President Donald Trump’s pledge to hand Americans a $2,000 tariff “dividend” was immediately walked back by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday.
Trump announced his tariff rebate amid a barrage of Truth Social posts Sunday morning defending his tariffs and berating Supreme Court justices for questioning their legality at a hearing last week.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” he fumed, before falsely claiming that the U.S. was “taking in Trillions of Dollars” from the tariffs.
Trump, 79, then declared, “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” without further explanation. He added that efforts to pay down the record $38 trillion national debt would begin “soon.”
But Bessent, 63, dialed back Trump’s tariff rebate pledge just hours later during a contentious interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week.
“I haven’t spoken to the president about this yet,” he said, suggesting that Trump may have posted the idea on a whim and without input from his top advisers. “But the $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms and lots of ways, George.”
Rather than direct payments like the COVID-19 stimulus checks, Bessent suggested that Americans would receive Trump’s “tariff dividends” in the form of already-enacted tax cuts.
“It could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda. You know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security, deductibility of auto-loans. Those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill,” Bessent said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The GOP’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed this summer, includes provisions allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay, along with limited tax reductions for Social Security benefits.
Anti-Trump Republican strategist Susan Del Percio told MSNBC’s Alex Witt that Congress is unlikely to pass any stimulus payments.
“I don’t see Republicans, especially in the House, going along with this,” Del Percio said. “It just doesn’t work for the financial controls that the House wants to have on big spending.”
While Trump claims that his tariffs—a type of import tax paid by U.S. companies who typically pass the cost on to consumers—have brought in trillions, the Treasury Department reported in September that customs duties raked in $195 billion during the first three quarters of the year.
To roll out his tariffs, Trump circumvented Congress by declaring that the country’s trade deficit was an “emergency.”
Multiple Supreme Court justices, including Trump-nominated Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, voiced skepticism at a hearing last week about the president’s legal arguments for invoking emergency powers.
