J.D. Tuccille: Donald Trump’s bribe to American voters

At last week’s Republican midterm convention, U.S. President Donald Trump promised that “if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate — both of them.… I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

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His pledge combined two dumb notions — vote-buying and tariffs — into one package. True, Trump didn’t invent the idea of purchasing electoral support, nor is protectionism an original idea of his. But the president brings brazen excess to his promotion of the awful combination.

The payments are possible, he insisted, “because our country is making so much money.” He added that it would be “very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

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“The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs,” he said.

So, the promised payments to Americans will be funded by tariff income, the president says, but only if Americans vote for the Republican Party. At its core, politics is usually about courting voters with promised goods and services to be funded by somebody else. But rarely in modern times do we see such an overt offer of pay for ballots. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either bare-faced corruption or the distilled essence of democracy. Or both.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th-century historian, wrote of democracy: “The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people — through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery.”

Tytler also noted that under democratically elected rulers, the people abandon “their natural liberty … as if they were under the rule of a monarch,” though the inherently authoritarian nature of all governments is a subject for another conversation. For the moment, it’s sufficient to focus on the observation that democracy is largely an exercise in vote-buying.

Before he became America’s first president, George Washington offered evidence for that point by winning election to Virginia’s colonial-era House of Burgesses through plying voters with booze. Smithsonian magazine recounted that “Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider and beer his election agent handed out — roughly half a gallon for every vote he received.”

Honestly, it seems that Washington got a better bargain than the $5,000 promised by Trump.

Openly buying votes — or else intimidating voters — was common through the 19th century. The Ohio Capital Journal noted in 2020 that “Political parties would offer food, drink and inducements ranging from offers of bribes to threats of beatings to encourage voters to cast the party’s official ballot.” The adoption of the secret ballot largely ended the practice of overt bribery and arm-twisting. Now, American politicians, like those elsewhere, try to bribe the whole electorate with promises of “free” stuff that will supposedly be paid for out of somebody else’s pocket.

Soon after the passage of his now nearly bankrupt Social Security program in 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt admitted to his advisers that the scheme’s funding mechanism was economically unsound but was “politics all the way through” designed to win over voters.

That’s typical. Since open bribery went out of fashion, politics has involved extravagant promises of goodies to be paid for by envied and resented others — or just by borrowing. We see that in politicians’ proposals for government health schemes, student loan forgiveness, and more. President Trump revived the overt bribe while insisting it would be funded by tariffs paid to the U.S. government by foreigners.

The problem is that trade barriers are mostly impositions on the people of the countries that impose them, not on foreign manufacturers of imported goods. According to Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, “study after study of the 2018-19 U.S. tariffs found that U.S. buyers of imports suffered essentially the entire burden of the tariffs, with nearly complete pass-through shown in the data.”

The second problem is that Trump’s “dividends” commit the U.S. government to paying voters vastly more money than the government has collected in the form of import duties. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported as much last week.

“Issuing this dividend in 2027 would cost the federal government over $1.2 trillion, which is far more than all three COVID-era stimulus payments combined, the projected cost of the President’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) next year, and is 50% larger than the entire primary deficit projected for 2027,” it wrote.

Despite the president’s insistence that “our country is making so much money” from tariffs, it’s not enough to fund such a vast expense. Erica York of the Tax Foundation warned that “The revenue raised by the new tariffs in 2027 would cover only about one-tenth of the cost of the promised $5,000 dividend payment. It would take almost a decade of collections from the tariffs to cover the cost.”

That’s if tariff revenue is stable and predictable. But the president’s trade barriers are based on executive orders of dubious constitutionality that have been voided by the courts one after another. The Cato Institute’s Alfredo Carrillo Obregon recently noted that “net tariff revenue has been negative since May, as the government has had to refund the tariffs invalidated by the Supreme Court earlier this year.”

And despite his love of acting unilaterally, President Trump absolutely can’t authorize $5,000 payments to every adult citizen on his own say-so, no matter how the election goes. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) says “he’d need Congress to act” on the “dividend,” though he promises to try to make it happen.

In a strange way it’s refreshing to see President Trump remind us that, at its core, democratic elections are based on what Tytler the historian called “the basest corruption and bribery.” We’ve become accustomed to grandiose political promises of subsidies, “free” services, and payoffs while too often forgetting that they’re fundamentally vote-buying schemes.

Trump’s open offer of voter bribes funded by nonexistent money underlines the true nature of politics.

National Post

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