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Dogs bark, ducks quack, and populists offer free stuff. Enrique Pena Nieto dispensed around 10 million TV sets to low-income Mexican households. Hugo Chavez gave Venezuelans steeply discounted refrigerators, air conditioning units, and, again, TV sets. In Argentina, Evita Peron would personally hand out children’s toys, sewing machines, clothes, and kitchenware.
None of these (for once the phrase seems precisely apt) tinpot populists, though, was so flagrant as to offer a straightforward cash handout in explicit exchange for an election victory. It took President Donald Trump to go there. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate,” he told a roaring crowd in Dallas, “because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
I know, I know. Seriously, not literally, and all that. Trump had previously promised to send everyone a $5,000 check from savings through DOGE, only to discover that no such savings were to be found. He naturally then denied ever having made any such promise. He also offered everyone a $2,000 tariff rebate check. In the event, it was the federal government — in other words, the American taxpayer — that ended up having to write rebate checks to companies that had been hit by the illegal trade restrictions. That point bears repeating, by the way. Not a single foreign country is asking for a rebate, because, as everyone outside the MAGA core tried to explain at the time, tariffs fall on American consumers and businesses, not foreign governments.
Trump’s latest pledge might very well violate election law. In any case, even if the Republicans somehow did win both houses — something that would be much easier for them if they had a different president — it is hard to see Congress approving such largesse, a total cost of around $1.3 trillion, at a time when, to remind you, the national debt is at $40 trillion.
(Washington Examiner illustration; Getty Images)
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(Washington Examiner illustration; Getty Images)
Like so many previous Trump pledges, it ain’t gonna happen. Nothing about Trump mystifies me more than the bovine insistence from his base that he “tells it like it is.” I can think of no front-line politician anywhere in the world to whom that phrase applies less aptly. Where other politicians might twist, evade, answer a different question to the one put to them, or find a legalistic formula that allows them to be technically accurate while misleading, Trump straightforwardly makes things up. As Shakespeare’s Prince Hal puts it, “These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable.”
Why is there so little protest at the overt Third Worldery of the chief executive? I have written here before about the way Trump seems to enjoy giving tinpot dictator vibes: the territorial expansionism, the enrichment of the presidential family, the protectionism, the contempt for the Constitution, the threats to jail opponents, the monumental triumphal arches, and the naming of institutions after the leader.
This, though, is on a different level. When Ferdinand Marcos offered Filipinos subsidized rice and sequestered land, it was at least wrapped up as a social program. When Rafael Trujillo, who named the Dominican Republic’s capital city after himself, decreed cheap housing and clinics and offered people make-work government jobs, he pretended he was tackling poverty.
Trump, by contrast, is quite brazen about the quid pro quo: “If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000.”
As always, the depressing thing is not Trump’s shamelessness, but the people who enable it. The founders had Trump’s number. When they warned against what they called “Caesarism,” they had in mind the danger that a strongman might overturn the institutions of the republic. To see Trump avidly imitating Julius Caesar’s embrace of the dole, the handout of free grain, would not have surprised them.
What would have surprised them is the reaction, or lack of reaction, from Republicans who know better. Immediately after Trump’s pledge, the camera cut to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, applauding like a demented seal. Does Bessent not understand what is wrong with the leader of the world’s most indebted country, at a time of spiking bond yields, making such a commitment? Or is it like one of those speeches by Stalin where no one in the audience dares to be the first to stop clapping? Does Vice President JD Vance truly believe that such a sum is a “dividend for American workers,” or is he too playing along and biding his time?
Either way, they would not be behaving like that if voters were not lapping it up. This, I fear, is not just a Trump problem. It is an electorate problem.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
