The Dictatorship
Trump’s promises of direct checks to Americans put Republicans in a bind
President Donald Trump is stuck on an idea: sending checks to Americans.
A $2,000 “dividend” check using revenue from his global tariffs campaign. A “DOGE savings” payment using 20% of the proceeds from Elon Musk’s budget-cutting initiative. A health care plan that would funnel money away from Affordable Care Act insurance plans and direct it straight to Americans, who might be able to keep any “money left over.”
The White House has yet to release concrete plans on any of it, though press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday that the administration is “currently exploring all legal options” to issue the $2,000 tariff checks.
And that puts Trump’s Republicans in a dicey spot.
If direct checks are not issued, there’s a political threat if voters get their hopes up waiting for money they don’t receive. “If you make a promise that sounds good to people, and then it sort of just disappears — maybe they’ve not noticed that the first or the second time — but certainly, if you keep doing that, they do,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist.
But there’s potentially an even bigger risk if checks are issued: They would likely either drive up inflation or, if not, serve as an implicit acknowledgment that the fundamentals of the economy are weaker than White House has suggested.
In a strong economy with low unemployment and healthy consumer spending, adding more money to people’s pockets can add inflationary pressure — which could worsen Americans’ concerns about affordability and the cost of living. Stimulus payments are most effective in a recession or economic downturn with low inflation, high unemployment and weak consumer demand.
Right now, the labor market is showing signs of softening, but consumer spending has remained strong and inflation has cooled enough that the Federal Reserve has started to reduce interest rates.
“The economic situation we face today is not one in which you’d expect the policy response to be direct payments,” said Alex Jacquez, a former National Economic Council official under President Joe Biden. Jacquez defended rounds of stimulus checks by the Biden administration as “fairly standard” for a recession like the one caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Instead, the recent pitches from the president nod at Republicans’ political reality. Exit polls from last week’s elections show that the cost of living remains a top priority for voters.
“To me, this just looks like this is an election ploy,” said Desmond Lachman, an economist at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “He’s just seen that people are worried about affordability and they’re not making ends meet. So why don’t you just give them a check?”
The president plans to travel the country later this year and into 2026 to deliver speeches focused on the economy, according to a senior White House official, though the locations have yet to be decided. And despite the president publicly dismissing concerns about affordability, White House staffers have organized meetings to address the issue.
“I want the money to go directly to you, the people,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday night as he signed legislation to reopen the federal government. “So much money is involved, and we’re willing to pay so much money to the people.”
Still, Trump’s nascent proposals face an unclear path forward.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Congress would need to pass legislation on tariff rebate checks. In July, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill to give families of four up to $2,400 from tariff revenue, and though Trump initially said he was thinking about such a proposal, the legislation has remained dormant ever since. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said this week he would draft legislation for direct payments to healthcare-specific accounts. A senior White House official told BLN the administration would have to see the bill before supporting it.
And then there’s the looming Supreme Court decision on Trump’s imposition of tariffs, which threatens to unravel his designs for the “dividend” checks. Without much of its tariff revenue, justifying the cost of rebate checks could prove untenable for Trump. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the proposal’s price tag would be roughly $600 billionbased on a model that excludes people who earn more than $75,000 a year. The government’s total annual income from tariffs amounts to approximately half that amount.
“President Trump remains committed to continuing to deliver on his Day One priority of turning around Joe Biden’s affordability crisis and dead-end economy,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “Self-proclaimed experts should hold on their half-baked analyses until the administration releases concrete policy proposals instead of baselessly speculating what the details of the president’s proposals are.”
Republicans and top administration officials continue to pummel Biden for leaving them with the tailwinds of record inflation. But as Trump has raised the prospect of injecting money into the U.S. economy, Republicans have mostly refrained from expressing worries it could contribute to higher prices.
The consumer price index is now at 3% growth on the year, as of September, and most economists blame supply-chain challenges as the primary driver of persistent inflation, though stimulus policies were likely a contributing factor. In addition to Biden’s stimulus payments, Trump approved stimulus checks of up to $1,200 per person in his first term at the height of the Covid crisis.
Underscoring why sending checks can leave a lasting impression: Even after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, voters still recalled seeing his signature on pandemic-era stimulus checks. Biden, meanwhile, opted not to sign his name on subsequent slips, which some Democrats believed was a mistake.
I “learned something from Donald Trump; he signed checks for people,” Biden said last year. “I didn’t: stupid.”
This time, it’s unclear whether Trump’s vows on direct payments have permeated the public psyche. Searches for “2000 dollars trump” and “stimulus check 2025” skyrocketed this week, according to Google Trends. But Heye noted that the “sheer volume” of news under Trump means that “most people are not focused on the minute-by-minute” developments of his office.
“Trump knows that,” says Heye. “My guess is because we’ve seen this a million times; we’ll have forgotten about this rather quickly — unless he keeps bringing it up.”
Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for BLN.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
___
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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