Fox’s Bret Baier Torpedoes Trump Treasury Chief Over $2000 Check Scheme: Won’t That ‘Be Inflationary’

Fox News anchor Bret Baier stumped Trump Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent when he asked if President Donald Trump’s promise of $2000 tariff “rebate checks” for Americans would be “inflationary” by his own logic.

Trump has taken a beating from just about every quarter over his trade policies, which have been blamed for a good portion of the price inflation that became the inflection point of this month’s electoral bloodbath.

One of Trump’s responses has been the promise of rebate checks to Americans based on revenue from tariffs that he claims will cover the outlay.

On Tuesday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Special Report, Baier turned the tables on Bessent in an exchange about the “affordability crisis” when Bessent blamed a “demand shock” caused by government spending, asking if the rebates could have the same impact:

BRET BAIER: Is there an affordability crisis? You listen to Democrats, that’s obviously the word they’re using. The president’s talking about it more as well. Is there a crisis when it comes to that?

SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY SCOTT BESSENT: Well, they they should — they should know about it because they caused it. It was the worst inflation in 40 or 50 years by this massive government spending, spend, spend, spend.

And if we go back, what what what did they do that the president differently than the president did in his first term?

So they had a demand shock induced by this massive wave of government overspending. But to make it worse, they had this huge regulatory buildup. So demand shock and supply constraint, that’s a recipe for this inflation.

President Trump now and during his first term, you get a demand shock from the private sector, but you deregulate, and then you can go back to the non-inflationary growth.

But look look, we we are working on this every day, and my prediction is the first quarter, second quarter, what we’re going to see is we have brought the inflation down, it is curving down, and real income, the other side of that equation is real income growth, and we are going to see this from all this investment.

BRET BAIER: Would a two thousand-dollar tariff dividend check going to people be inflationary?

SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY SCOTT BESSENT: Well th– there are a lot of things that are gonna happen next year.

BRET BAIER: Is that one of them?

SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY SCOTT BESSENT: And that could be one of ’em. And again, maybe we could the persuade Americans to save that.

Because a couple of — one one of the things that’s gonna happen next year is the the the Trump accounts, every child who was born from January first for the next three years is gonna get a government account that goes into the stock market.

So every American child born for the next three years, starting January 1st, is gonna have that. They can take it out when they’re 18. They’re gonna learn the power of compounding, and the there’s gonna be a a lot of financial literacy around that.

And I think the reason that we saw kind of the disastrous election in New York is young people don’t feel like they have a stake in the economy, so we wanna give ’em a stake in the economy.

Watch above via Fox News Channel’s Special Report.