Just Put Your Name on the Checks, Joe

As America, and particularly Americans with children, awaits its late-covid lifeline in the form of $1,400 checks, the White House is clearly pretty pleased with itself by the humility they seem to believe is inherent to offering stimulus checks without the president’s name on them.

In a press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that “We are doing everything in our power to expedite the payments and not delay them, which is why the president’s name will not appear on the memo line.” Instead, “The checks will be signed by a career official at the Bureau of Fiscal Service.”

It’s not exactly clear how keeping Joe Biden’s name off our stimmies will get them out faster, leading some experts to speculate this is really about optics, namely the fit Donald Trump threw to get his giant weirdo signature on that first check and the wave of Democrats pointing out how fucking childish that was. However, Jeff Stein, Washington Post economics reporter notes that people remember that giant weirdo signature on those long-ago checks, which could have helped Trump win votes (though clearly not enough) in 2020.

Look, I bitched about so many things during the Trump administration who can remember everything I was furious about a year ago, but I truly do not remember having The President of the United States’s name on my stimulus check being anymore offensive than all the dead ex-presidents on American currency. It was more about the fact that Trump was doing what he did best—acting like a shitty stepdad pretending doing the bare minimum to keep people alive was worthy of some sort of World’s Best President mug on Father’s Day.

Just put your name on the stimulus, Joe. Because, truly, all any of us care about is the money.