Tariff dividend checks that were never happening still not happening
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The Supreme Court’s holding that Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were statutorily unauthorized was important, but some things it didn’t change at all:
The Supreme Court struck down a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda on Friday, also dealing a blow to the possibility of sending so-called tariff dividend checks to families, experts say.
“Tariff dividends were a long shot from the beginning,” said certified financial planner Stephen Kates, a financial analyst at Bankrate. “Given the White House’s lack of authority to unilaterally issue stimulus checks to Americans, the idea was largely aspirational,” he said.
Any such broad-based benefit program would require legislation passed by Congress. Following a major Supreme Court defeat and with an ongoing partisan battle in Washington, congressional approval would be especially difficult, he said.
“Even if tariffs were to return to prior levels and generate revenue for a broad stimulus program, there does not appear to be sufficient political support to move such a measure through Congress,” Kates said. “The odds of this policy moving forward is now effectively zero.”
[…]
The president first floated the idea of making direct distributions to Americans in July. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., then introduced the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025, which pitched a stimulus check funded with tariff revenue. The Senate referred that bill to the Committee on Finance, where it remains.
Later in the year, Trump said that a rebate check with the money his tariffs had generated would be forthcoming.
“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social in November.
I gotta say that there’s a little wit to having Josh Hawley introduce the phony, stillborn populist gesture. Important to have both the exoteric and esoteric meanings — to Republicans who opposed rebates having Hawley as the point man was a mortal guarantee that nothing was ever happening.
The important thing, though, is that Trump’s lie about checks that are coming is presumably still resonating through TikTok etc., and I assume a non-trivial number of Trump voters will convince themselves that they actually received them.