Trump Breaks Glass, Joins Socialists, Embraces Bribery

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 10 ,2026

 

Painfully aware that, once the midterms are over, he risks being gradually consigned to irrelevance, President Trump has hit once again upon a Hail Mary plan for political success. That plan is bribery. Last night, after vocally condemning the rise of socialism in the United States, Trump pledged some of his own. “If the Republicans win,” he told a crowd in Dallas, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

 

No, no, no, no, no.

 

Did I mention “no”?

 

The Democrats who have condemned this idea are, of course, ridiculous, for in trying to trade votes for cash, Trump is merely adopting their approach without the middlemen or the euphemisms. But that is not a defense of the move — which is, in every sense possible, catastrophic.

 

Let us start with the obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it. Explaining his idea, the president described it as a “dividend.” But, of course, it is no such thing. A dividend is money a company pays to its shareholders, usually from its profits. The United States is not a company; the voters are not its shareholders; and, to put it lightly, there are no profits to be shared. There is no reason whatsoever that each adult in America should be sent money from the federal government; there is no reason that, if it is to be sent, that money should be equally allocated; and there is no reason to condition such a payout upon the Republicans winning the midterms. This isn’t tax policy or fiscal policy; it is a reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it.

 

Practically, the idea is deeply irresponsible. “Dividend” would remain the wrong word if the United States had no debt, a budget surplus, and 5 percent annual growth. But now? We are $40 trillion in debt. This year’s federal budget deficit will exceed $2 trillion. Sending $5,000 checks to every adult would cost around $1.3 trillion — more than the entire federal discretionary budget for 2026, and equivalent to about ten years of revenues from the tariffs that Trump’s feckless vice president insists will pay for this latest foray. Last year’s tax bill corrupted the sensible reforms of 2017 by adding a patchwork of irrational exemptions and special treatments: deductions for people who live in fiscally profligate states; preferences for workers who earn some of their income from tips; an expansion of the entitlements that are bankrupting us; and more. Trump’s checks-for-everyone gambit would corrupt our already corrupted budget in a similar — and considerably more consequential — manner.

 

Politically, the act would confirm for all time that the second Trump administration has been a failure. Trump was returned to office because a majority of voters believed that he could get inflation under control and thereby lower prices. Instead, Trump has publicly called for aggressive interest-rate cuts and imposed tariffs on all sectors of the economy. Adding another $1.3 trillion in stimulus would without doubt make the status quo worse. The populists are fond of insisting that the choice is between them and the socialists. This morning, that contention seems preposterous. Leaving to one side that the deliberate stoking of inflation by a president who defines himself as an anti-socialist is likely to lead to a thermostatic increase in the socialists’ support, one must ask the obvious question: If this is populism, what need is there of socialism at all?

 

Pundits and partisans routinely suggest that Donald Trump’s great electoral insight was to recognize that the public does not like being asked to eat its vegetables and that it does not want to be reminded of the dire fiscal situation that now stares it in the face. Analytically, this may be true. But “is” and “ought” are often irreconcilable, and, irrespective of their desires, the voters will not be able to outrun mathematics forever. Now, as ever, the old maxims are true. The purpose of government is to secure liberty and to tax and spend only in the realms in which it has been empowered. A society that permits its government to extort it will be a society without virtue. And, as Dickens’s Mr. Micawber famously observed, debt always leads to disaster in the end. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness,” Micawber tells David Copperfield. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery.” That applies in America in 2026, too — on both sides of the ledger.