U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says the legislation he is filing to send $600 tariff rebate checks to Americans are not for “Biden voters,” but for “Trump blue-collar voters.”
“Well, you wouldn’t give it to everybody, you’d give it to the working people,” Senator Hawley told far-right podcaster Steve Bannon on Tuesday (video below). “You’d give it to our people.”
“I mean, you know, the rich people don’t need it, and but what I mean by that is all those Democrat donors of Wall Street, all these hedge fund guys who all hate the tariffs, by the way.”
Hawley said, “We’re on track to raise over $150 billion from tariff revenues this year alone, this calendar year alone.”
He did not mention that most of the tariff money is paid by U.S. consumers and U.S. companies.
“My view is, we ought to give a portion to that back to our working-class blue-collar voters who powered the Trump revolution, who got this president into office multiple times, and who are the backbone of this nation.”
“Biden has crushed these people,” Hawley alleged. “What a legacy for Donald Trump to say, ‘I’m gonna take a portion of this massive money’ that he’s raising on these tariffs, and return it to the people who run this country and are gonna build our future.”
Hawley then got down to some specifics.
“It’d be $600 for every adult and child, so if you’ve got a big family, you’re gonna get more,” he said, calling his plan “fantastic.”
“And you’d phase it out for income, you know? So again, the wealthy—you start making six figures, you get into the big six figures—you’d phase the thing out.”
“So this is not going to the hedge fund managers or all the Biden voters. This is not going to the Wall Street kingpins. So they don’t need any of it.”
“This is going to the Trump blue collar voters, the people who Joe Biden crushed, the people who didn’t get a raise under Joe Biden for four long years, the people who cannot afford their gas, because Joe Biden shut down our energy, who can’t afford their groceries, because Joe Biden drove up the price of everything,” Hawley claimed, despite prices on many items being higher under President Trump.
“And it is a message from us to them, from Trump to these folks that he is here to deliver for them.”
Hawley is facing blowback from critics who say the $600 checks should not be issued, but rather, should be used to pay down America’s debt, which Republicans, including President Trump, just increased by about $3.4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.