As political sweeteners go, this one could hardly be more blatant. Back Republicans in both chambers of Congress in November’s mid-term elections, President Trump told Americans this week, and every adult citizen will receive a $5,000 (£3,700) payout. Even by Trump’s standards, it is a remarkable piece of electoral inducement. To my mind, it reeks of panic.
The only reasonable conclusion is that he has finally started paying attention to the more sober voices inside the White House, who have been warning him for months that Republicans risk losing not only the House of Representatives but the Senate as well.
Until recently, Trump brushed those warnings aside. Once he returned to the campaign trail, he insisted, Republican voters would be fired up, the party would rally and the danger would pass.
But he is campaigning now, and the outlook for Republicans is anything but reassuring. Their November prospects appear to be deteriorating with each passing week. The House was always vulnerable: the Republican majority is narrow, and the party holding the White House has historically struggled in mid-term elections.
What changed over the summer is that the Senate, once viewed as a much harder target for Democrats, has also become competitive. It remains a difficult prize for them to win, but senior Republican strategists now concede it is in danger. The prospect of Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress is causing real alarm in the upper reaches of the MAGA movement.
They understand exactly what that would mean: Trump would spend the final two years of his presidency as a textbook lame duck. Congressional oversight would tighten around almost every major initiative, from military action to federal spending, areas where he has so far operated with comparatively little restraint.
Influential committees in the House and Senate would almost certainly open a string of investigations into Trump, his family and his inner circle, with particular attention on whether they profited from his time in office.
Embarrassing scandals involving those close to him would be dragged into public view. Careers could be wrecked, reputations shredded and resignations forced. For the MAGA elite, it would be political purgatory. Democrats would no doubt also attempt to impeach Trump for a third time.
Republicans know Democrats controlling Congress would mean Donald Trump spending his final two years in the White House as the very definition of a lame-duck President
Despite what Vice-President JD Vance has claimed, Trump is not paying down the national debt – in fact, it’s rising
That explains the increasingly frantic effort to shore up the Republican vote, including this week’s special rally in Dallas, Texas, where Republicans could lose a Senate seat to the Democrats. The event was designed to showcase the party’s candidates in marginal races and, above all, to promote that $5,000 promise. I doubt it will succeed. Yes, American voters can sometimes be susceptible to grand campaign pledges. But not this susceptible. For one thing, they know there is no obvious pot of money to fund it. There are roughly 245 million adult citizens in the United States. At $5,000 each, the so-called “Trump dividend”, as the President is inevitably calling it, would cost an enormous $1.2 trillion. So where, exactly, would that money come from?
Vice-President JD Vance, now widely seen as the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, appeared on Fox News after the President’s speech to offer an explanation. None of what he said stood up to scrutiny.
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.
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.
