My phone rang at 4 AM. This was during the worst of the COVID pandemic, when most Americans with good sense were hiding from the poison air. I was watching television and reading. When the phone rings at 4 AM, it rarely means anything good. The call was from my aunt. I held my breath to calm down, exhaled, and then I asked her, “Is everything OK? Are you alright? Did you get sick or something?” My aunt is in her 80s. She is a bit of a trickster. With age, she has only become more of her true self in that way. She giggled and told me, “Papa Trump just paid off. I got my COVID money!” I was annoyed that she called me at such an obscenely early hour to tell me that she got her Trump money.

My aunt does not like Donald Trump. Like many other Black working-class folks that I know, she thinks that Trump can be “a bit off” at times and does bad things. But, she admits, he is very funny. She also likes that “Donald Trump says what everyone is thinking, but most politicians don’t have the nerve to say publicly.” She was amazed by how Trump got up from the ground so quickly and pumped his fist in the air after being shot at in Pennsylvania during the 2024 campaign by that “crazy man who should never have been allowed to get that close to the president” and how “the whole thing was like a scene in an action movie or comic book!”

Trump’s suggestion that he may give the American people another “stimulus” check (or DOGE “dividends”) resonates because of the country’s extreme levels of wealth and income inequality.

After my aunt shared her glee at getting her “Trump bucks,” I asked, “Are you going to vote for him now? And what are you going to spend your big Trump bucks on?” She immediately answered, “Hell no! But I do need some more money. I have to make up for being so behind because everything got so expensive, and I needed all these supplies for COVID.” Some months later I asked my aunt who she voted for in the 2020 election. She changed the subject and wanted to talk about neighborhood gossip instead.

When Donald Trump gave the American people COVID stimulus money — with his signature on the check — I knew that was a defining moment which would, quite literally, pay-off for him. The payoff came not in the 2020 election but four years later in 2024. The American people were traumatized by the mass death and pain of the COVID years. As is common for individuals and societies under extreme duress, many Americans have actually forgotten or misremembered Donald Trump and his administration’s willful incompetence and malign behavior during the COVID pandemic. However, they remembered Trump’s COVID relief checks.

Public opinion, focus group, and other research — as well as anecdotal evidence — suggests that Donald Trump’s COVID relief money and the expectation that he would be giving out more money if he won the 2024 election, likely played a role in his victory over Kamala Harris.

Related

In a story that was published following the 2024 election, CBS News provided this context:

President-elect Donald Trump in his first term as president sent out two stimulus........

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