President Donald Trump\u2019s first-term stimulus checks were a response to a pandemic he didn\u2019t cause. His second-term cash promises are mostly a response to problems his own policies created, and now stretch to an election he may lose because of them.<\/p>\n
\n
At the GOP\u2019s midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday, Trump pledged $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold the House and Senate in November, calling it the \u201cTrump Dividend\u201d and comparing it to a company\u2019s shareholder payout. The pledge would cost more than $1 trillion and is conditioned on an election result rather than an economic one. <\/p>\n
Vice President JD Vance appeared to walk that back within an hour, saying the money wouldn\u2019t go to wealthy Americans. Still, a lawyer told the Associated Press<\/em> the plan is probably legal anyway, since it would pay everyone regardless of how, or whether, they vote.<\/p>\nYou get a check, and you get a check<\/h2>\n
Trump\u2019s promise to send checks to people\u2019s houses might bring up a few memories from years ago, when Trump signed the CARES Act on March 27, 2020, sending $1,200 to eligible adults and $500 per child, with income-based phaseouts. That December, he signed a second round of $600 checks into law. (At first, he demanded Congress raise the number to $2,000\u2014and while the Democratic-led House agreed, Senate Republicans blocked it.) <\/p>\n
Combined with a third round of stimulus checks under President Joe Biden, the three pandemic rounds totaled more than $814 billion. Whatever the politics, the underlying emergency of a virus that shut down the global economy wasn\u2019t something Trump had built.<\/p>\n
But Trump\u2019s second term is full of cash promises that trace back to two programs Trump created\u2014and then had trouble delivering on.<\/p>\n
The first was DOGE. In February 2025, Trump backed a \u201cDOGE dividend\u201d that would return 20% of the department\u2019s claimed savings to citizens, an amount its promoters pegged near $5,000 per household. But the savings didn\u2019t hold up: A GAO audit found DOGE couldn\u2019t verify 96% of its claimed grant savings and had counted $1.7 billion from a contract that was never actually canceled. DOGE shut down July 4, 2025 and no dividend ever went out.<\/p>\n
The second was tariffs. Starting in July 2025, Trump floated a $2,000 \u201ctariff rebate\u201d funded by tariff revenue, even as his own Treasury secretary said on air he hadn\u2019t discussed the details with the president. By November, betting markets had the odds of a real payout at 1% to 2%. Meanwhile, the tariffs themselves became a drag rather than a windfall: They\u2019re a live factor in the toilet-paper price and shortage fears hitting household budgets, and economists cited say they\u2019ve helped fuel an affordability problem now weighing on Trump\u2019s own midterm pitch.<\/p>\n
So in reality, Trump\u2019s midterm elections promise\u2014that $5,000 dividend\u2014is nothing more than a fix for a political problem that Trump\u2019s prior \u201cgive people money\u201d promise (and the tariffs behind it) helped create.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s promises don\u2019t stop there: He also promised money back through the tax code. During the 2024 campaign he pledged to end taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits. Those pledges only partly survived Congress: The \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill\u201d he signed in July 2025 created temporary deductions for tipped and overtime income through 2028, not the full exemptions promised, and Social Security benefits are still taxed on the returns filers submitted this year. Independent estimates put the full package at $3.6 trillion to $6.6 trillion in added deficits over a decade if fully enacted. In his first term, Trump deferred payroll taxes by executive action in August 2020 and promised to make the cut permanent if reelected; that promise died along with his 2020 campaign.<\/p>\n
Few governments tie cash payments to elections<\/h2>\n
Governments elsewhere have sent broad cash payments before, but rarely tied to their own reelection. <\/p>\n
Hong Kong gave every adult resident HK$10,000 in 2020 to offset protest-related and pandemic damage, while Japan sent residents a flat 100,000 yen payment that same year, just as Singapore ran a tiered payout based on income. None of those were contingent on a specific party winning an upcoming vote. Legal experts likened it to a bribe to vote a certain way, similar a move it likened to Elon Musk\u2019s million-dollar giveaways to voters in last year\u2019s Wisconsin Supreme Court race.<\/p>\n
Congress still holds the power of the purse, and no bill exists\u2014yet. Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio wrote he\u2019d have one ready \u201cimmediately after the November 3rd election.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#Trumps #term #real #stimulus #checks #promises #tied #problems #started<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump\u2019s first… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[768,7227,2208,2209,273,7224,1018,7225,3518,1108,62,3096,4026,7226,5408,277],"class_list":["post-4281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-american-politics","tag-checks","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19-vaccines","tag-donald-trump","tag-economic-stimulus","tag-elections","tag-fiscal-stimulus","tag-problems","tag-promises","tag-real","tag-started","tag-stimulus","tag-term","tag-tied","tag-trumps"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n