Month: November 2025

• Trump has proposed sending $2,000 tariff checks to Americans in mid-2026.
• He’s got a lot of work to do to convince his allies in Congress to go along with it.
• Many Republicans would prefer to see any tariff revenue used to reduce the national debt.

President Donald Trump wants to send $2,000 tariff checks to Americans next year.

But to do that, he’ll have to get Congress to go along with it — and even some of his top allies are skeptical.

“We’re facing a deficit this year around $2 trillion,” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters. “I think whatever revenue we get, from whatever source, ought to go to try and bring down those deficits.”

Trump’s proposed tariff checks have received a cool response from most Republicans on Capitol Hill, with many saying they’d prefer to see the national debt addressed first.

That’s a big problem for Trump, considering it takes an act of Congress to actually send the checks.

Even those who aren’t outright rejecting the proposal — it’s always risky to oppose Trump as a Republican — are politely signaling that they’d prefer a different path.

“I mean, everybody’s got their own idea,” Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona told BI. “I would prefer we reduce the overall tax rate, and make that permanent.”

“You know, my focus would clearly be paying down the $38 trillion of the debt,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida told Business Insider. “But I have to see what he proposes.”

Trump’s getting more specific — but lawmakers aren’t budging

Throughout the first year of his second term, Trump has at times flirted with the idea of sending checks to Americans. It began in February, when Trump said that “DOGE Dividends,” checks paid for by purported DOGE savings, were “under consideration.” The tariff rebate talk picked up in August, when Trump embraced the idea, seemingly in response to a question from a reporter.

“We’re thinking about that, actually,” Trump said at the time.

The president in recent weeks has begun to speak more seriously about the idea, bringing it up multiple times in public remarks and Truth Social posts. On Monday, he said he was eyeing a rollout in mid-2026. And in calling for $2,000 checks, he’s gotten more specific than before.

That’s all been music to Sen. Josh Hawley’s ears, who introduced a bill to send a tariff rebate to lower-income Americans in August.

“This is my pet idea,” the Missouri Republican told reporters on Wednesday. “I just think it’s a terrific way to give relief to working people.”

And other Republicans have been forced to soften their opposition. In February, when asked about potential DOGE dividends, House Speaker Mike Johnson was relatively firm in saying he preferred to see the national debt reduced.

This month, he’s struck a slightly more conciliatory tone.

“Well, I think there’s some merit to it,” Johnson said on Fox Business earlier this month. “I mean, we’ll have to figure that out.”

“The discussion would be: If you have trillions of dollars in new revenue, what’s the best use for it?” Johnson continued. “Should you pay down the debt? Because that saves families a lot of money in the long run and puts us back on a sound fiscal trajectory.”

Still, plenty of other Republicans are holding firm. In July, when Trump was merely floating the idea, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio told reporters that the proposal would “never pass” given the soaring national debt.

On Wednesday, he reiterated his opposition.

“I think we should pay down the deficit,” Moreno told Business Insider.

‘There are ways that they could maybe spin this’

Aside from the politics of it all, there are more basic problems with Trump’s proposal.

First, there’s the math: Several independent analyses of the proposal have found that there’s not nearly enough tariff revenue to fund Trump’s plan.

An analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that the program could cost $600 billion — about double the $300 billion in projected annual tariff revenue. And that’s assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t strike down any of Trump’s tariffs.

There’s also the fact that stimulus checks are likely to be inflationary.

That’s a pill that Republicans in particular are unlikely to want to swallow, according to Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“Republicans have spent five years railing against the Biden administration for cutting people checks and sparking inflation,” Lincicome told Business Insider. “Now in power, they’re going to start cutting people checks and maybe sparking inflation?”

Still, Lincicome predicted that Republicans might try to find other ways to satisfy Trump’s demand, including by simply rebranding tax refunds that Americans are expected to receive as a result of the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

“There are ways that they could maybe spin this,” Lincicome said. “You know, have a big press conference and some really nice poster board, that makes it look like they’re actually giving people tariff rebates, when in reality, it’s just One Big Beautiful Bill tax cuts.”

• Dagobert Renouf funded his wedding by selling company logo spots on his suit.
• His creative approach gained support from his entrepreneur community and social media followers.
• Renouf’s unique suit led to a discussion with a fellow founder and, ultimately, a new job.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with entrepreneur Dagobert Renouf, 36, who lives in Lille, France, and now works in tech sales at the startup Comp AI. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I was an entrepreneur for seven years, bootstrapping businesses. That means not getting any funding. I had some good moments and some struggles. Over the summer, I launched a solo startup, and it wasn’t going very well. I was running out of money.

Almost two years ago, I met my now wife. She’s Russian and I live in France. We wanted to live together. Because of visa issues, we wanted to accelerate the wedding. I could absolutely not afford any kind of wedding because of the business situation, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give up on either dream — of building my startup or on the wedding.

I have a community on social media talking about my journey as an entrepreneur. So I posted something like, “I have to find a way to pay for my wedding. No idea how I’m going to do it.”

I said the minimum wedding I can do is going to be 4,000 euros. A friend of mine who’s a famous entrepreneur in our community said, “I’m going to loan you the 4,000, but you don’t have to pay me back if you can’t. I just want to support you.” Then somebody joked, “If you really need help for your wedding, you just put my logo on your suit.” Because it’s an entrepreneur community, everybody wants to promote themselves. That’s what we do.

After all these years in business, I’m like, “You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone. You try crazy shit if you want to make it.” So I said, “Let’s do it.” I posted on X, and then dozens of people were like, “Yeah, I want to put my logo on your suit.”

How my fiancée felt

When I told my fiancée, she hated it. All she saw was the reaction on X — people joking, making fun of it. What made her come around, and what was making this whole thing beautiful, was when I really connected it to the fact that it was a way to bring my community to our wedding. She said, “OK, we can do it, but only if it’s nice companies that you love, mostly indie companies — people you know.”

I had to convince people that she loved it. So, it became way harder than I thought to sell it. On average, I sold spots on my suit for 300 euros. I ended up selling about 10,000 euros’ worth.

Once I started doing the suit, then I’m like, “OK, now I want it to look good. I don’t want to look like an idiot.” I have a friend who’s a stylist — a very talented guy, but very expensive. He was like, “It’s going to be like 5,000 euros, but I can do this.”

We had the final list of logos at the end of August, and the wedding was in October. At first, he wanted to print everything on the suit, but that takes more time because you need prototypes. So we ended up having to do embroidery. The suit is high quality and very beautiful. When you look at it in person, it doesn’t look like a joke. Our family and friends loved it.

The fun thing is, out of the 26 entrepreneurs who supported it, I know almost all of them. A lot of them told me something like, “Just keep the money, but don’t put it on your suit. I just want to support you.” It was like a wedding gift between entrepreneurs.

I was like, “No, I want to do the suit. We love it.”

Landing a new job

It’s the most basic thing that we hear all the time as entrepreneurs: At first, they think you’re crazy, and then it seems obvious. For the first time as an entrepreneur, I had this experience.

I really had to fight for this. It took months of me posting on social media about it. Every time, half of the people were like, “This is so bad. This is disgusting.” I feel like sometimes I was the only one to see the beauty. That’s because, for me, entrepreneurship is my life. There’s nothing on the suit I don’t like. I can almost see the face of every founder associated with their company.

I wanted to do right by all the people who supported me. They helped me get to where I’m at now. Because I felt like I owed them something, I was actually quite stressed — more stressed than my wife — during the wedding because I was always like, “I need to make sure these logos are visible.”

I joked with a friend who was beating himself up because he missed putting his logo on the suit, “Don’t worry, you can have dibs on the baby crib.” My wife wasn’t on board with that.

One of the people who replied to my posts about the suit was the cofounder of Comp AI. We were only acquaintances, but he kept replying to my posts, saying to put his company’s logo on my suit.

At the same time, I realized that I can do sales, and he said, “Let’s get you a sales job.” That was completely unexpected. I was an entrepreneur for years, and I couldn’t see any other way of living. Without the suit, I would have never gotten this job.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.

• I’ve always had a very strong bond with my mother and frequently turned to her for advice.
• Losing her unexpectedly made it more difficult to parent my own kids for a time.
• Now I’m drawing on my mother’s values and lessons to guide my parenting journey in her absence.

Being the youngest of six and having already lost my father at the age of 7, my bond with my mother was exceptionally strong.

Over the years, I leaned on her for advice on everything and never made a major decision without her input. From home remedies for my children’s illnesses to finding balance in a busy life with three kids, she stayed at the center of my world with her guidance and steady support.

Ammi, as I lovingly called her, lived a life filled with challenges, but her strength stayed firm. She became a widow at a young age and raised six of us on her own. She managed the home, the responsibilities, and her own losses. It felt like she never had a pause from hardship, but she moved through each phase with calm determination.

We remained close, even after I got married; I lived only a few houses away from her. That physical closeness deepened my emotional dependence on her. She played a major role in raising my three children, who adored their grandmother with their whole hearts. I will always remember how she was always there for me with a warm embrace, yummy homemade food, and above all, a sense of stability that filled the void my father left years ago.

Life shifted in a way I never imagined after she was gone

I genuinely believed things would continue on this way forever. I thought she would stay in this world long enough to watch my children grow and to keep guiding me through every new stage. But in a devastating turn of events, I lost her.

My mother went to visit my sister in New York, over the summer. She planned to return this November. Instead, she suffered a massive brain stroke in early September, slipped into a coma, and was moved to hospice care. She passed away soon after. From thousands of miles away in Pakistan, all I received were updates about her condition. First, the stroke. Then the coma. Then the end.

My family and I only managed to see her for a few minutes through a video call, lying still in a state no child wants to witness. It felt unreal. I never spoke to her again. I never touched her hand. I never said goodbye. I never asked her how I would go on without her.

It has been two months since her death. As I move through grief, I often feel lost while parenting my kids. I still reach for my phone at times when I would ask her something. I scroll through her voice notes and read her messages because hearing her words gives me a moment of comfort. I ache for just one more conversation with her.

Parenting became much harder without my mother in the picture

My children need me. They feel her loss, too. But in those first weeks, even simple tasks like handling a tantrum required a strength I could not find. There was a time when I had to attend my eldest child’s parent-teacher meeting, but I had no strength left in me to discuss important issues with his teacher, and my husband had to step in. Although I had always handled these things perfectly before, I was too overwhelmed by the feeling of having lost my guidance to handle everything properly now.

With time, my family and friends reassured me of the steady devotion and strength my mother had instilled in me during her lifetime. My elder sister also reminded me how committed our mother was to her responsibilities after our grandmother died. She never let that grief overcome her love and dedication as a mother. None of us ever felt she wasn’t there for us when we needed her. That memory finally pushed me to believe that I could keep going, too.

Carrying on with instinct instead of memories

I won’t have my mother’s guidance and support in everything, nor will I have her message or voice note for every challenge that comes my way in life. But I knew her well enough to understand how she thought about life. Now, when I face decisions, I pause and imagine what she would have told me, trying to stay strong even in the painful silence she left behind.

I will miss my mother for the rest of my life. No one will ever fill the space she left. But her courage, resilience, and compassion now shape the way I raise my own children. This feels like the lasting gift of having a loving parent. Their values stay alive in you long after they are gone.

• Meet Semlani quit JPMorgan in 2018 and now has raised over $6 million for his startup.
• He says he was afraid to leave the money and validation of JPMorgan, but life had become static.
• Semlani says leaving JPMorgan helped him redefine success and feel meaningfully busy.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Meet Semlani, a 33-year-old startup cofounder based in India. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I was two years into my time at JPMorgan when I realized how disillusioned I’d become with my life. It felt robotic.

I was following the motto “30 VP,” a phrase I’d heard at the company. It means the goal is to reach vice president status by the age of 30. I’d seen my seniors have these glamorous investment banking careers, so that’s what I thought I was supposed to do.

At 26, every day felt the same. I’d be in the office by 9 a.m., go to the same meetings, do the same actions, and leave at 7p.m. During that time, I lost friends and relationships.

On a whim, I signed up for a 10-day silent meditation retreat with the intention of taking a digital detox, and came back with the clarity that it was time to quit. My time at JPMorgan shaped my career, but quitting helped me redefine success and eventually raise over $6 million for my startup.

I was chasing a goal that wasn’t mine at JP Morgan

I started working at JPMorgan in 2015 as an intern on a US visa. Later, I moved back to India and became an associate within the asset management department. I was focused on climbing the corporate ladder.

At the same time, I felt like every conversation with coworkers was about having kids, buying a house, paying loans, and planning for the future. But I didn’t see a future for myself at JPMorgan. I had just grown accustomed to the status, validation, and money it provided.

I wanted to make a real impact and keep learning, but I was afraid to quit.

I had associated my identity with working at JP Morgan

If I went to an event and said I worked at JPMorgan, it meant something. People seemed more curious about me when they learned where I worked. I liked the validation and didn’t want to give it up.

The idea of leaving a good salary was also a hesitation. I got used to buying the best gadgets and going to nice restaurants. I definitely experienced some lifestyle creep, and I wasn’t sure how I’d maintain my habits without that salary.

I knew I needed a break from work

I had no idea what to expect going into the meditation retreat. There were no screens, no talking, just breathing. The first few days felt depressing, but when I really settled into the meditation, it gave me space to question everything.

I asked myself, “Do I really want to live like this? Is this how I want to be known?” The answer was no.

I questioned what’s the worst that could happen if I left JPMorgan, and kept coming back to the idea that, no matter what happens, at least I’m not dead. When I returned home, I felt a sense of calm and a knowingness that I was ready to let go of my job. I didn’t know what was next for me, but I knew it was time to forge a new identity.

The day I returned to work, I told my manager I was thinking about quitting. I ultimately stayed a few more months, until February 2018, to hand over my work as smoothly as possible and ensure the team wouldn’t be negatively impacted.

I took a 70% pay cut to work for a startup that fulfilled me

I was living with my parents rent-free at the time, but I still had some expenses. That’s when I began looking into startups.

I applied to some jobs and ultimately got hired as a customer service associate at a startup. I really resonated with its mission of helping international students go abroad through scholarships, loans, or grants, because of my shared experience as an international student, which motivated me to take a 70% pay cut from JPMorgan.

I had to scale down on a lot of things I was doing before, like eating out at nice restaurants and traveling, which was tough. There were even moments where I considered going back to JPMorgan because of it, but I’m so glad I stayed.

The learning and access I had in a startup environment were unbeatable

Being able to grab coffee with the CEO, share ideas, and see decisions happen in real time changed me. It was a real startup hustle, and I was actually building things, not just attending meetings.

I felt meaningfully busy, not just calendar busy. That’s when it clicked for me that success isn’t only about money or titles. If I focused on becoming truly competent and useful, the success and money would eventually find their way.

In late 2019, the startup was having fundraising issues, and I was asked to leave. It came as a bit of a shock, and I felt like I hit a professional roadblock. I thought about going back to a secure role at a place like JPMorgan, but I realized I wouldn’t fit into a structured setup again.

The pandemic hit shortly after, and oddly, it gave me time to explore ideas. I decided to go all in on my startup idea as a cofounder.

Leaving JP Morgan helped me redefine success

The early days of fundraising and building were hard. There was a point in time about six months in where I went to bed crying every day, thinking, “When will this end?” But I’d wake up the next morning and remember that this is what I signed up for. This is what I wanted to do.

Since then, our startup has raised over $6 million from global investors and we’ve built Tartan into a leading data-infrastructure platform.

I still feel like JPMorgan was an integral part of my career. It shaped me into becoming disciplined and structured. Sometimes I think about what my life would be like if I stayed there. I’d probably be a managing director with a corner office, but that’s not what success looks like to me anymore.

These days, success isn’t about title, big paychecks, or nice things. It’s not even about chasing a goal 10 years down the line. It’s about what keeps me going every day. If I’m waking up in the morning smiling and going to sleep smiling, I think I’m good.

Do you have a story to share about taking a risky or unconventional career pivot? If so, please reach out to this reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

• ChatGPT now has a group chat function where you can add your friends.
• I tested it and found that ChatGPT was often too long-winded and annoying. Let me know if you try it!
• I can imagine that having multiple users is great for certain things, like for work or studying.

ChatGPT just added a group chat feature, which is intriguing and slightly confusing. You add your friends to a new chat inside the app, and then as you and the real humans chat away, the AI chatbot can weigh in as needed.

Like I said, intriguing. The idea of moving your group chat with friends to something that lives inside ChatGPT is, well, somewhat headache-inducing, if only from a privacy and security standpoint. I won’t even touch on the freakiness of moving our social lives into an AI chatbot app — I’ll let you ponder the implications of that all on your own.

I can imagine there is some usefulness, though. In the demo video created by OpenAI about the feature, a group chat is shown where friends are trying to decide where to meet for dinner, and it provides several restaurant recommendations.

(Side note: “Trying to decide what restaurant to pick” is a human conundrum use case that seems like every tech company has attempted at various points to solve. There are, indeed, many potential technical solutions here, although, in my experience, the only true fix is having one extremely forceful person in the group who goes ahead and picks a place for everyone.)

Anyway, I had to test out this new group chat feature.

I tried inviting some friends to three separate group chats with ChatGPT. Now, of course, I was testing it out for the first time, so we were doing the standard “let’s play with a new AI tool” schtick. In one chat, we pretended to have an argument and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to get ChatGPT to take sides; we accused ChatGPT of hurting our feelings. Our immediate impulse to try to torture a chatbot as a sort of game reminded me of a famous tweet about killing E.T. with hammers.

In another chat, we tried to talk normally, but ChatGPT kept butting in. One weird thing is that ChatGPT replies to nearly everything people write unless it’s explicitly addressing the other person (“Hey Peter …”).

This, as you can imagine, is pretty annoying. ChatGPT tends to be long-winded compared to a typical human. It answers in paragraphs and bullet points, with lots of throat-clearing and hedging, taking up inches and inches of screen per answer. This is fine when it’s just you and ChatGPT, but somehow reading ChatGPT’s replies to someone else is intolerable.

As for the restaurant use case, I suppose it needs a little work. I asked it for a restaurant in NYC, and it suggested Gramercy Tavern, which is very famous, expensive, and hard to get a table at. But, sure.

It was, however, helpful when I tried doing a “normal” chat with my colleagues Peter and Pranav. Pranav talked about weekend plans for a hike, and I asked ChatGPT to make him an itinerary. It gave him helpful advice (screenshot his parking pass because there was spotty cell service — good tip!).

None of these were particularly amazing or unique uses for ChatGPT, just one-on-one, and they weren’t particularly thrilling in a group chat, either.

I won’t be taking my group chats to ChatGPT

I don’t imagine I’ll switch my group chats to the ChatGPT app anytime soon. But I can see some other great potential uses for it as a multi-user version of ChatGPT. Think of a group study session, or coworkers writing code together, or preparing meeting notes, or the myriad of other things people use ChatGPT for — now just with another person able to do it, too.

I don’t think my personal group chats need an AI assistant at the moment (maybe yours do? I don’t know your weird life!), but the ability to work with another person inside the same ChatGPT chat seems productive and appealing.

Like with any new AI product, figuring out “what will people use this for?” is a bit of a guess, and there’s a huge range and lots of unexpected uses. I’m curious to see what happens here — email me to tell me if you have fun uses for this with your friends: knotopoulos@businessinsider.com. I want to hear!