It’s a widely-known fact that politicians have been buying votes since the invention of politicians. Elect me and I’ll cut your taxes! Elect me and I’ll forgive your student loans! Elect me and I’ll build you a bridge and fix all your potholes! The transaction is generally disguised beneath enough policy jargon that we can all maintain the polite fiction that nobody is standing outside the polling booth handing out hundies.
Apparently, Trump has decided that polite fiction is overrated.
During Wednesday night’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas, POTUS made what may be the most magnificently shameless transparent campaign pitch in political history: If Republicans manage to keep their grip on Congress in November, he will present every eligible American with the cash equivalent of a 2016 Chevy Equinox.
“Because we’ve done so well,” Trump told the crowd, “and because our country is making so much money that only I could make this promise to you: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate—both of them—I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for five thousand dollars!”
If the Republicans win, you win with us, he added, before unveiling the money’s not-so-shocking moniker: the Trump Dividend. Because of course. (I guess that’s one way to make sure that 49% of your checks never get cashed.)
AMERICA: Wait, can he do that?
CONGRESS: Actually, not without us.
The little hitch in the getup is that making good on this particular pledge would set the government back a cool $1.2 trillion—at an inconvenient moment in time when the same bureaucracy is more than $40 trillion in debt. It would be a bit like offering to pick up the group dinner tab knowing your wallet contains nothing but a Blockbuster card and twelve dollars in Monopoly money.
Even absent a congressional blessing and assuming the country’s coffers were flush enough to cover it, can the sitting president literally say, “Keep my party in power and there’s five grand in it for every one of you” without being guilty of election bribery? It would appear, yes. Federal law prohibits paying someone to vote a particular way or rewarding them for it afterward. But Trump isn’t offering voters $5,000 in exchange for proof of a Republican ballot. He’s making a campaign promise for a benefit that would go to every eligible citizen even if they put their dog’s name on the write-in line or stayed home on Election Day and organized their sock drawer.
While that distinction certainly matters, it hasn’t prevented folks from criticizing the move as a little too quid-pro-quo for their liking. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called it “rather desperate.” Republican megadonor and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale went with a “bread and circus bribe.” The average Republican, on the other hand, overwhelmingly dubbed it “where do I sign up?”
It’s worth pointing out that Trump is hardly the first president to play the cash-incentive card. Bush sent out hundreds of dollars in stimulus checks, Obama handed first-time homebuyers up to $8,000, and Biden dangled $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness before SCOTUS politely told him to go take a nap. (Although Trump would undoubtedly argue that nobody’s stimulus package is as big as his.)
Presidential precedent isn’t really the issue here. Even if the whole thing were just the equivalent of a generous bonus from the CEO after an embarrassingly profitable quarter, there’s the teensy matter of believability. After all, this isn’t the first time Trump has floated the idea of buying Americans’ love and loyalty. Remember the $5,000 per-household that DOGE was supposedly going to unlock by slashing government waste? And the $2,000 tariff rebates we were promised last year?
Neither, as you may have noticed while balancing your checkbook, has materialized.
TRUMP: I’m prepared to give away trillions of dollars if I get my way!
AMERICA: Yeah, you’ve said that before.
TRUMP: Fair. But this time I put my name on it!
To Trump’s credit, he did make good on that tax-free $1,776 “Warrior Dividend” for American military personnel last Christmas. Nearly 1.5 million service members received actual money that could be exchanged for goods and services, so at least we know the technology exists. And in a spectacular bit of timing, the White House announced yesterday that nearly a million Obamacare enrollees will receive $500 refund checks beginning in October—one month before the midterms and regardless of whether Texas elects Paxton or Talarico.
As for the theoretical $5,000 Trump Dividend, there’s one decidedly curious catch: it must be spent in the United States. And no, I am not making that up.
WRITER OF THIS SUBSTACK: Wait, can he do that?
UNIVERSE’S LOGISTICS DEPARTMENT: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As far as I can tell, he cannot do that. I don’t mean he’s legally unable (I have no idea about that part, TBH), but logistically. Think about it: If the Treasury deposits five grand into my checking account, how exactly does Uncle Sam know which of the dollars in there are the Trump dollars? Can I buy an American Airlines ticket to Italy? Can I spend the money on Amazon—an American company—even if the widget I’m purchasing was made in China (which it probably was)? Can I pay my Visa bill that contains charges from both Target and Temu? Can I buy Bitcoin? Toyota stock? Gift cards? Gold? Can my husband and I gift each other $5,000 and then spend the $10,000 in Cabo?
More importantly, who on earth would be in charge of this bureaucratic hairball? Some lucky federal agency would presumably have to write the rulebook for what counts as “spent in America” and then somehow police it. Because money has this irritating characteristic economists call fungibility, which is a fancy way of saying dollars don’t wear tiny ankle monitors identifying where they came from.
I know what you’re thinking, because it’s exactly what I was thinking the minute I saw that conditional clause: THIS IS THE TROJAN HORSE THEY’RE GOING TO ROLL IN TO GET US ALL ON THE CBDC BANDWAGON. “Oh, you’d like five grand? No problem! Just enroll in our little program right here and you’ll be good to go.”
The thing about that theory is that the Trojan Horse is already inside the gates. SNAP benefits come on electronic cards programmed with restrictions. WIC benefits can be spent only on specifically approved foods. Obamacare subsidies can be sent straight to the insurance company and used for exactly one thing: health insurance. Sure, a $5,000 prepaid card could theoretically reject foreign transactions. The government could create some sort of reimbursement system or devise a restricted digital wallet. But none of those things would make it a CBDC. Central Bank Digital Currency isn’t simply money that happens to be digital; it’s currency actually issued by a central bank—something Trump himself has explicitly prohibited the federal government from establishing. A glorified gift card from Uncle Sam may be inappropriate, restrictive, or both, but it’s still just a glorified gift card.
Also, none of that solves the fungibility problem. Suppose I use my shiny new dividend to buy $5,000 worth of groceries, gasoline, and American-made decorative throw pillows, thereby freeing up the $5,000 I would have spent on those things to book a hotel in Paris. Did I spend my Trump money in America? Technically, yes. Did the government prevent its handout from financing my French vacation? Gleefully, no.
So what happens next? For now, absolutely nothing. There’s no bill on the books, no pile of checks waiting to be signed, and no congressional authorization to spend the jaw-dropping wad of dough. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno says he’ll introduce legislation after the November 3 election, at which point Congress would get to wrestle with the price tag, the funding, the 60-vote Senate hurdle, and the establishment of a Bureaucratic Hairball Committee.
Maybe that’s the real genius of the domestic-spending requirement. It transforms a regular old campaign promise into a Rorschach test. To voters, it means a few thousand extra in cash. To protectionists, it means Buy American. To congressional Republicans, it means please do not ask us where the $1.2 trillion—or whatever the final price tag is—will come from. And to Treasury officials, it means a logistical colonoscopy.
Trump doesn’t need to solve any of that at a convention. He just has to say the words “five thousand dollars” while standing near a flag.
The rest is somebody else’s pothole.
No thanks! Let's shrink government instead. Abolish the income tax too.
It's not clear how we can afford to simply give money to honest Americans. We still have a lot of fraud to fund.