Few political offers could sound more audacious. President Trump this week told Americans that if they keep Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress at November’s midterm elections, every adult citizen would receive $5,000 (£3,700). Even by Trump’s standards, the proposal resembles an extraordinary form of electoral inducement — and, in my view, betrays a growing sense of alarm.
The most likely explanation is that Trump has begun heeding advisers inside the White House who have long warned that Republicans could lose both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
For much of the year, he appeared to brush aside those fears. Trump assured aides that once he took to the campaign trail, his presence would energise Republican voters and steady the party’s fortunes.
But the campaign is now under way, and the outlook for Republicans has not improved. Their prospects for November appear to be deteriorating week by week. Democrats were already favoured to retake the House, where the Republican majority is narrow and the president’s party has historically struggled in midterm contests.
The major shift over the summer, however, has been the Senate. It remains a more difficult target for Democrats, yet leading Republican strategists now acknowledge that control of the chamber is at stake. The prospect of Democrats holding both houses of Congress is prompting serious anxiety across senior MAGA ranks.
They understand what that result would mean: Trump would enter his final two years in office as a textbook lame-duck president. Congress would impose far tougher scrutiny on virtually every major initiative, from military action to federal spending — areas in which he has so far faced limited oversight.
House and Senate committees with substantial investigative authority could open a string of inquiries into Trump, his relatives and his close associates, including questions over how far they may have benefited financially during his presidency.
Such investigations could expose scandals involving figures in Trump’s orbit, damage reputations and force resignations — a grim prospect for the MAGA establishment. Democrats might even seek to impeach him for a third time.
Republicans fear that Democratic control of Congress would leave Donald Trump serving his final two White House years as an unmistakably lame-duck president
Contrary to Vice-President JD Vance’s assertion, Trump is not reducing the national debt; it continues to rise
Hence the desperate moves to shore up the Republican vote, with this week’s special rally in Dallas, Texas (where they could lose a Senate seat to the Democrats) to showboat the party’s candidates in marginal seats and, above all, parade that $5,000 bribe. I doubt it’ll work: yes, American voters can be gullible. But not that gullible. For a start, they know there’s no money to pay for it. There are roughly 245million adult citizens in America. So at $5,000 a head the ‘Trump dividend’ (as the President is inevitably calling it) would cost a massive $1.2trillion. Where’s the money coming from?
Vice-President JD Vance, who has emerged as the clear frontrunner to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, took to Fox News after the President’s speech to explain. Everything he said was untrue.
Trump’s tariffs are now generating ‘an extraordinary amount of revenue’, he claimed. Lie. So much is coming in that it’s ‘helping us pay down the [national] debt’. Lie. Keep us in power in Congress, he told voters, and ‘you’re going to share in this incredible wealth’. Lie.
Let’s turn to the truth. Tariffs are generating nothing like $1.3trillion. They were expected to bring in around $400billion this year and next. But after court rulings deemed some tariffs to be illegal, necessitating refunds, they’ll be lucky to bring in $200billion a year. Moreover that revenue has already been committed to off-setting some of the cost of Trump’s tax cuts. Much as politicians would like to, even Trump can’t spend the same money twice. After all tariff revenue has been counted, America still runs a federal budget deficit of around $2trillion a year – and rising.
READ MORE: Celebrities With Personal Stories and Connections to 9/11
Contrary to Vance’s absurd claims, there is no tariff money to pay for the ‘Trump dividend’. It’s also a nonsense to depict it as a dividend. Dividends are how companies pass on their profits to shareholders. But the federal government doesn’t make a profit. It’s ‘losing’ $2trillion a year and has to borrow the difference.
Nor, despite what Vance claimed, is Trump paying down the national debt. In fact, it’s rising – fast. It was $36trillion when Trump started his second term and, less than 20 months in, it’s now $40trillion. It’s forecast to rise for the rest of his presidency.
So the only way Trump could finance his cash-for-votes wheeze would be to borrow all $1.2trillion, on top of the $2trillion he’s already planning to borrow this financial year and the $40trillion in outstanding debt America has already accumulated. The bond markets simply wouldn’t wear it – which is why, even in the unlikely event the Republicans hold the House and the Senate, it won’t happen.
After all, we’ve been here before. American voters were promised a $5,000 a head handout in the early days of Trump’s second term – a share in the proceeds of the $2trillion Elon Musk was going to save by taking a chainsaw to federal spending. Of course the savings never materialised on anything like that scale. Neither did the $5,000 pay-back.
Nor is this the first time Trump has promised tariff revenues to voters. Last November he said tariffs would generate enough to send every voter a $2,000 cheque. Of course they didn’t generate anything like that. So the $2,000 promise also bit the dust.
It’s a measure of Trump’s less than passing acquaintance with honesty and facts that, even though he now knows tariffs will bring in a lot less than he thought last November, he nevertheless blithely ups his unfunded bribe from $2,000 to $5,000.
Desperate times, of course, call for desperate measures, even fantasy ones. The two-day rally in Dallas was itself a sign of growing panic in Republican ranks. Unlike British political parties, which insist on inflicting their increasingly dire conferences on us every year, the American parties sensibly limit their conventions to the year they have to pick a presidential candidate, which means only once every four years.
So the Dallas mini-convention was unusual, to say the least. It was called to galvanise the MAGA base and allow Trump to place himself metaphorically at the head of the Republican ticket to lead the November election charge, even though he’s not running himself. It suggests a certain madness has already set in on the Republican Party.
It cannot hope to win in November solely on a high MAGA turnout. It needs independent voters too – and they are haemorrhaging fast. The exodus will only be exacerbated by Trump placing himself front and centre. His desire to make the mid-terms a referendum on his second term is the height of self-serving electoral folly.
There was a time when Trump was the Republicans’ biggest electoral asset. No longer. He is seen to lead an administration mired in corruption, a President who has dragged America into a deeply unpopular war with Iran without congressional or public approval. His approval rating is below 40 per cent. Support for his handling of matters crucial to the cost of living is under 30 per cent.
Republican bosses despair that he would rather ramble in speeches about his White House ballroom and his plans for a triumphal arch in Washington than address grocery prices at the check out counter. As the Republican faithful left Dallas yesterday, a gallon of diesel (the fuel of America’s gigantic road haulage industry) hit $6. A gallon of petrol is already over $4. Inflation is stuck at 3.4 per cent and likely to rise.
These are election-losing statistics. All the more so because voters think Trump’s war has made them worse off. In Dallas Trump admitted there would be no end in sight to the war this side of the mid-terms – which means more economic pain is on its way.
Add in the fact that he’s increasingly perceived by voters to be verging on the doolally – even Fox News cut away from his Dallas speech when he embarked on a long ramble about water – and you have the makings of a Republican recipe for defeat in November. No conceivable bribe is likely to thwart that.