During Thursday’s edition of “Inside Politics,” CNN anchor and Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju poked holes in President Donald Trump’s promise to send $5,000 rebate checks to Americans by rolling a highlight reel of him making the same promise “over and over again.”
While speaking Wednesday at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, Trump pledged to send every American adult a check for $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both the House and the Senate after this year’s midterm election cycle. As Raju was quick to note Thursday, that is not the first time the president has made and broken such a promise.
“The president’s been making these promises over and over again about giving a rebate check for this and that and the other,” Raju told CNN viewers, before teasing, “We have a bit of a mash-up of his promises over the months.”
Raju aired five clips of Trump. In the first, the president hinted that his administration was considering giving 20% of the savings created by his and Elon Musk’s DOGE agency last year to American citizens. In the other clips, Trump talked about a federal rebate generated by the money from his tariffs and a “dividend to our middle-income people and lower-income people” of $2,000.
Trump made that same promise in the last clip Raju played, in which the president boasted at the time, “We have so much money coming in from tariffs that we’ll be able to issue at least a $2,000 dividend and also pay down debt.”
In response, Raju wryly observed, “Yeah, that really didn’t play out.” Puck reporter and “Inside Politics” panelist Leigh Ann Caldwell concurred with Raju.
“The funniest part of that entire thing was his lead-up talking about the way that, the reason they can do that is because the economy is so amazing and the fiscal situation is so great in the United States that he’s able to pay Americans if Republicans win,” Caldwell observed, adding, “This is not going to happen.”
As Caldwell noted, the $5,000 promise that Trump gave Wednesday would be so “extremely expensive” that even the fiscal conservatives who are on Trump’s side “might actually say something.”
“Passing the $5,000? Congress is not going to do that,” Caldwell said. “It’s extremely expensive, and also, when Republicans are trying to slam Democrats as socialists, this is probably not the best message, considering that it might just also be a socialist policy.”
