The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal blasted President Donald Trump in an editorial for "suggesting that voters are idiots" for not buying into his tariffs while promising Americans a $2,000 tariff stimulus check, The Daily Beast reports.

The conservative newspaper's editorial board scorned Trump's use of a "hail Mary" to "blunt the harm" of his sweeping tariffs.

“We’ve advised Mr. Trump from the beginning that tariffs would do economic harm, and so they are. They’re also doing political damage to the GOP, which is why he’s floating rebates that contradict his other tariff claims. One other suggestion, Mr. President: It’s never a good idea to call the voters ‘fools,’” the board wrote.

On Sunday, Trump wrote on social media that "people that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!” proposing that “a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone."

Like many critics who came out against Trump's Truth Social proposal, the WSJ editorial board "noted that issuing $2,000 checks to potentially hundreds of millions of people would significantly add to the already ballooning national debt," reports The Daily Beast.

The idea, the Daily Beast notes, also "contradicts remarks made by Solicitor General John Sauer before the Supreme Court last week during a hearing on whether Trump’s tariffs were legally imposed," saying, "They’re clearly regulatory tariffs, not taxes,” Sauer said. “They are the exercise of the power to regulate foreign commerce.”

The WSJ editorial board slammed that idea, writing, "If tariffs are most effective if no one ever pays them, then how are they going to raise the revenue Mr. Trump needs to pay those rebates? The truth is tariffs are taxes, but Mr. Sauer didn’t want to admit this lest the Court conclude that Mr. Trump is usurping a core constitutional power of Congress. Which he is."

“Mr. Trump is essentially promising to repay Americans $2,000 of the border taxes they’re paying in higher prices. But if tariffs are a free economic lunch, and their benefits abound, why offer a rebate? Shouldn’t voters be thrilled about tariffs even without a rebate?" they asked.

President Donald Trump wants to send Americans $2,000 checks as a “tariff rebate.” Senate Republicans, however, are far from convinced.

Speaking to The Hill on Wednesday, various top Republicans in the Senate added to the growing skepticism surrounding Trump’s new tariff check proposal. As is commonly the case with matters involving federal spending, the senators’ concerns largely revolved around the national debt, which hit $38 trillion in October after growing at a historic rate during Trump’s second term, though they did not dismiss the checks proposal outright.

“I’ve also heard suggestions that they would apply any tariff revenue to debt repayment, which I think is a really good idea,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. “So, we’ll look forward and await any suggestions they might have.

“The amount of revenue coming in from the tariffs is considered to be substantial at this point and hopefully can be put to a useful purpose, in my view one of which would be repaying the debt.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate GOP’s policy committee, also told The Hill that paying down the debt would be her “preferred route.”

“I think we need to have a more fleshed-out plan. Does it go to everybody?” Capito said. “I think my preferred route, quite honestly, would be to pay down the debt, but I want to hear out his program.”

Sen. James Lankford, vice chair of the Senate Republican Conference, came down more definitively against the checks proposal.

“Any income that’s coming in from anywhere is reducing the deficit at this point,” Lankford said, noting the national debt is now nearly $40 trillion. “Whatever dividend that would be paid… would still add to our debt.”

Trump has floated the idea of payments to American taxpayers from tariff revenue in the past, but brought the concept back to the forefront after affordability issues drove major election wins for Democrats in early November. The idea, as he put forward, would distribute $2,000 checks to every American adult making under a certain income threshold.

According to calculations from the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Trump’s proposal would cost roughly $600 billion, even with high-income individuals excluded. The Treasury Department had only collected around $136 billion from tariffs through the end of July.

As poll numbers on his handling of the US economy have continued to sink in recent weeks, President Donald Trump has floated sending Americans a $2,000 check that he has claimed will be funded with revenue collected from his tariffs on imported products.

However, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) on Tuesday crunched some numbers and found that Trump’s proposed tariff “dividend” simply doesn’t add up.

In particular, Baker found that the revenue being generated by the tariffs is less than half of the total cost of sending nearly every US citizen a $2,000 check.

“At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes,” Baker explained. “Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt?”

Baker declared Trump’s tariff math “crazy,” and then speculated that the president sincerely believes the false claims he’s been making about securing $18 trillion in investments from foreign countries. What’s more, Baker said that it appears that no one on the president’s economic policy team wants to tell him that this belief is purely delusional.

“People like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or National Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett may not be brilliant intellects, but they know that Trump does not have trillions of dollars from foreign countries to play with, and that we are still running deficits that would ordinarily be considered very large,” he said. “But they are too scared of Donald Trump to explain this to him.”

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, said in an interview with CNN published on Tuesday that Trump could also reignite inflation by sending out $2,000 checks to everyone, as this would likely increase demand for goods and services without a corresponding increase in supply.

“All of this is exactly the wrong recipe if you want to get inflation under control and make things feel more affordable,” she said.

York also said in a separate interview with the Associated Press that it makes little sense to cut Americans a check when one of the main reasons they’re paying more for so many products has been the president’s tariffs.

“If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs,” she said.

Michael Pearce, deputy chief US economist at Oxford Economics, echoed York’s concern about the dividend checks worsening inflation, and he told CNN that the risk with Trump’s plan is “if you add a stimulus check on top of a tax cut refund, you’re going to overheat the economy.”

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers was even more blunt in his take on Trump’s tariff dividend idea, which he labeled, “insane, unfair, pointless and dumb.”

“If tariffs are making Americans poorer,” Wolfers told CNN, “the simplest and fairest way to stop that is not to tariff.”

In the days following last Tuesday’s sweeping Democratic victories, Trump administration officials fanned out across news outlets to highlight the administration’s focus on affordability, assuring Americans that prices have fallen under President Donald Trump. The president himself reiterated his claim—made many times before—that grocery prices are “way down.”

Critics say that overall, prices largely have not come down, and inflation remains around 3%—roughly the same level as when President Trump took office earlier this year.

Last Wednesday, Politico reported that a person close to the White House told the news outlet that “The President hasn’t talked about the cost of living in months.”

And White House deputy chief of staff James Blair told Politico, “You’ll see the president talk a lot about cost of living as we turn … into the new year.”

But now the White House is insisting the focus has been there all along, and denies any post-election ramp up.

“It’s not something where we called a meeting Wednesday morning after the election and said, ‘We have to get stuff on the board now,’” an unnamed White House source told Politico on Tuesday. “At both a systemic level and more targeted micro examples, we have been consistently focused on addressing affordability.”

Late last week, the Associated Press confirmed the President’s new messaging focus.

“President Donald Trump is adjusting his messaging strategy to win over voters who are worried about the cost of living with plans to emphasize new tax breaks and show progress on fighting inflation,” the AP reported. “The messaging is centered around affordability, and the push comes after inflation emerged as a major vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in Tuesday’s elections, in which voters overwhelmingly said the economy was their biggest concern.”

Politico on Tuesday also noted the increase in messaging.

“In the wake of last week’s bruising off-year elections that underscored just how vulnerable the GOP is heading into 2026, Trump has announced a bevy of policies that may ease the pressure on household budgets.”

Those include a claim he will send low- and middle-income Americans $2,000 tariff dividend checks, and a deal with pharmaceutical companies to sell popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs at reduced prices.

On Sunday, he also proposed sending Americans money for health savings accounts in what appeared to be an attack on Obamacare and insurance companies.

CNBC reported on Tuesday that economists say some of these ideas “are not likely to become policy anytime soon.”

As prices remain high at grocery store checkouts, President Trump, however, has been pushing back on Americans’ affordability focus, while insisting his job is already done.

Last week, Trump “bragged that the price of Walmart’s pre-assembled Thanksgiving Dinner has been reduced by 25% this year,” a Monday USA Today opinion piece by Chris Brennan noted. Also reduced were the number of items in the meal.

“I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” Trump said on November 6, Brennan noted, as he “defended his administration’s attempts to resist a judge’s order to make full federal food assistance program payments, known as SNAP, to 42 million Americans, during the federal government shutdown.”

One day later, “Trump insisted that the recent focus on ‘affordability’ was a ‘con job’ by Democrats.”

Trump repeated his “con job” claim Monday night on Fox News, along with some other incorrect claims, such as the price of gas.