Media Ignores Trump’s Major Victories on Poverty, Wage Growth

Affordability concerns remain a top issue for many Americans as high gas prices eat into household budgets. But while the media obsessively fixates on how some Americans are struggling, it has also ignored major positive developments that point to the success of the Trump administration’s economic agenda.

Americans have every right to want lower costs at the pump and on grocery store shelves. But that doesn’t erase the fact that, according to a new Census Bureau report, the official poverty rate fell to 10.2 percent in 2025, the lowest figure since tracking began in 1959. For a family of two parents and two children, the pretax cash income poverty threshold was $32,649.

The child poverty rate also reached a historic low of 13.4 percent last year, as did the Hispanic poverty rate, which fell to 13.9 percent. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for black Americans declined from 18.4 percent to 17.3 percent.

In total, 1.5 million Americans were lifted out of poverty in 2025. This achievement is especially noteworthy given that an Oxford University report showed a corresponding increase of 51.5 million people living in poverty worldwide. As the global poverty situation got worse, the U.S. poverty situation got better.

This decline in the poverty rate was largely driven by a boost in “real” wages, meaning the amount of money workers earn after adjusting for inflation. Real median household income reached a record high of $87,460 in 2025, a 2.6 percent increase. Median income for black households jumped 4.8 percent from 2024 to 2025, while median income for white households increased three percent.

For reference, real average weekly earnings saw a 3.9 percent cumulative decline during Joe Biden’s presidency, according to economist Stephen Moore. In 2023 alone, middle-class households lost, on average, more than $33,000 in real wealth due to inflation.

Stephen Moore

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The affordability comparison is clear: Under Biden, real wages fell nearly 4%. Under President Trump, real wages are up 1.2%. Americans are once again seeing real wage growth.

1:30 PM · Aug 12, 2026

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Trump’s critics have attempted to attribute the historically low poverty rate to government assistance programs. But that explanation runs into a major problem. The Census Bureau’s “official” poverty measure does not count noncash government benefits such as food stamps, housing assistance, or Medicaid as income. It also does not include refundable tax credits. Instead, the measure primarily compares a family’s pretax cash income against the poverty threshold.

The Census Bureau also calculates a separate Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which does account for government benefits, taxes, housing costs, medical expenses, and other factors. That measure stood at 13.1 percent in 2025 and was statistically unchanged from the previous year.

In other words, the historic decline Trump highlighted was recorded under the government’s traditional poverty measure, which has been used since the 1960s and is designed largely around how much money Americans actually earn.

The contrast with previous periods of economic hardship is striking.

In 2010, during the second year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the official poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent. At the time, 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line, the largest number recorded in the 52 years that the Census Bureau had been publishing poverty estimates. Real median household income also declined 2.3 percent that year.

Fifteen years later, the poverty rate was nearly five percentage points lower.

To be sure, no president can claim exclusive credit for every economic statistic recorded while he is in office. But while elected Democrats and the corporate media place higher gas and grocery costs directly at Trump’s feet (even after they ignored the even higher costs Americans paid when Biden was in office) they claim Trump deserves no credit for lifting 1.5 million Americans out of poverty or overseeing a record high in inflation-adjusted household income.

That double standard is particularly galling because it distorts how Americans understand the economy.

The affordability problems facing families are real. A household paying more at the gas pump does not feel better because economists can point to an improving national poverty statistic. Trump was elected in large part on a promise to bring down prices, and voters have every right to expect his administration to deliver on that pledge.

But affordability is determined by more than the sticker price of a gallon of gas or a carton of eggs. What ultimately matters to a family is the relationship between what things cost and how much money that family earns. If wages and household incomes rise faster than inflation, purchasing power increases even if some prices remain painfully high.

That is why the 2025 numbers deserve far more attention than they have received.

Americans endured years in which inflation eroded the value of their paychecks and made even substantial nominal wage increases feel meaningless. Now, there are significant signs that the equation is beginning to move in the other direction.

None of this means the Trump administration’s economic work is finished. But an honest assessment of the economy has to include the good news along with the bad. If the poverty and wage numbers were moving in the opposite direction, there is little doubt they would be dominating the headlines.

The fact that they are not tells Americans something important about the media’s coverage of the Trump economy – but very little about the actual state of it.