Trump’s phony dividend

We’ve all heard the old saying… Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. But by the time the foolery gets to the third, fourth, or fifth go-round, you would hope voters finally get the idea.
It’s a legitimate concern in the wake of Donald Trump’s latest promise to the electorate. At his Trumpapalooza in Dallas earlier this month, he told the crowd that he would send $5,000 to every adult citizen if voters would just—pretty please—keep Republicans in control of Congress in November. If it sounds a little desperate, you may be onto something. If it sounds like Trump’s usual con, you would be correct.
The president says his $5,000 payoff will be called the “Trump dividend,” which is perfectly appropriate since Trump would be left with the “dividend” of two more years of zero accountability to run his corrupt grifts from the White House. As for the rest of us, don’t book your Christmas get-away just yet, because the check is definitely not in the mail and it isn’t going to be, no matter who controls Congress next January.
The president was asked about the cost of his latest promise and said the country can “easily” afford it because “we’re taking in so much money.” He’s right about that. With Trump back in office, our deficit and debt have exploded, just like in his first term. We’re taking in so much money because we’re issuing Treasury bonds at a rate of about $42 billion a week. (Ital) And we’re paying near record high interest rates on all of Trump’s debt on top of it. In Trump’s six years in office, the U.S. has accumulated an astonishing $11.6 trillion in debt, approximately 30 percent of the total over the nation’s 250 years of existence. Trump once called himself the “King of Debt” and Americans now understand what he was talking about.
His promised checks would add another $1.2 trillion to that deficit, but what’s another trillion? Trump likes to slap his name on things, so maybe we should rename the U.S. National Debt, the “Donald Trump Debt,” since he is, by far, the biggest contributor to our bottomless pit.
Then again, you can rest assured that Trump will deliver on those checks— because he said so. “I always keep my pledge,” he told his sycophants at Fox News.
So, how about a little fact check on that?
Remember the tariff dividend? Last November, the president told Americans they “will be paid” $2,000 apiece from tariff revenue, and that anyone who doubted it was a fool. That was ten months ago. We’ve checked the mailbox. We’ve checked the bank account. We’ve even checked under the couch cushions. The bottom line? If you were counting on that money, you’ve now had ten months to rethink who was really the fool.
Remember the DOGE dividend? That was going to be a hefty one. Elon Musk and his chainsaw were going to find $2 trillion in government waste, and the president embraced the idea of sending some of the savings back to taxpayers. The chainsaw bloodied a lot of decent middle class public servants, but savings to the government were hard to find. DOGE’s much-hyped “Wall of Receipts” claimed $110 billion in savings, but a government watchdog reported in August that the figure was mostly illusory.
Then there’s the really big one, the promise that got a lot of folks to the polls to vote for Trump in 2024. Trump said he was going to bring down prices, first thing. “On Day One,” he liked to say. We know how that one turned out. Anyone who has bought groceries, gassed up the truck, or contemplated the sheer horror of filling their fuel oil tank can offer their own review of how well that’s all turned out.
We’ll grant that a campaign promise is not a contract. Candidates have promised the moon for as long as there have been elections, and voters have generally learned to discount them accordingly.
But there’s a difference between a candidate who overpromises and a president with a track record. This one has now promised Americans checks at least three different ways, from three different pots of money, and delivered on not one of them. That’s not a broken promise. It’s a pattern.
Putting Republicans back in charge in Washington come November isn’t going to yield us all checks. What it will do is guarantee another round of tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, and higher health care costs and shuttered rural clinics for the rest of us. Trump has gotten where he is today by making promises to the American people that he has no intention of keeping.
Fool me once…