Donald Trump promised to reduce prices, instead he’s delivering Syrian warlords
The US President is at risk of failing his own political test on lower living costs, with concerns growing within the Republican Party that Trump is losing focus on his domestic priorities and spending too much time hosting foreign leaders in the White House.
Trump is facing growing calls to recalibrate his political strategy after last week’s Democratic victories in New York City, Virginia and New Jersey were widely interpreted as a warning signal for the White House ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
In his latest gamble, the President is presenting his sweeping tariffs as a solution for those feeling the economic pinch by declaring on his Truth Social platform that the revenue raised will mean that a “dividend of at least $2000 [$A3060] a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
It is not clear such an arrangement would work, with Trump using the same social media post on Sunday local time to argue the tariffs would take in trillions of dollars and help the nation pay down its “ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion.”
He followed-up this message with another on Monday (local time), declaring that “all money left over from the $2000 payments made to low and middle income USA Citizens, from the massive Tariff Income pouring into our Country from foreign countries, which will be substantial, will be used to SUBSTANTIALLY PAY DOWN NATIONAL DEBT.”
Yet there is a key problem with these comments – they undermine his own administration’s legal defence before the US Supreme Court of the reciprocal tariffs which were imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977.
While these imposts have raised about $US200bn already, US Solicitor-General John Sauer told the US Supreme Court last week that the IEEPA tariffs were “regulatory tariffs, not revenue-raising tariffs” and “the fact that they raise revenue is only incidental.”
The argument did not appear to satisfy most of the Supreme Court justices, some of whom argued that the ability to impose taxes and raise revenue was granted to the US Congress rather than the President.
Trump’s latest comments are likely to have only deepened suspicions about the strength of government’s case on the Supreme Court, but they also reveal a President who is starting to feel the pressure.
The vice president of federal tax policy at the Washington-based Tax Foundation, Erica York,
performed the rough calculations on Trump’s latest tariff proposal to show the maths simply didn’t add up.
Posting on social media, she said that “if the President sends $2,000 checks to the ~150 million people who make less than $100K, it would cost about $300 billion. The tariffs are projected to raise about $217 billion annually.”
She followed this up with the obvious point, declaring that the “US has not actually taken care of its deficit problem, and sending out $2,000 checks to millions of Americans would make the deficit problem worse.”
The Wall Street Journal also pointed out that the annual federal budget deficit is roughly $US1.8 trillion even with tariff revenue, so paying a rebate would add to the national debt rather than reduce it.
In a sign of the growing ruptures within the President’s MAGA support base, long time Trump-ally Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media to criticise the President’s meeting with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House on Monday.
She said he was a “former al-Qaeda terrorist wanted by our government” and warned that
many Christians and minority groups had been killed in Syria “before and after sanctions were lifted.”
“I would really like to see non-stop meetings at the WH on domestic policy not foreign policy and foreign country’s leaders,” she said.
Asked about the criticism, Trump responded by saying “she’s lost her way, I think. But I have to view the presidency as a worldwide situation, not locally. I mean, we could have a world that’s on fire, where wars come to our shores very easily.”
But the push to refocus on domestic issues is also being advocated by figures much closer to the President.
Following last week’s election victories for the Democrats, Vice President JD Vance posted on Truth Social: “We need to focus on the home front.”
“The president has done a lot that has already paid off in lower interest rates and lower inflation, but we inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn’t built in a day. We’re going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country, and that’s the metric by which we’ll ultimately be judged in 2026 and beyond.”
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Donald Trump won the presidency last year by campaigning on the cost of living, but he is now facing serious push back for not doing enough to ease price pressures and growing dissatisfaction at his economic agenda.