Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

During both his presidential terms, Donald Trump has longed to make Americans happy by mailing them checks from the government adorned with his own signature in case anyone wants to write him a thank-you note in the form of a vote. So it’s not surprising that his big idea for responding to the rise of “affordability” as a national political issue is to send out $2,000 checks, allegedly to be financed by his trade-war tariffs. Do people think tariffs boost consumer prices? Okay, then, here’s a rebate! Or a “tariff dividend,” as he calls it.

Now, that is very unlikely to come to pass for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Trump is vastly overestimating the tariff revenue that’s coming in. For another, his own administration and perhaps soon the Supreme Court are putting the brakes on his tariff offensive. And even more obviously, authorizing $2,000 checks from Trump for everybody at this particular moment has zero support among Democrats and not much support among Republicans, who mostly seem to be rolling their eyes over it. If they take it seriously at all, they tend to recommend that any “tariff dividends,” should they actually emerge, be used to reduce the public debt that Trump has never seemed to worry about for a moment.

But the most telling (not to mention hilarious) reaction to the “tariff dividend” idea has come from Trump’s own Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as Axios reported:

The administration is hopeful Americans won’t necessarily spend the $2,000 tariff checks President Trump has promised, and instead pump them into “Trump accounts” for kids, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says …

The risk of rising prices remains a huge concern for consumers, and against that backdrop, Fox News asked Bessent Tuesday night how the government would avoid another bout of stimulus-driven inflation if the checks happen.

“Maybe we could persuade Americans to save that, because one of the things that’s going to happen next year” is the start of “Trump accounts” to save for kids, Bessent said.

So the president wants to send checks to folks who are worried about making ends meet today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. But his top economic adviser is telling them not to cash those checks to pay for their living costs but to save them instead because (quite accurately) spending the money might boost living costs even more.

Bessent was clever enough to couch this blatant contradiction of the president’s wishes in a recommendation that the money should go into Trump-branded savings vehicles (the subsidized kiddie savings accounts created by the One Big Beautiful Act). But it’s probably not what the president had in mind when he imagined grateful Americans using those checks to pay for groceries and gasoline while uttering a prayer of thanksgiving for their benefactor the president — and vowing to vote Republican in the 2026 midterms.

Vote-buying is a simple proposition, but the people around Trump keep trying to complicate it. No wonder he’s angry and frustrated about “affordability.”

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