The $1.2-trillion desperation play — why Trump’s $5,000 midterm ‘bribe’ will backfire

Donald Trump has at last discovered an electoral mechanism familiar to politicians across much of the developing world. When the voters are unhappy, just give them money.

Last Wednesday night, 9 September, speaking at the Republican Party’s utterly bizarre and macabre midterm convention in Dallas, Trump made an extraordinary promise, even by his standards. If Republicans retain both the House of Representatives and Senate in the November midterms, every adult American citizen will receive a $5,000 “Trump dividend”.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” he told the Maga faithful in attendance.

This being Trump, there was no consideration of legislation.There was no detail on how it would be funded. There was not even much detail. Trump simply proclaimed that, provided Americans returned his party to power, he would give them cash. The White House subsequently dressed the idea up as the parallel of a successful company returning capital to its shareholders, as if that made any more sense.

It is not bribery in the narrow criminal sense. Trump is not offering voters $5,000 (R80,512) in return for photographing their Republican penned ballot paper. Governments routinely promise tax cuts or benefits before elections.

But politically the distinction is so fine as to be essentially meaningless. One is reminded of the famed mayor of Naples Achille Lauro, who would give voters a left shoe before the election and a right one after his re-election.

It is of course characteristically shameless to tell voters that they will receive $5,000 if – and only if – your political party retains control of Congress. In his trademark style, which still astonishingly seems to garner respect, Trump dispensed with the tedious intermediary steps of standard populism and went directly to the transaction. It is as simple as: vote for us, get money. 

A strategy Africans recognise

South Africans, and Africans more broadly, will recognise the strategy. Vote-buying remains depressingly de rigueur across the continent. Sometimes the inducement is cash. Sometimes it is food, fertiliser, T-shirts or a KFC Streetwise. During Kenya’s 2022 elections, EU observers recorded direct monetary handouts by both major political coalitions. Kenya’s human rights commission documented 193 cases of voter enticement or undue influence, including distributions of flour, water and of course cash.

Research using Afrobarometer data across 17 sub-Saharan African countries found that almost 18% of respondents reported having been offered money or gifts around elections. Nigeria has produced numerous variations on the theme, from cash handed out around polling stations to food and goods distributed by party factotums.

The US obviously remains institutionally different from Kenya or Nigeria, but the political psychology has essentially become the same. This is instructive as to where we are headed.

Clientelism works by replacing an argument about the future with a transaction in the present. Do not ask whether the roads work, whether prices are rising, whether government finances are sustainable or whether the president has governed competently. Here is something material, and don’t forget who gave it to you. This is further entrenchment of the cult of the personality which has plagued Africa and now envelops the US.

All of which is further evidence that Trump’s proposal tells us considerably more about Republican weakness than Republican strength.

A $5,000 payment to every American adult would cost roughly $1.2-trillion before financing costs. The US already has a federal debt of more than $40-trillion and is running an annual deficit approaching $2-trillion. Pumping another trillion dollars or more of borrowed money into consumers’ pockets while Americans are furious about inflation is a surreal economic policy of almost laughable self-defeat.

Many Republicans understand this perfectly well. Arizona Republican congressman David Schweikert said he would throw his “heart and soul” into blocking the proposal because it would hurt working Americans, warning that further borrowing would push interest rates higher. Conservative economist Stephen Moore, who has formerly advised Trump, wondered publicly whether Trump meant the proposal at all. Trump supporters will once again say it is just his strategy of getting headlines, of creating soundbites, of shaping the narrative.

This could be true, and Republicans might dismiss it all as campaign trail theatre. What they cannot dismiss so easily are the polls.

Trump approval rating at all-time low

Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 33%, according to Reuters/Ipsos, the lowest level of his political career. Even more detrimentally, 71% of Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy – including four in ten Republicans. For the first time in roughly a decade, voters now say Democrats have better ideas for managing the economy.

These are cataclysmic numbers for an incumbent president heading into midterms.

Democrats need only a small gain to win the House. Reuters says analysts now regard a Democratic takeover as likely, while one Cornell University forecast gives Democrats a roughly 80% probability of winning Congress. 

The Senate once looked safer. Now it is effectively a coin toss. While Republicans have the easier electoral map and Democrats still need a net gain of four seats, contests in places such as North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and even Texas have become competitive enough that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has openly admitted he “worries” about losing control.

Perhaps more revealing is what Republicans are saying anonymously. Strategists have complained that Trump has insisted on turning the election into a referendum on himself when that is precisely what vulnerable candidates do not want. One Republican consultant described their predicament brutally: accept Trump’s help and his unpopularity may hurt you; reject it and he may punish you. “This is the world we’re in.” Trump, for electoral candidates, has become toxic.

Hence the cheque. Trump is trying to convert an election about inflation, war, tariffs and his presidency into a simple calculation: would you like $5,000?

An African lesson for Trump

But here Africa offers him a warning. Kenyan voters even developed a beautifully cynical phrase for dealing with politicians bearing gifts: “Kula pesa, lakini kura ni yako”; eat the money, but the vote is yours.

Trump may be about to learn the same lesson. Most voters are unhappy with the president, unhappy with the economy and increasingly unhappy with the Republican government. The first two years of his second term have been an unmitigated catastrophe for the majority of Americans.

At this point it looks likely that Democrats will take the House, turning Trump into a lame duck and opening him to countless commissions of inquiry on what he has done in his first two years in power.

The Senate remains harder, but what looked almost impossible a year ago now looks plausible. If the economy deteriorates further, or Trump’s approval slips again, Democrats could take that too. Iran’s mullahs are trying their best to make sure this happens.

And should that happen, Trump’s trillion-dollar electoral ‘bribe’ may acquire a rather wonderful epitaph to an administration that wrecked America. The voters were perfectly happy to consider taking his money. They just weren’t prepared to give him their votes. DM