Sorry, you’re not getting a $2,000 check from Trump

It's Trump latest gambit to save his import tariffs. A better stimulus would be killing the tariffs altogether.

President Trump is obviously worried about the fate of his tariffs, which the Supreme Court may soon eviscerate.

Trump’s first gambit to save his tariffs was to threaten an economic disaster if the court upholds two lower court rulings that invalidate most of the import taxes Trump has imposed this year. But the economy was doing fine before Trump launched his 2025 trade war, and most economists think growth will improve and inflation will moderate if the tariffs disappear.

Since everybody laughed off Trump’s doomsaying, he’s now pitching a new reason to keep the tariffs: Everybody will get some free money. On November 9, Trump posted on social media that “a dividend of at least $2,000 per person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

It’s a mirage.

Trump started the post by saying, “people that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” Then he said, “we are taking in trillions of dollars.” So the $2,000 dividend he has in mind will supposedly be a gift to the American people for putting up with his tariffs.

Except Trump doesn’t get to decide who gets money from the government. And there’s no tariff slush fund for Trump to tap, to write checks to taxpayers. Congress can do it, but nobody should start banking on another government stimmy.

Many Americans probably remember the stimulus checks that want out to the majority of taxpayers during the Covid pandemic. Congress passed legislation authorizing three rounds of stimmies, with minimum payouts of $1,200 (March 2020), $600 (December 2020) and $1,400 (March 2021). There were additional amounts for taxpayers with children. Income limits meant wealthy people didn’t qualify.

So there’s a clear precedent for Congress approving legislation that sends money to taxpayers. But Congress approved those three stimmies during an economic emergency, with much of the economy shut down.

There’s no emergency right now. And while Trump’s fellow Republicans do control both houses of Congress, they’ve got their hands full with a government shutdown and a $37 trillion national debt that’s only getting worse.

Many Republicans dislike Trump’s tariffs, which disrupt the free trade the party once stood for. Busting the budget even more to support unpopular tariffs isn’t in the cards. Policy analyst Henrietta Treyz of Veda Partners puts the odds of Congress passing a tariff stimmy at just 10%.

There’s not enough new money for the Trump stimmies, anyway. Trump’s new tariffs have raised about $116 billion in additional revenue through September, according to the Tax Foundation. If fully imposed at Trump’s preferred levels, they might raise $240 billion per year, which would be $2.4 trillion during the next decade, assuming no future president reversed them.

The December 2020 and March 2021 stimulus payments, which, if you combine them, started at the same $2,000 threshold Trump wants for his checks, cost the government about $542 billion in foregone revenue. So if you assume Trump’s new stimmie would cost the same $542 billion, it would take about 2.5 years for new tariff revenue to cover the cost of Trump’s $2,000 dividend payment.

That’s not adjusted for inflation. You could do a more precise estimate, except by now it ought to be obvious that the whole idea of taxing American importers to write a dividend check to American taxpayers, who end up bearing much of the cost of the tariffs anyway, is just a tax-and-rebate shell game that needlessly moves taxpayer money through new gates Trump has constructed to micromanage trade. It raises everybody’s costs, adds inefficiencies, and benefits hardly anybody—except Trump.

The Supreme Court has a different concern, which is that the 1977 law Trump is using to impose most of his tariffs on an “emergency” basis doesn’t actually give him tariff authority. Trump has used the emergency justification for about three-quarters of the tariffs he has enacted this year. If the Supremes knocks down the emergency tariffs, Trump has other options, but they’re more limited, take longer and give him far less flexibility.

Maybe Trump thinks he’ll persuade the justices to keep the emergency tariffs in places if he poses them as the basis for a taxpayer rebate. But revoking those tariffs would be an even better tax cut, because it would actually cut import taxes that American businesses and consumers are paying. You wouldn’t get a check in the mail, but you’d face lower prices for thousands of items, which would ultimately add up to more than a Trump stimmy.