During the COVID-19 pandemic, the one policy Donald Trump consistently favored was the mailing of “stimulus checks” (technically, economic-impact payments) to individual taxpayers, bearing his signature, as though this federal-government largesse was a gift from the president himself. Indeed, he pitched a temper tantrum not long before his first term ended because the stimulus checks Congress authorized him to send out were $600, while he much preferred $2,000. Such direct payments to the whole country were later, of course, denounced by many conservatives as inflationary, mostly when they were continued by a Democratic president and Congress in 2021 ( Joe Biden , by the way, didn’t sign those checks, though he later joked that maybe he should have ).

Trump’s desire for a $2,0

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