“People don’t need no jobs,” said Mike Judge’s marvelous comic creation, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. “I’m gonna tell you what people need, people need money, lots and lots of money… we gonna print so much damn money, I’m gonna give every single American one million dollars. Ain’t gonna be no more one percenters. Everybody’s gonna be million percenters.”
President Donald Trump hasn’t yet gone full Camacho. But he’s getting there. Last night, at the glitzy Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, he introduced the “Trump Dividend” – a $5,000 reward for every adult US citizen on the condition that his party keeps the House and Senate in November.
It’s hard to look at the Trump Dividend and see anything other than a democratic system in decline
“If the Republicans win,” he declared, “you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump Dividend.”
He added another caveat: “We don’t want you going to China, to Germany. You got to spend the money in the United States of America.” It’s not clear how that restriction is to be enforced, or whether it is legal. But who cares about the details? Secure the bag, as the crypto hustlers used to say.
Politicians are often accused of bribing voters. Ahead of America’s last midterm elections, in 2022, President Joe Biden announced a plan to cancel large amounts of student debt. The Supreme Court later blocked the main program, but the promise was aimed squarely at young Democratic voters. During Covid, in the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs, Senators Warnock and Ossoff told voters that their electoral success would mean unlocking $2,000 in total stimulus payments – the $600 already passed, plus another $1,400. After the 2008 financial crash, Presidents Bush and Obama presented various massive government payouts as economic necessity, but of course their interventions were politically motivated, too.
But no Commander-in-Chief has ever pitched such a nakedly obvious cash-for-votes offer as Donald Trump delivered last night. In the context of the moment, the Trump Dividend, which would cost about $1.3 trillion, reeks of desperation. The President’s approval ratings are hitting new lows. Oil is surging over $100 a barrel again thanks to the Iran conflict. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is frantically trying – and failing – to bring down surging government borrowing costs. As a political project, Trumpism, or MAGA, appears to be buckling under the weight of a stupid war, various corruption scandals and the erratic silliness of the President. In happier days, Trump’s more absurd proposals could simply be laughed away – take him seriously, not literally etc. But it’s hard for any reasonable, or sane, observer to look at the Trump Dividend and see anything other than a democratic system in decline. Perhaps nothing matters any more.
It fell to J.D. Vance, Trump’s still-loyal Vice President, to defend the policy on Fox News last night. “I don’t think it’s a controversial idea,” he said, barely keeping a straight face. “What the President is talking about is fundamentally a dividend for American workers. We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the President of the United States is standing up to both foreign companies and foreign countries…”
Trump’s tariffs have “helped us pay down debt,” he added. “What the President’s just saying is if you keep us in power and allow us to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth we’re creating…”
For reference: in Trump’s second term so far, America’s public debt has increased from about $36 trillion to $40 trillion. Gross customs receipts under the tariffs have run into the high hundreds of billions of dollars, but a large share has had to be refunded after the Supreme Court struck down the legal framework for the IEEPA duties, and net collections come nowhere near the cost of the proposed payout. None of it justifies the redistributive bonanza Trump just mooted – quite the opposite, in fact. But maybe soon we can all be one million percenters.
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