Treasury Sec Has Idiotic Idea for How People Can Use Stimulus Checks

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hopes that Americans will save their $2,000 checks President Donald Trump promised for a rainy day—if they get them at all.

During a disastrous appearance on Fox News Tuesday, host Brett Baier asked whether Trump’s repeated promise to deliver $2,000 dividends of tariff money to every American would be inflationary.

“Well, there are a lot of things that are gonna happen next year, and that could be one of them,” said Bessent. “And maybe we could persuade Americans to save that.”

Bessent suggested that parents could potentially put the money into their children’s “Trump accounts,” where the government plans to deposit $1,000 for Americans born between 2025 and 2028. Parents are encouraged to contribute up to $5,000 annually. Bessent has claimed that the accounts will give disillusioned young people a stake in the economy, while providing a “backdoor” to privatize Social Security.

But if the secretary’s plan to fight steadily rising inflation relies on Americans not immediately spending a $2,000 check, we’re in some serious trouble. Americans are increasingly worried about how to pay for necessities such as food and health care, concerns helped in no small part by the Trump administration’s attacks on SNAP and Obamacare. Some extra cash would likely go straight into paying for bills.

It’s also not clear that an actual payout is coming. Earlier this month, Bessent claimed that the president’s promise of a two-grand payout “could come in lots of forms,” listing the supposedly “substantial” tax deductions outlined in Trump’s behemoth budget bill that passed in July, and falsely claiming that Social Security would no longer be taxed.

Additionally, Trump’s tariffs haven’t actually collected enough money to pay for the kind of payout the president promised. The Trump administration has collected more than $220 billion in tariff revenue, but the $2,000 paid to all 163 million Americans who filed their taxes would cost roughly $326 billion, according to CNN. So that would leave -$106 billion to pay off the national debt.

A Ponzi schemer who Donald Trump saved from prison is headed right back to the clink.

Eliyahu “Eli” Weinstein was sentenced Friday to 37 years in prison in a New Jersey courtroom, capping the career criminal’s third fraud conviction.

Prosecutors argued that Weinstein, who in recent years went by the alias Mike Konig to hide his criminal history, milked roughly $35 million from dozens of investors who believed they were putting their money into Covid-19 masks, baby formula, and first aid kits for Ukraine, according to the indictment.

It was a crime that Weinstein never would have been able to cook up if the president hadn’t lifted him out of federal prison in 2021. At the time, Weinstein had served just eight years of a combined 24-year prison sentence for two fraud convictions—a real estate fraud scheme in which he utilized a portfolio of fake property investments to reel in $200 million from unsuspecting buyers, and another in which he duped dozens of investors into investing in Facebook just before the social media company went public (swindling at least one investor of $6.7 million).

For whatever reason, Trump decided Weinstein was the guy who deserved a get-out-of-jail-free card. The 51-year-old was a part of a whopping 143-person pardon the president issued the day before he left office in 2021. Other recipients of the unexpected clemency included former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, rapper Lil Wayne, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was sentenced to 28 years on corruption charges.

But Weinstein wasn’t ashamed of his behavior. In August 2022, he recalled that he “finagled, and Ponzied, and lied to people,” according to court documents. Shortly after he was released from prison, he started defrauding people again, orchestrating the Ponzi scheme that he was sentenced for last week.

U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp ruled that Weinstein must pay more than $44 million in restitution for his most recent offense, due immediately.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struggled to sell President Donald Trump’s outrageous claims about how much money the United States is making from his trade deals.

During an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, host Brett Baier asked Bessent how much money Trump was bringing in through trade deals, corporate commitments, and tariff revenue.

“Well, the president uses the number ‘20 trillion’ in terms of total investments, and I think that those commitments are real,” Bessent replied, sounding slightly unsure.

He rattled off a few examples of major investments as part of trade deals with Japan and Korea, as well as a commitment from Apple, calling them “investments like we’ve never seen.” But the Treasury secretary offered no exact number, just the president’s own propaganda.

Bessent’s waffling answer could indicate that he knows how ridiculous that “20 trillion” claim actually is. The White House’s own investments website lists the total of all U.S. and foreign investments at only $9 trillion—but crucially, the Trump administration also misstated some investments.

They claimed that Japan had agreed to make a $1 trillion investment, when the most recent deal from July was for only a little more than half of that. The website claimed that Korea has pledged a $450 billion investment in U.S. energy products, when the number is actually $350 billion, made up of $200 billion in cash installments capped at $20 billion per year and another $150 for shipbuilding. Similarly, Apple has pledged to spend more than $500 billion, and the White House website bumped that up to $600 billion.

At the same time, tariff revenue for FY 2025 was only $195 billion, which is a significant increase from the year before, but doesn’t push that number anywhere near the $20 trillion Trump has claimed.

The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey hit two major snags on Wednesday.

First, interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan, who brought the indictment, admitted the entire grand jury did not vote on the final indictment—a shocking development. Instead, only two grand jurors reviewed the indictment before it was presented in court.

Earlier in the day, Justice Department lawyer Tyler Lemons, who is prosecuting the case, also told U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff that someone in Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office ordered him not to disclose whether career prosecutors in the Department of Justice authored a memo recommending that Comey should not be indicted. Lemons said that he was told he couldn’t disclose privileged information without permission.

“At this point, my position would be, whether there was a declination memo, is privileged,” Lemons said. “I don’t know in the world of documents there is a declination memo.”

Nachmanoff pressed Lemons on whether that actually meant that he was told not to say anything by someone in Blanche’s office, but Lemons wouldn’t elaborate.

“I hope you understand that I am trying to answer your questions,” said Lemons.

While Lemons refused to answer the question, ABC News reported in September that career prosecutors did in fact recommend against indicting Comey. This latest development suggests that Blanche, formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney, is trying to keep that info from being part of the official record.

The indictment is being challenged by Comey for being politically motivated and tainted by government misconduct, and Comey seems to have a lot of evidence on his side. Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience prior to this case, is only in her position because her predecessor, Erik Siebert, refused to indict Comey due to a lack of evidence. With each development in Comey’s trial, Siebert’s decision is looking more and more correct.

Donald Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time low for his second term, and the president has his old pal Jeffrey Epstein to thank—and those pesky grocery prices.

Only 38 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance in office, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published Tuesday evening. That’s down a whopping nine points from Inauguration Day. But there’s still a far way to fall: Trump’s approval rating for his first term bottomed out at 33 percent.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files seemed to be a particularly sore spot for respondents. Only 20 percent of Americans—including only 44 percent of Republicans—approved of how Trump has handled the case against the alleged sex trafficker. A whopping 70 percent of respondents, including 60 percent of Republicans, said that they believed the government was concealing information about Epstein’s clients.

After months of dismissing calls for more transparency as a Democratic “hoax,” Trump claimed Sunday that he was prepared to sign a bipartisan measure to force the release of all the government’s documents related to Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking.

The bill finally made its way to Trump’s desk Wednesday after being approved by the House and Senate, but it’s not clear that the president intends to sign it into law. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Trump shared some of his so-called concerns about the unamended bill, indicating that Trump could still choose to veto the legislation.

Epstein wasn’t the only area of concern for Americans: Only 26 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s work managing the cost of living, down from 29 percent earlier this month.

After sweeping election victories for Democrats campaigning on the cost of living earlier this month, Trump ranted that he didn’t want to “hear about affordability.” And so far, it seems that the president’s renewed efforts to address Americans’ economic anxieties is simply to lie.

Trump has repeatedly claimed to have brought grocery prices down despite consumers experiencing the biggest price jump in more than three years, and pushed claims he has defeated Biden-era inflation even though it has steadily increased for the last five months in a row. Again, Trump has claimed that voter concerns were the result of a “con job” by Democrats. In reality, Trump’s tariffs and his crackdown on immigrants have significantly contributed to rising prices.