Last week, I stood on a Chicago street corner in a blinding snowstorm and watched a homeless man crawl inside a big wooden box on wheels. A bright orange tarp, meant to serve as a tent, kept ripping loose in the wind. Every few seconds, he curled up inside, then climbed back out to wrestle with the flapping tarp. Eventually, he surrendered to the wind, and the tarp became a half-torn sail — his flag.
In the Age of Trump, it’s almost as if the American people are contestants on a dystopian gameshow, competing for prizes. As the host, Donald Trump puts his arm around the contestant’s shoulder, points to a box on the stage and bellows, “Show me the money!” Here is a hint: You most certainly do not want what is in that box.
The newest prize Trump is dangling before the American people is a $2,000 tariff dividend check.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” he said in a Nov. 9 Truth Social post. “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
A week later, he told reporters, “We’re going to be issuing dividends later on, somewhere prior to, you know, probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that. Thousands of dollars for individuals of moderate income, middle income.”
Tellingly, Trump’s tariff rebate checks will be doled out just before the 2026 midterms — and will almost certainly feature his face and signature, along with an accompanying letter of congratulations. But promises are one thing; economic reality is another.
Trump has been making these promises for weeks. He’s now attaching a timeline to them. Tellingly, Trump’s tariff rebate checks will be doled out just before the 2026 midterms — and will almost certainly feature his face and signature, along with an accompanying letter of congratulations. But promises are one thing; economic reality is another.
To little effect, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has tried to walk back and qualify Trump’s promises of checks, which would likely require congressional approval. There is also growing concern and opposition among Senate Republicans, who prefer the money be used to reduce the federal deficit.
Economists have warned that Trump’s tariffs have not raised enough money to fund his promised checks. The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that there may only be enough money to pay for about half of the 600 billion dollars that would be needed for his scheme.
The tariff check is only the first shiny prize in Trump’s game show. He is also promising other forms of free money.
Instead of extending the tax subsidies that have helped tens of millions of Americans to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, Republicans now want to give cash payments directly to the public so that they can buy their own health insurance — policies that would likely have very high deductibles and offer thin benefits.
The real goal is to gut the Affordable Care Act.
As part of the “Big Vile Bill” that he signed into law in July, Trump and MAGA Republicans created their own version of baby bonds, which they have dubbed “Trump Accounts,” where parents can invest up to $5,000 a year into a tax-free investment account for their children until they reach 18 years of age. The federal government will provide the initial $1,000 grant for children born after Dec. 31, 2024, and before Jan. 1, 2029. These accounts stand to primarily benefit wealthy families, who have more disposable income to contribute to such plans, as well as other methods of leveraging them for maximum gain.
These spectacles and political gameshow-like ploys and shiny objects distract from the brutal economic realities facing everyday Americans.
Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and author of the new book “Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet,” explained that Trump’s tariff checks are just another example of him as the ultimate showman.
“Facing mounting challenges and plummeting popularity, Trump is serving up distracting, alluring prizes and ‘tariff dividend checks’ in true carnival barker fashion,” he said. “While the stock market booms for the wealthy, U.S. working families are still suffering from stagnant wages, layoffs, and rising costs for groceries, housing, health care and other basics.”
Collins pointed out that with millions of families living paycheck to paycheck, the “billionaires [and] thousandaires” should be assuming more of the burden. “After nine months of economic chaos and pro-billionaire government policies,” he noted, “what our country truly needs is a steady and predictable economic policy, a restoration of progressive taxes on the extremely wealthy, and protections against political grifting and self-dealing.”
Public opinion polls support Collins’ position. A majority of Americans favor policies that raise the minimum wage, strengthen the middle class, protect unions, address the housing crisis, expand access to affordable healthcare and make the rich and corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
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Trump’s free money is not an act of benevolence or generosity; it is a product of a culture of cruelty and hollowed-out American democracy that rests upon a much deeper moral crisis.
“Trump’s game show-style giveaways…are not policy responses,” Henry Giroux, a social theorist, said. “What masquerades as generosity is simply gangster capitalism transformed into the politics of disposability in its purest form: The state is hollowed out, social rights vanish and people are thrown back onto the market, grateful for whatever crumbs of short-term relief fall from above.”
The long-term damage wrought by Trump’s game show politics, Giroux said, will be lasting. “They teach Americans to see themselves not as citizens entitled to social protections, but as contestants in a cruel lottery where survival hinges on loyalty to the leader rather than the strength of democratic institutions.”
Voters across the country are demanding meaningful change, but party leaders seem unable or unwilling to respond to their cries. Democrats, in response to the administration’s shock-and-awe assault, are now trying to craft a winning political strategy centered on “affordability.”
But Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is not convinced that affordability will address the deeper systemic and institutional forces that are causing so much economic pain.
“What’s needed — and missing — is a coherent response from Democratic politicians,” he said. “What we mostly get instead is partisan sniping. Few prominent Democrats on the national stage are willing to clearly denounce the culprits for the reality that rents and so much else are too damn high — because corporations get away with routine price-gouging while the government does nothing to stop it.”
Since at least the 1980s, the American people have been conditioned to accept a neoliberal gangster-capitalist regime of permanent economic precarity and extreme wealth as normal, the price of liberty and freedom. In reality, this destruction of the American Dream and middle class was not preordained or somehow natural. It was a choice made by policymakers and other elites.
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“No humane society forces its citizens to drown themselves in debt just to pay for the basics, and no humane society tells people that they will never be able to have a decent middle-class lifestyle no matter how hard they work,” explained A. Mechele Dickerson, University of Texas Law School professor and author of the new book “The Middle-Class New Deal.”
The crisis is dire: The average American does not have $1,000 for an emergency. Ultimately, when asked to choose between a so-called democracy where they don’t feel very free and the prospect of getting thousands of dollars in supposedly free money from Donald Trump, too many Americans will likely choose the second option.
Put another way: Trump is basically trying to buy votes.
His calculation is a sound one: Research suggests that many low-information and independent voters backed Trump in 2024, at least in part, because they believed a rumor that he would give them an additional stimulus check.
Given the worsening economy and how the American Dream is now a luxury that is out of reach for most Americans, Donald Trump’s newest hustle may yet prove successful.
In that scenario, he won’t need to lie, cheat or steal to win a third term in office.
Instead, Donald Trump will simply promise to make it rain money if his contestants put him back in the White House.
