Trump has promised to send the so-called “dividend” checks to low- and middle-income Americans using revenue from his sweeping expanse of tariffs. 

How much will the checks cost?

Dishing out $2,000 to most Americans would cost as much as $600 billion – twice the revenue expected from tariffs, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

President Trump has vowed to send $2,000 tariff “dividend” checks to most Americans by the 2026 midterms. Susan – stock.adobe.com

The steep tariffs Trump imposed in April – with a 10% baseline rate on all foreign countries – had raised $90 billion as of Sept. 30, according to data from US Customs and Border Patrol. He recently lifted tariffs for over 200 products as part of his push to make the cost of living more affordable.

That leaves a substantial gap in funding the checks, though Trump has promised not to pay for them with taxpayer dollars.

Trump says tariff revenues will increase

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump said tariff revenues will soon “skyrocket” – which could help pay for the checks.

Businesses rushed to stockpile inventory earlier this year ahead of the tariff deadlines so they could avoid paying the new import levies. But soon, warehouses will start to run out of this backstock, and companies will be forced to cough up the import fees in full, the president predicted.

Americans have thus not yet felt “the full benefit of the Tariffs,” he added.

How would the tariff ‘dividends’ be different from the COVID stimulus checks?

Trump has promised not to use taxpayer dollars to fund the checks. Scott Habermann – stock.adobe.com

The $2,000 tariff checks would not be the first such payments sent out by Trump.

In March 2020, he signed off on congressionally-approved COVID stimulus checks. 

Democrats campaigned on bringing more stimulus payments to Americans, with then-President Joe Biden doing so in 2021. Many economists blame those checks for helping to spike inflation, which ultimately tanked Biden’s approval ratings.

Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that Trump’s tariff dividends could have a similar effect on inflation, which is already heating up – hitting 3% in September, its fastest rate since January, according to the Consumer Price Index.

In March 2020, Trump signed off on congressionally-approved COVID stimulus checks.  Getty Images

In an attempt to curb inflationary effects, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has urged Americans to save the checks instead of spending them.

“Maybe we could persuade Americans to save that, because one of the things that’s going to happen next year is the Trump account[s]” designed to store savings for kids, he told Fox News last week.

Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is creating a new class of investment accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028 that will be seeded with $1,000 from the US Treasury.

About 40% of Trump’s 2020 stimulus payments were spent, while 30% were used to pay down debt and 30% were saved, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.

Later stimulus payments were also mostly spent or used to pay down debt, according to the New York Fed.

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February 24, 2025, 12:05pm

In maybe the most high profile example of the “leopards ate my face” phenomenon, Vice-President-In-Name-Only J. David Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy is being pulled from the shelves at at least one Department of Defense school for being “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics.”

The American military operates schools that serve 66,000 children of service members, and they recently received a memo pushing them to pull certain books. The memo is “gives officials broad descriptions but does not provide specific names of books that are banned from the 161 elementary, middle and high schools for children of American service members in the U.S. and abroad,” according to Task & Purpose, which got a copy of the memo.

This move comes as a part of the broader campaign of repression by Don Trump and his coterie of soy right weirdos, who are sweatily forcing their way into our libraries, schools, and bathrooms to enforce their own strange definitions of normal.

The librarians who are supposed to enact this policy seem confused, and interpretations of the memo are varying widely. One librarian told Task & Purpose, “I think there will be some schools that move hundreds of books and some that will move maybe a dozen or single digits.”

One high school in Europe, for example, pulled The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Well-Read Black Girl by Glory Edim.

The same school also pulled Hillbilly Elegy, written by Vice President Vance, the menacing skinsuit trying to make having a stick up your ass look fun. The 2016 memoir was behind Vance’s rise to prominence, and was especially popular with West-Wing-fetishists and skittish op-ed page types. You probably shouldn’t read it, but if you’re curious, I recommend the Know Your Enemy episode dissecting the book.

Like with so many instances of this administration’s cruel flailing, it’s not clear what this memo is really supposed to do. The Department of Defense Education Activity regulations already requires schools to have a “Challenged Materials Review Committee” to respond to complaints, so the memo seems redundant. It leaves enough leeway for someone brave to stand up and not comply, as this is clearly intended to scare and destabilize the Americans who Republicans hate. It’s ugly, stupid, and mean; it’s also very confusing for these school administrators.

One group that is not confused are the students at these military schools, who have already started to protest. Kids at a school in Germany walked out on new Secretary of Defense and the highest-ranking government employee you’re likely to run into at a dive bar, Pete Hegseth. Good for them!

In the meantime, I wonder if Vance, who puts the sad sack in sycophant, is going to try to get his book taken off this banned list, or if he’ll once again roll over and accept humiliation from the hog-men he’s hitched his wagon to.

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