and even after an unsuccessful assassination attempt, Never Trumpism failed harder. Never has there been a less effective political movement. Never has a single political event exposed so many fake conservatives so quickly. After 2016, they blamed Republican voters as racist and misogynist. After 2024 —following record minority support for Trump— that blame, as Claremont dryly noted, “remains a work in progress.”

In other words, what was meant to be a civil war within the party became an exodus or purification; a cleansing. The fake grifters who’d always just played at conservatism purged themselves, leaving a leaner, meaner, healthierRepublican party. It’s like the GOP took ivermectin and expelled a disgusting ball of parasites.

It wasn’t much fun during the period of active efficacy, but don’t we feel so much better now? And less bloated.

🔥 I mock them, but the parasites have not gone away. They’re still swanning around the septic tank, waiting for a chance to swim back up the plumbing. Our mission for 2026 will be to squash the Never Trumpers for good. Here is what their continuing campaign looks like— This was tweeted yesterday by a high-follower-count conservative influencer:

He’s talking about the Minnesota Somali scams, which we’ve covered quite a bit lately (and more on that in a moment). To be clear: I’m not accusing this person (a lifelong Democrat who recently became a Republican) of being insincere, having illicit motives, or being a liberal mole. My argument is this sentiment derives from Never Trump psyops, swimming back up the toilet tank.

First, to rebut the tweeter’s argument: What on Earth is he talking about? The FBI has already arrested hundreds of people, nearly all Somalis, and has announced hundreds more open fraud investigations. Being as generous as possible, he might be arguing that Governor Walz should be immediatelyarrested or something. That’s fine, call for Walz’s arrest all day and night, and good luck to you, but why scoop in Republicans?

I couldn’t prove the conspiracy, but I don’t need to. It’s right there for everyone to see. As British systems theorist Stafford Beer once famously said, “The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says it does.” For example, if a system claims to promote democracy but consistently punishes dissent, rewards conformity, and nullifies voters’ choices, then —by definition— its purpose isn’t really democracy at all.

So when some conservative influencers claim to critique democrats, but their blows always land on President Trump and Republicans, we can safely assume the purpose of those critiques is to damage conservatism. Unfortunately, too many impatient conservatives take the bait, and express their encouragement (“I just want to help motivate President Trump to do the right thing”) as destructive criticism.

Where do you suppose these narratives from the right about President Trump and the GOP come from? Take, for example, President Trump’s rare, poorly worded interview with Laura Ingraham. During the interview, the President came across as insufficiently opposed to Chinese students and H1B visas. Some conservative influencers pounced, even though at the time President Trump had already done more to correct both problems than any president in history.

Unfortunately, some other conservatives, understandably trained to expect betrayal, were ready to throw in the towel, resulting in a short-lived media frenzy about “MAGA fracturing.” E.g., Axios headline, November:

My working hypothesis is that these anti-Trump narratives from the right spring from the same group of Never Trumpers and their followers, who’ve been cleansed from the party but have gone underground, retaining just enough leftover conservative credentials to wield sufficient influence to get these things rolling. Naive influencers, like the one I quoted above, pick up the narrative thread and run with it, with the contentious results that we’ve seen all too often lately.

This kind of red-on-red criticism only helps Democrats. It does not help make MAGA stronger, encourage reasonable intra-party debate, or achieve anything except making everyone else feel deeply uncomfortable, like when married couples argue in public. Because of its profound irrationality —people not stopping for a second to fact-check themselves, like the tweeter above— it is clearly a psyop, not any organic impatience with the President.

Here is the rational rebuttal, which we shall repeat throughout 2026 until everyone gets it: even if Republicans in power aren’t fixing things fast enough, it is no reason to vote Democrat.

So long as we are making any progress, we should stay the course.

Of course, the truth is we are making lots of progress, historic amounts of progress, progress faster and bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before. We’ll remind them of that, too.

🔥 🔥 🔥

Speaking of conservative influencers, Nick Shirley is a 23-year-old independent journalist and YouTuber, known for his on-the-ground reporting and street interviews. Almost 600,000 follow him on Twitter, and 1.1 million follow his YouTube account. The UK Daily Mail reported the story this morning, headlined, “Fury grows over ‘empty’ Minnesota daycare with misspelled sign accused of receiving $4m in taxpayer funds”

In his latest investigative video, titled, “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal” and released the day after Christmas, Nick delivered a gripping 42-minute exposé on widespread welfare fraud in Minnesota. Accompanied by a local tipster, Shirley conducted on-the-ground visits to a long list of taxpayer-funded childcare centers, many Somali-owned and licensed for dozens of children, only to find them eerily empty during business hours— no kids, no staff, locked doors, and darkened windows.

Highlighting cases like the hilariously misspelled “Quality Learing Center,” which reportedly received nearly $2 million in 2025 Child Care Assistance Program funds alone, Shirley’s team claimed to have uncovered over $110 million in suspicious payments in a single day of research.

The video, which has amassed tens of millions of views and drew endorsements from folks like Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, accused state oversight under Governor Tim Walz of enabling what Shirley calls potentially “the largest fraud scandal in US history,” sparking national outrage and renewed calls for federal audits.

Benny Johnson called Nick’s video “the single most damning exposé ever produced by an independent journalist.”

“All it took was one man and a camera to expose what the state either ignored or allowed,” Benny continued. “If officials weren’t complicit, this would have been stopped long ago.”

It was so simple. All Nick did was get a list of day care centers receiving aid and go around Minneapolis, knocking on their doors in the middle of a workday. Whenever someone did answer, Nick said he wanted to sign his son Joey up for childcare. They universally refused to talk to him, show him the facility, or explain why there were no kids anywhere around.

In this short clip, an Affluent White Female Liberal (AWFL) warns a daycare center by shouting, “don’t open up! we have ICE here!” when Nick approaches the door. It’s truly pathological.

🔥 There is much about this developing scandal that could be said, is being said, and hopefully will be said. I’d like to focus on the uselessness of corporate media. The fact that a young independent journalist with a small crew and basic tools uncovered over $110 million in suspicious payments in just one day of research raises an awkward question: Why hasn’t any major news outlet with vast resources done this basic investigative work?

Where, oh where, is 60 Minutes? You would think that the program that once exposed tobacco coverups could send over a camera crew or two. But no. And if 60 Minutes won’t touch it, don’t hold your breath waiting for the New York Times or Washington Post. Or even the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Thus we observe the greatest single development in news media since the pandemic. What James O’Keefe pioneered in 2009 with his ACORN takedown, other young people like Nick Shirley are running with. The corporate media is killing itself in DEI-inspired ritual suicide. Gallup’s 2025 poll shows Americans’ trust in mass media hit a historic low of 28% (down from 68% in 1972 and even lower than last year’s record low). The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report noted stagnating subscriptions, rising social media dominance, and independents/influencers gaining ground while traditional outlets hemorrhage engagement.

One analysis concluded that legacy media’s loss of trust is the core reason for decline— rather than tech disruption. Indeed, conventional media couldpublish interesting content to YouTube and Twitter just like Nick Shirley. They have massive resources, professional cameras, editing teams, and established brands. But nobody wants them there, either.

In other words, the audience isn’t just scrolling past; they actively resent the messenger.

🔥 Which brings us to Governor Walz. We’ve shot right past calls for his resignation. The conservative sphere wants him arrested. The perfectly understandable theory seems to be a form of res ipsa loquitor —a latin phrase used in highbrow legal briefs that means “the thing speaks for itself.” How else could this have happened under Walz’s tenure without his direct involvement somewhere along the line?

Of course, real arrests are burdened by little concerns like the presumption of innocence and due process. But a massive investigation is underway. At leastsix federal agencies are actively involved in investigating various aspects of Minnesota’s widespread welfare and social services fraud scandals (including the original Feeding Our Future meal program fraud, autism services, housing stabilization, childcare assistance/daycare programs, Medicaid billing, unemployment insurance, and related allegations).

The following agencies have all announced ongoing investigations: the DOJ/FBI, the IRS, HHS’s Office of Inspector General, the Department of Labor (unemployment and benefits fraud), the Treasury Department (overseas links), the Small Business Administration (covid-era loans and small business fraud), the USDA (child nutrition programs), ICE/DHS (immigration angles), and the House Oversight Committee.

It’s interesting to imagine how this would have played out had Tim Walz been elected vice president as Democrats hoped. On one hand, he’d now be facing an immense scandal. On the other hand, the investigation would have been much more muted, and Somalis would still be pouring into Minnesota and spreading the grift around.

📈 📈 📈

On Friday, the New York Post ran a terrific story headlined, “Americans in line for ‘gigantic’ tax refund early next year, says Scott Bessent.” It was another brilliant strategic move by the Trump Team.

How it worked is simple. As you know, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) was passed in July, it included a whole bunch of tax relief. You’ve heard of them: no tax on social security, tips, overtime, and so forth. But there were also two unmentioned provisions. First, the tax cuts were retroactive to January, 2025. Second, the IRS kept withholding tables unchanged, so nearly every payroll service in the nation continued withholding under the pre-OBBBA tax rates.

In April, when most folks do their taxes, all that extra withheld money will come surging back to many lower- and middle-income filers in the form of noticeably larger tax refunds.

It might seem gimmicky, but this doubles the tax breaks’ impact. Assuming the IRS modifies the 2026 withholding tables, wage earners and retired seniors will immediately see larger paychecks and Social Security checks, as less of their income will be taxable. Then, in April, they’ll get materially bigger refunds, too— a double whammy.

All of it must be viewed through the lens of the Democrats’ affordabilitynarrative for the midterms. As the media has conceded, the economy’s fundamentals are strong, but individually, people still feel like they are strapped. They’re still spending, but they are experiencing a psychological K-shaped recovery.

I’ve often said that this must be fixed by improvements in real wages. Well, one way to increase real wages is to lower the tax burden. Wage earners and retired seniors will immediately see real income growth in obvious ways, since people can easily compare their 2026 paychecks and social security checks to the ones they were getting just a month before.

This will make the affordability argument much more difficult. Democrats will be forced to argue that, even though people are making more, and even though prices are coming down, Republicans aren’t fixing the economy FAST ENOUGH.

In other words, it will be the same worn-out argument we’ve seen in all the other narrative psyops (e.g., “vote democrat, since Republicans aren’t fixing H1Bs fast enough”).

📈 That wasn’t all. You will scarcely believe this next story, which CNN ran two days ago below the unexciting headline, “Trump promised ‘aggressive’ housing reform next year. Here’s where home prices may go in 2026.”

“Next year may mark a turning point for the US housing market,” the story unexpectedly began. I nearly dropped my laptop when I read the next sentence, which included the ultra-rate “o” word: “many economists are optimistic about the housing market.” Get this: “Many economists anticipate that rising incomes will start to outpace home prices,” CNN said, “making homes feel more affordable for many Americans.”

“The Trump administration has signaled it intends to prioritize housing affordability in 2026,” CNN reported. The signals have been kept secret until the last couple of days. On Christmas Eve, Fox ran a segment interviewing one of Trump’s top economic advisors, Kevin Hassett, who disclosed a giant Mar-a-Lago summit starting next week.

CLIP: Administration chief economist announces Mar-a-Lago meeting “the week after Christmas” (1:24).

CNN’s economists and their sudden and unexpected optimism didn’t mention or rely at all on the summit. The summit that nobody’d heard about, since the Trump Administration is not leaking. Chief economist Hassett said, “I expect that most of us are going to be down for a big chunk of the week after Christmas at Mar-a-Lago, going through all the plans for next year.” He continued, “we have a big list of housing ideas that have been vetted very carefully by the Cabinet Secretaries, and we’ll see which ones he picks.”

I hate to make predictions, but it seems clear to me that January is shaping up to be the most intense month since last January, when Trump first took office. We have lots of signals, from Speaker Johnson’s promise of a legislative “surge,” to the tax cuts and mega-refunds, to Kevin Hassett’s reference to “all the plans for next year.” All of them. And we can expect that there is more in the queue that we haven’t been signaled about.

So get ready. It’s going to be a huge, historic year.

Have a blessed Sunday! And thank you for your continuing loyal support. Our mission is more important than ever— having captured the White House and both chambers of Congress, we must keep them and expand them in 2026. I look forward to working with you on this critical job next year.

Share

Give a gift subscription

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid