They’re at it again. The billionaires who own and run the GOP — including the billionaire in the White House and the billionaires in his cabinet — are throwing out another desperate “let’s buy some votes” scheme by sending a million Americans their own money.
According to the White House, over the next few days about a million Americans will get a check for $500 in the mail, prominently signed by Donald Trump, along with a letter telling them a naked lie about it being money Joe Biden kept from them.
It appears this all started when Trump, on September 9th at his “convention” in Dallas, promised to send a check for $5,000 to every American family if only us voters keep Republicans in charge of both the House and the Senate. You vote the way he wants, in other words, and you get paid.
Trump’s problem is that anybody with a memory knows it’s a lie. He promised us $5,000 DOGE dividend checks, $2,000 tariff rebate checks, and $1,500 we were supposed to get when Republicans reconfigured Obamacare, and none of them materialized. Just before the 2020 election he also promised us a $2,000 Covid stimulus check that never came.
And then there were the promises for the 10% rate on credit cards, “1000% cheaper” medications, inexpensive groceries and gas, no more stupid wars, a Trump national healthcare plan, the balanced budget, the Epstein files, and “millions of jobs.”
So, that’s why now he’s cutting these $500 checks for almost a million of us, so his $5,000 check story will sound more credible. It’s essentially the down-payment on a bribe, designed to make people take it seriously.
And one of the really disgusting parts of the whole scam is that he’s also using it as an excuse to take a swipe at Joe Biden based on a lie.
The checks will come with a letter claiming that the Biden administration had “massively overcharged” people who bought insurance on the Obamacare exchange by collecting more in marketplace user fees than they needed, and then sat on the cash. In his video announcement Trump put it this way:
“The last administration knew about this, they studied it, but they kept the money.”
Not only did Trump or his people fail to offer even the tiniest shred of proof of that claim, but health policy experts at KFF say most likely the money came from Trump’s own first term, when his administration collected so much more in fees than it spent that it left behind an estimated $1 billion in unspent funds.
KFF’s Larry Levitt told the New York Times that Biden actually lowered those user fees, but the leftover money that Trump is sending out exists because Trump refused to spend money that was set aside for advertising and for the groups that help Americans sign up for coverage, all because he wanted Obamacare to fail.
In other words, Trump’s so-called “Biden overcharge” is money Trump “saved” by making it harder for average Americans to get cheap health insurance.
The Times also reported that $500 is more than any of these folks could have personally paid in excess fees, and that the liars and hustlers (my phrase) in this administration still haven’t published the actual accounting behind the program.
If this were really about giving back an overcharge, the simple fix would be to lower the fee today and let premiums drop for people on the Obamacare exchanges. That very rational way of distributing the overcharge money, however, wouldn’t put a check in a million voters’ hands just weeks before an election.
And they’ve done their homework on who to target with this free money over Trump’s signature. These are all people who bought their own health insurance through the federal ACA exchange, so virtually all of them must be making under $65,000 a year: think farmers, ranchers, small business owners, hourly workers, and early retirees.
Their insurance costs have exploded by literally thousands of dollars this year because Trump’s Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill let the ACA/Obamacare subsidies expire to pay for a tax cut. Roughly three million Americans were so price-shocked that they simply dropped their coverage altogether (which will show up in premature deaths soon) and, because they’re no longer on the plans, they’ll get nothing at all from this latest Trump check scam.
And insurers are already asking for another 15% increase in Obamacare premiums for next year, as their already-bloated profits aren’t enough and their morbidly rich CEOs need to buy another yacht, trophy wife, or Swiss chalet.
So, to summarize, Trump took money from these families, is handing back five hundred, and wants a thank-you vote from them on November 3rd. And the 30 states where the checks are going just happens to include Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
None of this is new behavior for this billionaire-owned and -run crowd. Elon Musk handed out million-dollar checks to voters in Pennsylvania in 2024, and did it again in Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court race, where a bipartisan state elections commission found probable cause that he broke the state’s election bribery law.
Trump told two dozen morbidly rich oil executives at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 that if they’d throw a billion dollars at his campaign he’d gut any environmental rules they wanted. He’s followed up by paying companies billions to abandon wind and solar projects, increasing subsidies and deductions for the fossil fuel industry, gutting our clean air protections, killing EV subsidies, and reviving coal-powered electric plants.
His Department of Homeland Security then blew $220 million of our money on ads thanking him, and — surprise! — firms tied to his own campaign operatives pocketed at least $23 million in commissions.
This is simply how today’s Republican Party believes politics should work, a belief that’s been ratified by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Money goes in and favors come out. It’s spread across every major industry in America, as you can see by the parade of CEOs constantly bringing gifts and million-dollar checks to the White House so they can kiss Trump’s you-know-what and shine his shoes.
The oil barons, the drug companies, the banks, and the tech billionaires write the checks, and their obedient Republican politicians write the laws those “donors” want. They’ve lived inside that arrangement for so long that they assume the rest of us operate the same way, and that a voter, like a senator, will leap to respond to anybody who writes them a check.
This used to be a crime. After the robber baron scandals of the Gilded Age, Teddy Roosevelt pushed a humiliated Congress to pass the Tillman Act in 1907 to make it a felony for any corporation to give any sort of support or money to the campaign for any candidate for federal office.
As I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, it started with Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, Nixon putting Powell on the Court in 1972, and then a series of corrupt all-Republican decisions from Bellotti (authored by Powell himself) to Citizens United, to redefine political bribery as “free speech.” Republicans built that pay-to-play system, they use and defend it daily, and now their president is offering it to everyday voters.
A political party that believes votes are something you purchase doesn’t believe in democracy, a system that’s grounded in the idea that citizens should choose their leaders based on what’s good for their families and their country, and that our government works for our people rather than for whichever billionaire or corporate behemoth hands out the most cash.
A party that rejects that idea, and proves it with taxpayer-funded ads, cash-for-control promises, and election-eve checks wrapped in a lie about the last president, has long ago abandoned and forfeited any claim to legitimacy.
If one of these checks shows up at your house, cash it. It’s your money. Then vote like you know who raised your premiums in the first place.
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