如果共和党人在今年的中期选举中获胜，他将向每个人发放一张5000美元的支票作为分红。人们的反应就像他说了些疯狂的话，比如“巴拉克·奥巴马出生于肯尼亚，因此不具备成为美国总统的资格”——我的意思是，他们把他的胡言乱语视为又一个特朗普式的古怪举动，而不是它真正所代表的：一个腐败混蛋的 disqualifying lunacy（令人失格的疯狂）。
that if Republicans prevail in this year’s midterm elections, he would provide everybody with a $5,000 dividend check People reacted as if he’d said something crazy, like “Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is ineligible to be president of the United States”—by which I mean they dismissed his ravings as one more Trumpian oddity and not what it really was: the disqualifying lunacy of a corrupt jackass.
少数勇敢的人士温和地提出担忧，认为这相当于贿赂。那些想要为讨论添加实质内容的人指出，这个想法将导致通胀飙升。我不记得有人曾说出显而易见的事实：5000美元的付款实际上是在承认他和他政党的鲁莽政策毁掉了经济，并引发了全国范围的负担能力危机。
A few brave souls gently raised concerns that this was tantamount to a bribe Those who wanted to add something substantive to the conversation pointed out just how much this idea would cause inflation to spike I don’t recall anyone saying the obvious thing: A $5,000 payoff would be an implicit admission that he and his party’s reckless policies wrecked the economy and spawned a nationwide affordability crisis.
众议院议长迈克·约翰逊，他的议员们理论上应该是那些会发现这笔钱——超过1万亿美元——并予以拨款的人，他在接受克里斯汀·沃尔克的采访时表示，所谓的“特朗普分红”将是议员们“在国会中处理、讨论、辩论和商讨”的事情。不过，短期内不会有任何进展，因为约翰逊正在让议员们回家，以避免在中期选举前就对共和党众议员托马斯·马西提出的对“战争”部长皮特·赫格塞思的弹劾案进行投票——这位部长在他身边士兵的男子气概问题上陷入心理性惊恐发作，目前正遭到伊朗的“皮带打屁股”待遇。
House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose flock of lawmakers would ostensibly be the people who would find this money—more than $1 trillion—and appropriate it, told Kristen Welker in an interview that the so-called “Trump dividend” would be something lawmakers would “process through Congress and talk through and debate and discuss.”That said, nothing is happening anytime soon, because Johnson is sending lawmakers home until the midterm elections so as to avoid having to vote on GOP Representative Thomas Massie’s proposed impeachment of Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, who, between psychosexual panic attacks about the masculinity of the soldiers in his presence is currently getting the belt-to-ass treatment from Iran.
因此，你可能需要等待一段时间才能收到那张5000美元的支票。但这并不意味着特朗普分红尚未发放。恰恰相反，总统及其国会盟友一直在左挥右送地发放金钱。他们确实让很多人变得富有。事实上，他们在这方面很有一套——至少对少数人来说是这样。
So you might have to wait a while for your $5,000 check. But that doesn’t mean that the Trump dividend hasn’t already been paid out. To the contrary, the president and his congressional enablers have been handing out money left and right. They’ve made people very rich, in fact. It’s something that they’re quite good at doing—at least for a few.
从前，特朗普声称共同繁荣将以关税的形式实现，他认为关税能带来如此巨额的收入，以至于所得税可以被废除。这在理论上是疯狂的；在实践中，特朗普的关税仅仅遵循了他本人愤怒的逻辑——无论哪个国家在那周惹恼了他，就会被加征关税。最高法院最终裁定，其中大部分做法是非法的，尽管这并未削弱特朗普对贸易战争的热情。
Once upon a time, Trump claimed that shared prosperity would come in the form of tariffs, which he believed would rake in such a large amount of revenue that the income tax could be abolished This was insane in theory; in practice, Trump’s tariffs only followed the logic of the president’s ire—whatever nation was pissing him off that week would get tariffed. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that most of this nonsense was illegal, not that it diminished Trump’s yen for trade war.
但情况也不全是坏消息。正如ABC新闻上个月报道的那样，政府已经支付了1000亿美元的关税退税。这应该会让每个人兴奋。毕竟，税收基金会估计，最高法院裁定为非法的关税使每个家庭多花了700美元，因此这笔退税可能有助于给你的油箱加满三到四次油。但正如ABC新闻指出的，“大多数消费者——他们因关税而支付了更高价格——并没有看到这笔钱回到自己口袋里。”
But it’s not all bad news. As ABC News reported last month the administration has paid out $100 billion in tariff refunds. That ought to excite everyone. After all, the Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled to be illegal cost every household $700, so a reimbursement might be helpful in filling up your gas tank three or four times. But as ABC News notes, “most consumers—who paid higher prices from the tariffs—aren’t seeing that money go back into their pockets.”
在某些情况下，公司计划将部分这笔钱返还给消费者。但在其他情况下，这笔钱被公司私吞，一些公司将其用于“再投资”，而另一些公司则用它来抵消因特朗普处理经济和伊朗战争方式而导致的其他高昂成本。
In some instances, firms have plans to repay some of that money to consumers. But in other cases, that money is being pocketed, with some corporations earmarking the money for “reinvestment” and others putting it toward offsetting the other high costs they face because of Trump’s handling of the economy and the Iran war.
对于小企业而言，这些小额意外之财来得太迟了。据ABC报道，一位幸运地收到5万美元退税的人表示，“她被迫裁员并动用退休储蓄来维持业务运转”，而在等待这笔微薄退税期间。这笔支票无法弥补的损失。总而言之，特朗普的“解放日”主要是把钱从你口袋里解放出来。无论这笔钱最终是否会回到你手中，还是继续留在公司金库里，那就见仁见智了。
And for small businesses, these mini windfalls have arrived too late. Per ABC, one fortunate recipient of a $50,000 refund says “she was forced to cut staff and use her retirement savings to keep the business afloat” while waiting for her refund pittance. That’s wreckage the check won’t cover. All in all, Trump’s “Liberation Day” mainly liberated money from your pocket. Whether it makes its way back to you or remains in the coffers of corporations is anyone’s guess Meanwhile, people seem to be forgetting that Republicans in Congress have already passed a measure that put $5,000 in Americans’ pockets—or to be more precise, $5,190 to Americans earning between $153,600 and $361,400.
与此同时，人们似乎在忘记国会共和党人已经通过了一项措施，将5000美元放进了美国人的口袋——或者说更准确地说，是给年收入在153,600美元至361,400美元之间的美国人发放了5,190美元。这项法律被称为《一揽子美好法案》，它一直是全国范围内巩固收入不平等的一大美好手段。正如税收与经济政策研究所所报告的，该法案“最有利于最富有的纳税人，而为工薪阶层美国人提供的相对较小的减税，在许多情况下将被特朗普总统征收的进口税或关税所完全抵消甚至超过。”
That law is called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has been one big beautiful means of cementing income inequality across the country. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports the OBBBA “favors the richest taxpayers and provides working-class Americans with relatively small tax cuts that will in many cases be more than offset by the import taxes, or tariffs, imposed by President Trump.”
在这个交易中，最富有的1%获得的远不止五千美元——他们的减税额超过66,000美元。而在另一端，最贫困的20%的人只得到可怜的40美元。别一下子花光！（实际上，许多人做不到这一点，因为同样的法案终止了他们用来购买健康保险的《平价医疗法案》补贴。）共和党人对让已经富有人群再次致富的痴迷执念，正在做的远不止是从你口袋里偷钱。财富集中正日益将我们大多数人锁在美国梦之外。
The richest 1 percent got way more than five grand in this deal—their tax savings were in excess of $66,000. At the other end of the spectrum, the poorest 20 percent got a paltry 40 bucks. Don’t spend it all in one place! (Actually, many folks cannot because the same bill ended the Affordable Care Act subsidies they were using to purchase health insurance.) Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on re-enriching the already rich is doing much more than thieving money from your pocket. Wealth concentration is increasingly locking most of us out of the American dream.
根据政策研究所和人民民主研究所2024年的一项研究，财富集中正在“加剧现有的绅士化、无家可归、租房不可负担和购房遥不可及的问题”。全国范围内，掠夺性亿万富翁正在大量购买独栋住宅，使许多房产长期空置，以此“从房地产投机中获利”，并进军短期租赁市场，玩同样的把戏，从而让这些住房与潜在租户保持距离。特朗普和共和党议员通过政策助长了这一切——截至2026年纳税日，亿万富翁的财富已增长了30.6%。
As a 2024 study from the Institute for Policy Studies and Popular Democracy found, wealth concentration is “supercharging existing problems of gentrification, homelessness, unaffordable rental housing, and out-of-reach homeownership.”Across the country, predatory billionaires are buying up single-family homes, keeping many of these properties vacant so as to “profit from real estate speculation,” and invading the short-term rental market to play the same tricks, thus keeping units at arm’s length from would-be renters. Trump and GOP lawmakers have enabled all of this through policies that have—as of Tax Day 2026—grown billionaire wealth 30.6 percent.
如果你和大多数人一样，现在可能正需要5000美元。正如美国税收公平组织最近的一份备忘录所指出的：“美国工薪阶层在医疗、汽油和食品上的支出不断增加，而他们的工资却在特朗普任期内停滞不前甚至下降。”与此同时，共和党人在特朗普分红检查问题上左右摇摆、躲躲闪闪，却在公开场合大肆宣传正是这项法案导致了如此广泛的困苦——并试图掩盖这样一个事实：中期选举后计划实施的医疗补助工作要求一旦生效，将有约七万人失去健康保险。
If you’re like most people, you could use $5,000 right about now. As a recent memo from Americans for Tax Fairness noted, “Working Americans have had to pay more for health care, gas, and food while their paychecks have remained stagnant or fallen while [Trump has] been in office.”Meanwhile, as Republicans wiggle and dodge on the Trump dividend checks, they’re out in public touting the very bill that led to all of this widespread immiseration—and hiding the fact that when the Medicaid work requirements slated to be imposed after the midterms go into effect, an estimated seven million people won’t have health insurance anymore. Lots of people have gotten the Trump dividend:
很多人已经拿到了特朗普分红：特朗普本人、他的家族、亿万富翁们、众多公司，甚至那个奇怪的迪克·特雷西反派角色——就是那个毁掉反射池的人。但特朗普长期以来克扣他人的历史足以让你明白：即使共和党在国会保持多数，你也不该抱有会收到支票的幻想。如果历史能作参考，共和党只会继续榨取你的钱财。但特朗普分红仍将持续发放，许多人将继续变富。正如人们所说，这是一个大俱乐部，而你不在其中。
Trump himself his family billionaires, many corporations, even that weird Dick Tracy villain guy who broke the Reflecting Pool. But Trump’s long history of stiffing people should be more than enough to dissuade you from the belief that a check is coming your way if the GOP retains its majorities in Congress. If history is any guide, the Republicans would keep fleecing you.
本文首发于《权力疯狂》（Power Mad），这是由副编辑杰森·林金斯（Jason Linkins）撰写的《新共和》（TNR）周刊通讯。
But the Trump dividends will continue to flow, and many people will keep getting richer. As they say, it’s a big club, and you’re not in it.