Scott Bessent said to be 'in damage control' after blowing up Trump's $2,000 checks plan

Just hours after President Donald Trump floated the idea of sending Americans $2,000 checks, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent immediately contradicted the proposal during a live appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Bessent was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos how the Trump administration would facilitate the multi-billion dollar proposal, floated by Trump as a plan to end the ongoing government shutdown and defund Obamacare.

Bessent, claiming not to have spoken with Trump about the proposal, said that the “$2,000 dividend,” as Trump called it, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as a “payment,” could actually be a generic reference to the Trump administration’s proposed tax cuts.

“The $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms…. It could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda,” Bessent told Stephanopoulos.

“No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. You know those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill.”

Bessent’s claim that Trump’s plan to send Americans a “$2,000 dividend” could have been a generic reference to proposed tax cuts was immediately scrutinized by critics as the treasury secretary “already in damage control.”

Kelly McCarty, a self-described "constitutional conservative” and anti-abortion activist with more than 24,000 followers on X, also railed against Bessent for his attempt to walk back the president’s plan.

“Scott Bessent’s already in spin mode,” McCarty wrote in a social media post on X Sunday. “[He’s] now saying Trump’s $2,000 dividend isn’t really a check after all.”

And Jason Easley, a journalist and owner of the liberal news website PoliticusUSA, labelled Bessent’s comments as "embarrassing for Trump.”

“Trump is so out of it and out of the loop that a member of his administration didn’t even try to justify his idea,” Easley wrote in an analysis published Sunday on his website.

“Bessent was basically saying that the dividend isn’t going to happen. Trump is just making it up as he goes along. The president knows that Republicans are sinking fast, so it is time to pull out the old, vote for us, and you’ll get free money scam.”