ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania — President Donald Trump remains open to a potential rebate for middle-income and low-income earners, thanks to the vast sums of money coming into the Treasury through his tariff policies.
During a gaggle before Trump boarded Air Force One en route to Joint Base Andrews, Breitbart News asked about the possibility of a rebate to Americans, emphasizing that the Treasury took in $29.6 billion in July.
Trump first emphasized that paying down the national debt is a top priority, but was open to tariff-funded dividends for the American people.
“Well, we’re going to pay down debt. We have a lot of money coming in, much more money than the country’s ever seen, by hundreds of billions of dollars. And there could be a distribution or dividend to the people of our country,” he said.
“I would say, for people that would be middle-income people and lower-income people, we could do a dividend, but one of the things we’re going to be doing is reducing debt,” he added. “We have hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our country now. We should have done this many years ago.”
Trump, whose tariff policies are defying critics who contended they would cause inflation, highlighted that he began the tariff process in his first term, but the coronavirus pandemic stymied the plans.
“I did it in my first term with China. We didn’t get to the rest because COVID hit, and you couldn’t really go to France and Spain and Italy, and say, ‘Let’s … start talking about some tariffs. But China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we did it then. Then Biden screwed it all up … Everything he touched, he screwed up.”
Trump first floated a tariff revenue-funded rebate late last month while speaking with reporters at the White House before departing for his Scotland trip.