TRUMP ACCUSED OF LAST DITCH ATTEMPT TO BUY OFF VOTERS WITH CHECKS, DIESEL DEAL. President Donald Trump’s pledge to send every American adult $5,000, delivery of small healthcare rebates to millions of people, and announcement of a deal to secure Russian diesel amount to “a last-ditch attempt to buy off voters and dodge a richly deserved reckoning,” the editorial board of The Philadelphia Inquirer argued Oct. 13 as the midterm elections approach.
The editorial accuses Trump – whose illegal war against Iran has sent gas prices soaring and whose signature legislative achievement has stripped healthcare and food aid from millions of Americans—of engaging in “rank bribery” as a “last crass resort” ahead of the midterm elections as his approval rating plummets and threatens to drag Republican candidates down with it, Jake Johnson noted at Common Dreams (10/13).
“His deeply unpopular Middle East war is metastasizing, contributing to persistently high prices and a historically low public opinion of his presidency,” the editorial reads. “Republican schemes to rig the vote by gerrymandering and other means appear insufficient to withstand a Democratic wave, forcing them to abandon formerly favorable territory such as Georgia and North Carolina and fight for ruby-red turf in Kansas and South Carolina.”
“And polls have shown voters are divided over Trump’s crude promises of cash, which most don’t believe,” the editorial adds. “When it comes to winning over voters, it seems promises of payoffs are no substitute for a record of success.”
Trump’s flurry of pledges and rebate announcements come amid widespread discontent over high energy prices and surging health insurance premiums—which the president’s $90 Medicare rebates and $500 Affordable Care Act checks will do very little to offset increases for most Americans. People who receive the healthcare checks will also get an accompanying letter in which Trump touts his record — without mentioning his unprecedented cuts to Medicaid or the millions of people who have lost coverage during his second term.
“There is no better reflection of the purely transactional nature of Donald Trump’s politics than his love for buying Americans’ affections with cold hard cash,” New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore wrote Oct. 8. “The reality is that he’s commandeering (with no apparent legal authority) money designed for other public purposes and sending it out as individual checks. The ACA money is legally supposed to go to Obamacare enrollment and outreach efforts ... while the Medicare dollars have typically gone to provider reimbursement-rate adjustments. Neither source was supposed to finance a preelection slush fund for politicians.”
Reuters estimated that the Trump administration is sending a combined $2.35 billion in direct payments to millions of Americans ahead of the Nov. 3 elections.
That total doesn’t include Trump’s promised $5,000 checks, which would cost an estimated $1.2 trillion. The president is explicitly dangling the checks as an enticement to vote Republican. During an Oct. 12 rally in Ohio, Trump said “if Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States $5,000 each.”
“Only Republicans can do that,” Trump declared.
Tim Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, told The Washington Post that Trump is clearly attempting to distract from the nation’s worsening affordability crisis and trying to “buy votes.”
“It reeks of desperation,” said Burga.
FROM HEALTHCARE AND FUEL COSTS TO TARIFFS, TRUMP GOP’S POLICIES ‘CRUSHING’ SMALL BUSINESSES. Arizona-based Gabe Hagen said Oct. 13 that “to keep my business afloat, I invested my 401(k) savings and leveraged my home equity as collateral for additional capital, putting my family’s financial security on the line to sustain my business and employees.”
“I raised my prices, but sales have just flattened out because customers are ordering less,” explained Hagen, who founded the Tempe coffee roasting company Brick Road Community Corporation. He’s among over 1,000 US small business owners polled by the national coalition Small Business for America’s Future from mid-August to early October.
Among those surveyed, 77% have seen customers spend less, delay purchases, or trade down recently, with 46% saying that shoppers are spending “significantly less.” Meanwhile, owners like Hagen are increasingly enduring more financial stress, with many cutting their own pay or pulling money from personal savings to keep their companies operating, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (10/13).
The survey exposes how “a combination of factors is crushing small business,” the coalition said in a statement announcing its resulting report—which highlights soaring costs for everything from fuel to healthcare, and was released just weeks away from the US midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for the latter half of Trump’s second term.
“Costs are hitting Main Street from every direction at once and Washington doesn’t seem to care about the needs of small business owners,” said Walt Rowen, the coalition’s co-chair and president of Susquehanna Glass Co., a family-owned glass manufacturer in Columbia, Penn., that’s been around for over a century.
Rowen—whose company is located in a key swing state—noted that “my business is a good example of what is happening. We’ve been navigating erratic tariff policies that have disrupted our supply chains, and now my heating oil costs $4,000 to $6,000 a month.”
“We’ve lived through the Depression, wars, and recessions,” he said. “Heating my factory in this current economy is some of the hardest math I’ve ever had to do, and I’m expecting the bill to jump 30% to 40% this winter. This survey shows us that I am far from alone. Small business owners everywhere are comparing this economy to some of the worst moments we’ve had this century.”
The survey shows that 83% of small business owners are concerned about their company’s financial health over the next year, including 44% who are very concerned. Three-quarters called this one of the hardest economies of their careers, with over half drawing comparisons to the COVID-19 pandemic, and nearly a third pointing to the Great Recession.
A similar share (78%) accused decision-makers in Washington, D.C. of putting large corporations first, and 72% said running their business is harder than it was a year ago—with 85% citing inflation and rising prices as the source of strain. Majorities saw increases for utilities (72%); fuel (68%); transportation, shipping, or supplies (64%); business services (64%); healthcare and health insurance (54%); and employee wages and benefits (53%).
Those soaring costs have had consequences. Two-thirds of surveyed owners said they canceled, delayed, or scaled back investments in equipment, facilities, or technology. Over half did the same for hiring and expansion to new markets. Nearly two-thirds skipped or reduced their own pay, and 52% said their personal debt has increased in the past year.
Rising costs can be clearly connected to decisions by Trump and congressional Republicans—many of whom are up for reelection next month, as the GOP tries to hang on to its slim majorities in both chambers.
The president returned to power early last year having campaigned on a mass detention and deportation agenda, despite arguments from economists and elected Democrats that his approach was not only inhumane but economically risky. A clear majority of surveyed owners (61%) said that immigration enforcement has hurt the small business economy.
Trump and Republican lawmakers also enacted a 2025 budget package that cut federal healthcare spending and did not extend Affordable Care Act enhanced premium tax credits. Among surveyed business owners who buy their own insurance coverage through an ACA marketplace, 90% saw their premiums rise after the subsidies expired. Nearly three-quarters also said they fear rising health insurance costs will make it harder to hire and keep needed employees.
The administration’s shifting tariff policy and refund process have caused further stress: 59% of owners said trade-related cost increases have made it harder to run their business, and only 3% have filed refund claims since the US Supreme Court’s February ruling against many of Trump’s tariffs.
Trump’s illegal war on Iran continues to drive up fuel prices. The construction of artificial intelligence data centers—which the president has encouraged—is also increasing energy costs. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed are worried about the impact of electricity demand from new AI facilities. Around the same share is concerned about the consequences of the new armed conflict in the Middle East, which the GOP-controlled Congress never authorized, but has refused to end.
AS AMERICANS FACE AFFORDABILITY CRISIS, POLL REAFFIRMS ‘MEDICARE FOR ALL’ IS NOT RADICAL. Yet another poll, released Oct. 31, shows significant support for Medicare for All as Americans grapple with rising healthcare costs and the Trump administration and congressional Republicans target federal programs upon which tens of millions of people rely, Brett Wilkins noted at CommonDreams (10/31).
A plurality—43%—of respondents to the Axios-Ipsos American Health Index, conducted Sept. 25-28, said they support replacing private health insurance with a government-run Medicare for All system, compared with 24% who oppose the idea. Another 32% were unsure, leaving supporters outnumbering opponents by nearly two to one. Two-thirds of respondents also backed increased federal spending to reduce healthcare costs.
Respondents’ views on Medicare for All are divided along party lines, with a majority of Democrats (62%) and a plurality of independents (47%) supporting the proposal, while a majority of Republicans (52%) oppose it.
The most commonly cited reason people said they oppose Medicare for All is fear that the quality of care would be inferior to that offered by private health insurance (38%), followed by concern that the program would be too expensive for taxpayers (22%), and that the federal government should not be involved in providing healthcare (21%). Supporters were not asked why they favor Medicare for All.
The survey also revealed deepening distrust of political leaders on healthcare issues. Just 20% of respondents said they trusted President Trump for health-related information, down from 31% in March 2025, while only 25% trusted Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The poll also found that 49% would be less likely to support a candidate who received money from pharmaceutical company political action committees.
TRUMP DOJ LAUNCHES ANTITRUST PROBE INTO NEWS NETWORKS’ COVERAGE. The US Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether the five major television networks violated federal antitrust law when they briefly halted pool coverage of President Donald Trump amid his administration’s attempt to bar certain journalists from the White House, Jake Johnson noted at CommonDreams (10/12).
The New York Times reported Oct. 10 that DOJ officials “contacted networks on Friday [Oct. 9] and demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool.” ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News rotate the responsibility of capturing and distributing footage of the president. The networks paused pool coverage in September after the Trump administration dropped CNN from its scheduled pool assignment.
Emily Covington, a spokesperson for the Justice Department, confirmed the existence of the investigation in a statement Oct. 11, saying that “group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act.”
Press freedom organizations and other critics condemned the probe as a politically motivated attack on journalism and questioned the administration’s expressed concern about antitrust violations—particularly given that the DOJ has effectively abandoned antitrust enforcement during Trump’s second term.
Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the investigation “appears to be a pretext for seeking records from the networks about how they are covering daily White House events during a media ban the president himself put in place.”
“The decisions news organizations make about coverage are protected by the First Amendment, and summoning antitrust authority, on top of the retaliatory actions the White House has already taken to bar certain outlets, is another and even more brazen attempt to try to intimidate journalists,” said Brown.
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the investigation “nonsense.”
“The investigation is nonsense. Trump may view the presidency as a business venture, but news outlets’ standing up for their constitutional rights has nothing to do with antitrust law, no matter what Laura Loomer says,” Stern added, pointing to the far-right activist’s public call for an antitrust lawsuit against the major TV news networks. “Depriving Trump of the attention he craves is not a competitive harm, and in any case, antitrust law has long recognized First Amendment exceptions even when there is anticompetitive impact.”
News of the DOJ investigation came after CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued the president over his attempt to bar the outlets from the White House. Late September, a Trump-appointed judge ordered the administration to restore White House access to the outlets as the lawsuit proceeds.
Jonathan Kanter, who headed the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in the Biden administration, told CNN on Oct. 10 that the media networks’ actions in the wake of the attempted White House ban are “not even in the same zip code of an antitrust violation.”
“It’s literally freedom of speech,” said Kanter. “It’s no more an antitrust violation than the reporters coming together to form the pool in the first place.”
JAYAPAL RECALLS TRUMP BORDER CZAR TAKING $50,000 IN PAPER BAG. Progressive US Rep. Pramila Jayapal not only joined a growing chorus outraged by President Donald Trump’s “rogue” Department of Homeland Security agents raiding Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home, the Washington Democrat took it a step further.
After putting out a nearly three-minute video decrying Trump’s repeated attacks on her Democratic colleague from Minnesota, Jayapal reminded social media users of the president’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, allegedly accepting a bribe in the form of a paper bag stuffed with $50,000 in cash in 2024, Jessica Corbett noted at CommonDreams (10/13).
As part of a probe launched under the Biden administration, Homan was the target of an FBI sting operation. In September 2024, he was recorded taking the bag of cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen interested in securing government contracts if Trump returned to the White House.
“If the administration wants to investigate anyone, maybe they should look at themselves first. Anyone remember this?” Jayapal wrote alongside a photo of media coverage that notes Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) closed the probe into Homan last year.
Before former US Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired by Trump this past April, she insisted last year that “the investigation into Mr. Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI, agents, and DOJ prosecutors,” who “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.”
However, congressional Democrats as well as the groups Democracy Defenders Fund and Democracy Forward have fought for access to records, including the recording of Homan and the undercover agents.
Homan is far from the only member of Trump’s second administration to face credible allegations of corruption. In fact, according to polling results released Tuesday, 59% of Americans believe the president himself has done illegal or unethical things to cash in on his return to power.
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