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 BS. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ass 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.

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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.

And please share this article and consider supporting our work at hartmannreport.com, because the billionaires can’t buy an electorate who knows in advance what kind of corrupt scam they’re up to.

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The Billionaires Won’t Publish Hard-Hitting Analysis Like This

After Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Jeff Bezos ran off almost every single opinion columnist at the Washington Post by declaring the paper would only publish opinions supporting “personal liberties and free markets.” Since then, the Post’s opinion section has become indistinguishable from Fox News.

But because Raw America doesn’t have a MAGA oligarch telling us what to write, we can bring you in-depth commentary like this that truly gets to the heart of the issues. If that’s something you find valuable, we’re counting on readers like you to keep this work going by becoming a paying subscriber. All it takes is 22 cents a day.

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Turn on Fox “News” at night this week and you’ll see something no American has ever seen before but Russians would immediately recognize.

Images of the American president flash across the screen while a singer repeats the words “love me” over and over, Trump’s voice promises to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism,” UFC boss Dana White calls him “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met,” and then, at the bottom of the screen, six words appear:

“Paid for by the U.S. government.”

Mediaite has confirmed that the ad ran through three shows on Fox but the White House says it’s all fine because it’s a “public service announcement” that’s “educational and unapologetically patriotic” and “clearly not political” because “the President is not on the ballot.”

The singer, JMSN, says he never authorized his song for “ANY political agenda or campaign.” Even Republican Senator Thom Tillis said using taxpayer dollars like this “feels like Viktor Orbán” and John Kennedy of Louisiana said he doesn’t “like to see politicians use public money to pay for their own campaign ads.”

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A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

Even more astonishing, this bit of state-run, taxpayer-funded propaganda that promises to destroy communism aired the same day Trump was rolling out a literal red carpet for Xi Jinping, an actual communist.

We’re finally reaching Full Putin here in America; with the “paid for by…” admission, this is the latest and most blatant example of Trump using the property, money, and machinery of the United States government to build a personal cult around himself and his billionaire buddies.

This pathetic, strongman-style self-aggrandizement isn’t new for Trump, of course, other than the admission in black-and-white type that our tax dollars are funding it.

— Back in 2020, Trump demanded his signature be prominent on the pandemic stimulus checks Congress appropriated to keep the economy afloat.
— When puppy-killer Kristi Noem budgeted $200 million for ads featuring her on horseback, she told a crowd at CPAC that Trump told her, “I want the first ad, and I want you to thank me.”
— Three-story banners of Trump’s face went up on the Agriculture, Labor, and Justice Department buildings in Washington, and Senator Adam Schiff’s office documented at least $50,000 in taxpayer contracts to pay for them.
— The State Department put his portrait and signature inside our U.S. passports, the first living president ever to appear there.
— The Treasury is now minting a gold-colored dollar coin with his face on it, even though federal law says only a dead person’s likeness can appear on our currency and the bipartisan coin advisory committee refused to review it.
— His name was slapped on the Kennedy Center, on TrumpRx.gov, on the Palm Beach airport, on “Trump accounts,” and on a “Trump class” of battleships, among other things. Now he’s reportedly considering renaming Fords’ Theater where Lincoln was shot.

This nation’s Founders warned us, repeatedly, about exactly this sort of presidential self-aggrandizement.

When Congress wrote the very first Coinage Act in 1792, the Senate’s version called for the president’s head to appear on our money, just as the king’s did in England. George Washington, then the president, wanted no part of it, calling it a “monarchical act.”

He then used his Farewell Address to warn about future “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would use the power, wealth, and levers of government to “subvert the power of the people.” As a result, the House version (which became law) of the Coinage Act specifically calls for “an impression emblematic of liberty” rather than a living president.

John Adams said we were to be “a government of laws, and not of men,” and Ben Franklin said he’d helped to create “a republic, if you can keep it.” Those men had put their lives on the line to create America, and now Trump is committed to destroying this republic and replacing it with a form of government like his mentor and owner, Putin, has created for himself in Russia.

There’s the presidency, and then there’s the president. In a strongman state they’re the same; in a democratic republic they’re very different things.

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Previous presidents understood that they were temporarily occupying that office and saw it as their sacred trust to preserve our republic. But now we have a guy — and a shockingly large entourage of lickspittles, brown-nosers, and sycophants — who’re not only destroying our reputation and power around the world but gutting our democracy itself here at home.

We’ve all seen how this has played out in other countries over the past century.

Pravda telling Russians how to think, Lenin’s picture in every classroom, songs praising Stalin sung by a government choir and played on state radio, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s faces on banners on their governments’ buildings, Mao putting his visage on everything a Chinese citizen could see or touch, Ceaușescu showing reels of himself every night on Romanian television…

When we saw those things, we immediately recognized them for what they were: signs of tyrannical cults of personality that had seized sovereign governments and twisted them into instruments of personal wealth and self-aggrandizement. We called them either communists or fascists, but knew for sure they weren’t small-d democrats.

Now our government — the American government, funded with our tax dollars — is going down this same deadly-to-liberty road.

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Congressman Jamie Raskin — a constitutional scholar — says these ads are a clear violation of the Hatch Act that makes it a crime to use government facilities or resources for political purposes. Republican Senator John Kennedy objected, and Republican Senator Thom Tillis said:

“It’s inappropriate. It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it. But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán.”

And it is. Orbán had spent hundreds of millions in Hungarian taxpayers’ money to promote himself with “public service announcements” like this, as does Putin on an almost daily basis. Both of them — like pretty much every other dictator in the world — tried to normalize the idea that the state and its leader are the same thing.

And that’s the damage here.

Tens of millions of Americans are being taught, by their own government, that this is what a president is supposed to do.

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A generation of MAGA voters is learning that loyalty to one man is the same thing as patriotism, that the American Treasury funded by us taxpayers is really his to spend on his own self-promotion, and that ignoring the law is the prerogative of billionaires (particularly when they’re in elected office).

If this isn’t both stopped and spectacularly repudiated, that lesson could take a generation to unlearn, and Trump has more than two years left in office to keep teaching it.

Every one of these encroachments — the coin, the passports, the banners, the ads — will have to be undone by future presidents and Congresses, and the law must be fixed so that no president can ever commit these kinds of crimes against the ideals of America again.

There is already law on the books: much of what Trump is doing is already either a civil or criminal violation. Every appropriations bill for decades has barred spending federal money on “publicity or propaganda,” and the Government Accountability Office found the Bush administration broke that law when it secretly paid Armstrong Williams to promote No Child Left Behind and Bush’s association with it.

Jamie Raskin, who’ll chair the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats win in November, has already called the ad “blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions” including the Hatch Act.

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What’s missing right now is a Congress and Justice Department willing to investigate or enforce any of it, and a press corps willing to treat this as the constitutional violation that it is rather than as just another one-day “Trump will be Trump” curiosity.

So call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative you want GAO to issue a formal ruling on this ad, you want the Office of Special Counsel to open a Hatch Act investigation, and that you want the next appropriations bill to say in plain English that not one dime of public money can ever again be spent promoting the personal image of any sitting president.

Then make sure you and everyone you know is registered to vote, and please share this piece and support the Hartmann Report. The government just told you to “love” Orange Caligula; somebody has to tell the truth about what’s really going on here.

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Your Subscription Helps Us Fight the Billionaires

This week, David Ellison — the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison — got a huge victory after state attorneys general agreed to drop their lawsuit trying to stop his acquisition of CNN’s parent company. And last night, David Ellison dined with Trump at his state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping while CNN reporters were blocked from covering it. If you want a preview of what a fully billionaire-owned media landscape looks like, this is it.

We launched Raw America because we refuse to allow a small group of far-right oligarchs to be the sole deciders of what we get to know. Independent media is rapidly becoming the lone voice capable of truly holding the rich and powerful accountable. But whether we’re able to keep this work going depends entirely on whether readers believe in independent journalism enough to financially support it. If you found this column valuable, and if you’ve been enjoying our twice-daily newsletters, live interviews with top newsmakers and original reporting from Capitol Hill and the White House, make your support official by becoming a paying member. All it takes is 22 cents a day.

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Trump has now repeatedly offered his voters $5,000 checks if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate this fall, calling it the “Trump dividend.” On Sunday he told a rally that it’ll “happen 100 percent” if enough people turn out to vote GOP.

Since his own party controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, he could now get an appropriation p…

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Twenty-five years and the smoke still rises
In photographs, in names, in empty chairs
We remember the morning
We remember the falling
But who remembers what they told us after that?

Don’t let the lies die
Say their names, remember why
For every empty chair
For every mother who still cries

Twenty-five years
And this much remains

A country that forgets the lies
Can b…

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Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with both incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature.

When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news yesterday morning, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the majo…

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There’s a simple solution to our “illegal immigration” crisis: put some wealthy white CEOs — who are inviting these often desperate people into the country and hiring them — into prison. Ronald Reagan came up with the idea and put it into law, but no president since him has been willing to enforce it.

As a result, there’s a growing movement in America to…

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U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks to supporters and the media during a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., August 2, 2026. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap …

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U.S. President Donald Trump walks to speak with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Michigan, U.S., July 27, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

Last week we learned that Capital One…

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Democratic strategist James Carville, who advised former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, speaking in New York City, on April 11, 2015. (Image: Eduardo Munoz for ICSS Livepic/via Reuters)

The Third Way has functionally declared their intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressiv…

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It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released with…

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In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution …

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Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobiliz…

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Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.

It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.

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Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.

On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

To understand this — and why it’s so insanely radical — look carefully at what the Court actually did in the two 6-3 all-Republican immigration rulings it handed down yesterday morning.

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It takes a particular kind of hubris to stand on the South Lawn of the White House, on a sitting president’s 80th birthday, calling the fights for a cage match that the president personally dreamed up, hosted, sat ringside for, and bought stock in, and then go on your podcast a day later and tell the rest of the country that anybody who noticed the poli…

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Earlier this week, a Cable TV host did an extended rant about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of …

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I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious…

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Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.

Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting i…

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Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?

Her list is devastating. With that $1.776 billion we could, she writes:

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Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.

The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!

Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that…

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