By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, September 10, 2026
There were major and minor absurdities on night one of
the Republican convention. We don’t need to bother with the latter.
With one exception.
Among the minor ones: A photo of far-left streamer Hasan
Piker in his skivvies flashed on the Jumbotron. (“What the f—?”) Soft-spoken Sen. Tim Scott became possessed by the
spirits of a revivalist preacher and then a WWE
hype man. Donald Trump, riffing during one of his longest weaves ever, somehow detoured into a passage about beating
meat.
The less said about all of it, the better.
But credit must be given when due: The president’s new
bit about Texas GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton being ugly and poorly dressed is
one of his best in years.
He’s used it repeatedly in public appearances this month,
including
last night, and I don’t blame him. It’s impeccable comedy. “Ken Paxton, you
might not like the way he dresses,” Trump told a gathering of Republicans last week. “And I say this,
it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it. You might not ... like
the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his
television interviews.”
“But he was the best attorney general in the country,
perhaps.”
He might be bad at politics. And sloppy. And
physically repulsive. But he’s the best at what he does. Maybe.
It’s anyone’s guess why he’s chosen to make Paxton the
butt of a recurring joke, but the fact that Democrat James Talarico has led nearly every poll of that race taken over the past month
and a half likely has something to do with it.
Trump was warned that endorsing
the lavishly corrupt Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn would put Texas in play and potentially cost the GOP the Senate.
He was also certainly warned that Paxton is a lazy campaigner and poor fundraiser whom the president would inevitably need to
rescue financially with gobs of spending from his own super PAC.
All of that has come to pass. If Paxton ends up fumbling away a gimme
Senate seat in Texas, Trump will eat mountains of crow for having backed him
over Cornyn. And so the new gag in his speeches is probably a preemptive
attempt at disowning defeat: Alas, not even I could drag this slovenly
gargoyle over the finish line.
So much for last night’s minor absurdities. Let’s talk
about the major ones.
There were two. One involved Trump reverting to his prior
career as a game-show host and promising to award every American adult a cash
prize of $5,000 if Republicans hold the House and Senate. Bribes typically
flow
to the president in this administration, not from him, but it stands to reason
that someone willing to be bought would presume the same of others.
The other involved a “bombshell” cameo by Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who
appeared in a short video to introduce his friend, colleague, and fundraising partner(!) from Pennsylvania, Republican Sen.
Dave McCormick. The long-awaited Fetterman
party-switch was here at last, it seemed—for about five minutes, until the
senator issued a statement to the press. “I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes
overwhelmingly with my party,” he affirmed, “and should the Senate flip in November, I will
still be the 51st vote that I ran on.”
Two different absurdities, but with a common cause.
Neither Trump nor Fetterman is a serious man.
The ‘Trump dividend.’
The most notable thing about the president’s $5,000
bribe, which he dubbed “the Trump dividend,” was how markets reacted to it.
Namely, they didn’t. The Dow and S&P 500 opened down
this morning despite the head of state dangling a $1.3
trillion cash stimulus for the economy on national television. Bondholders
were also blasé. “U.S. Treasuries were little changed the day after Trump made
his pledge,” Bloomberg reported, “suggesting that, for now, bond traders
were shrugging it off as an empty campaign promise.”
No one apart from chud right-wing media types is taking
the president seriously about this, and they’re only pretending to do so out of
obligation. One Republican operative who spoke to Politico described it as “a desperate attempt to
change the political mood,” which is precisely right. It’s a
break-glass-in-case-of-emergency response to an affordability problem that
Trump not only hasn’t solved but seems to regard as a distraction from the more
important task of ballroom design.
In fact, Americans have stopped taking the president
seriously about pretty much everything. A poll published yesterday by the Associated
Press revealed that “trust in information from the federal government has
declined since 2024, across issues ranging from the economy and health care to
elections and politics.” Already dismally small when Trump returned to office
last year, the share of people who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a
bit” of confidence in what the feds tell them has since collapsed.
Just 18 percent now say they have significant faith in
what the government is telling them about inflation and the cost of living—and
that’s the largest share that expressed such confidence across any of
the issues tested. The bill has come due for 20 months of insultingly empty
happy talk about tariffs as the key to prosperity and the war being over
“soon.” Trump is an unserious leader, and everyone whose livelihood and/or
emotional well-being doesn’t depend on arguing otherwise now recognizes it.
He’s especially unserious when he purports to play Santa
with taxpayer money, though, as Americans have learned from experience. In
February 2025 he touted the possibility of $5,000 checks paid for by the savings that would surely
accrue from DOGE’s budget-slashing. (There were virtually no savings.) Then, in November, he suggested sending $2,000 to every American to be paid for with tariff
revenue, an obvious ploy to try to discourage the Supreme Court from finding
those tariffs illegal. (That didn’t
work either.) Neither “dividend” was ever paid, needless to say.
Even the rare “dividend” that has been paid was
smoke and mirrors. In December, Trump announced a Christmastime $1,776 “warrior dividend” for U.S. service members—which ended up
cannibalizing a stipend for military housing that would have gone to service
members anyway.
If the new “Trump dividend” has any merit at all, it’s as
a de facto IQ test for the stupefied American electorate. Start with the
obvious: Given that Republicans already control the House and Senate, why
should the $5,000 checks be conditioned upon the GOP retaining its majorities
this fall? Better that Congress pass a bill to make this supposedly important
stimulus happen now, before Democrats gain the power to block it, no?
There’s no public purpose to the proposal, transparently,
or else the White House wouldn’t wait to move forward with it. It’s a naked
bribe designed to buy votes in November.
And it’ll almost certainly never be paid even if voters
agree to be bought. That’s the next problem: How will this “dividend” be
funded? Are we slapping another $1.3 trillion onto our $40 trillion credit-card
balance? Or, as J.D. Vance suggested last night, will it be paid for with
tariff revenue? At this point, that’s a comedy bit in its own right: Not only
does the U.S. take in waaaaay
less than needed from tariffs to cover the checks Trump is imagining (and
less still as refunds are issued for illegal tariffs), but the
administration has claimed that “the tariffs will pay for it” to justify the
cost of something like a dozen different federal initiatives since last year.
How many times can the same roughly $200 billion pot of
money be appropriated and reappropriated to cover whatever expensive whim the
president happens to be having at a given moment?
Finally: Wouldn’t issuing a $5,000 check to every adult
be a wee bit inflationary, as the COVID-19 stimulus packages issued during the
Trump and Biden presidencies famously were? A sudden windfall would ease the
average household’s affordability crunch in the short term, but once the money
ran out, Americans would be left to cope with consumer prices even loftier than
they are now. What then? Another “dividend”? Price controls? Steep new
rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, making servicing the debt that much more
crippling?
There’s nothing behind the “Trump dividend” that
resembles rational thought. To call it another iteration of right-wing
socialism along the lines of “postliberal
UBI” would be to give it too much credit. It’s a simple transactional
proffer from a postliberal demagogue to his subjects: I believe you’re
corrupt enough to be bought and stupid enough not to consider the fiscal
consequences.
Asked to defend it last night, Sen. Ted Cruz dutifully yammered about how, surely, federal spending under a
Democratic administration would be even more profligate. That’s the modern
right in a nutshell: Even the guy who intends to run in 2028 as the traditional
conservative alternative to J.D. Vance now has to rationalize bribing taxpayers
with their own money on lesser-of-two-evils grounds. An unserious movement with
unserious leaders, from top to bottom.
The Fetterman betrayal.
I don’t understand John Fetterman’s half measure on
party-switching, taking the treacherous step of appearing at the other party’s
political convention while immediately disclaiming any intention to switch.
I do understand why he wouldn’t want to switch now,
though. Sort of.
Whether Fetterman should want to become a Republican or
remain a Democrat logically depends on the composition of the Senate next year.
If Democrats end up with 51 seats, a reasonably likely outcome in November,
their majority will depend on retaining him as a member. He’ll have enormous
leverage over their agenda. If they end up with any other number, greater or
smaller, they’ll no longer have much use for him. He’ll have every reason to
become a Republican before he’s up for reelection in 2028.
That’s because, as of a few weeks ago, his job approval in Pennsylvania stood at 22 percent approval
and 63 percent disapproval among his own party and 73-21 among the GOP. He
won’t serve another term as a Democrat with numbers like that. And so the
choice before him is essentially to switch or—if his current party lands on 51—resign
himself to a single term in which his final two years in office are spent
shaping the Democratic majority’s legislation to his liking on matters about
which he cares deeply, like Israel.
One could argue, though, that he should switch even if
he ends up as the 51st Democratic vote. Becoming a Republican under
those circumstances would hand control of the Senate back to the GOP given J.D.
Vance’s tiebreaking vote. It would make Fetterman an idol of the right in
Pennsylvania and beyond, the man who snatched GOP victory from the jaws of
defeat and handed the majority back to Trump. And, as the 50th
Republican, it would give Fetterman the same sort of enormous leverage over his
new party’s agenda as he’d have as the 51st vote for his old one.
He’d even hold a de facto veto over Trump’s presidential
nominees. So why not switch? And why not now?
All I can think is that Fetterman sincerely doesn’t want
to become a Republican (which is not to say that he won’t), but in that case
I’m at a loss to see what he gained by shooting a video for the GOP convention.
“Mr. Fetterman’s brief comments underscored Republicans’ main argument in the
campaign—that Democrats are extremists and socialists who cannot be trusted to
govern,” the New York Times wrote of his introductory video for
McCormick. “His decision to take part in Mr. Trump’s convention appeared
designed for maximum shock value and served as a boost for Republicans’
otherwise lackluster gathering.”
As House speaker-in-waiting Hakeem Jeffries was recently
reminded, there are few sins a Democrat can commit graver than legitimizing
the president’s corrupt postliberal regime more than official duties require.
Fetterman committed that sin in a freakishly grandiose way by agreeing to
appear in what was essentially an extended Trump campaign ad. At best, his
participation undermined the Democratic message that there’s something
abnormally threatening about Trumpism—on a night when Trump resorted to trying
to bribe voters from the stage. At worst, Fetterman’s comments about rejecting socialism implied that his own party might be the
truly abnormal one.
It did seem deliberately provocative, as the Times
suggested, particularly considering that even many Republican lawmakers don’t
want to be seen with Trump right now. And maybe that’s all there is to it: What
if Fetterman’s cameo wasn’t a strategic play but a provocation, a sort of
middle finger to his left-wing enemies from an unserious man?
The senator’s alleged unseriousness about his job was the
subject of a splashy Wall Street Journal piece last week. According to
the paper, “Fetterman keeps a light daily schedule, often refusing to meet with
constituents and fellow lawmakers, or canceling at the last minute, records and
interviews show.” Supposedly, “he has repeatedly expressed disdain for several
core day-to-day aspects of life as a senator, according to multiple former
staffers: meetings with constituents, attending hearings and making public
in-state appearances, like town halls.”
He spends little time on the Senate floor, where
legislative haggling often takes place, and reportedly shows up briefly for
hearings so that he can be marked present before wandering off. The Journal
claims that he once dodged a meeting with three paralyzed veterans, professing
illness, then showed up at the office later because he didn’t want to miss a
chance to appear on Fox News. In another case, he’s alleged to have begged off
attending the funeral of three police officers murdered near his hometown for
no better reason than that, at three hours, the service would be long.
Fetterman has denied all of it—“lies, half-truths,
innuendos, smears, and anonymous” from staffers disgruntled by his centrist
shift, he insists—but some of those staffers are claiming that
there’s more to come about his unseriousness and they have the receipts to prove it. Part of the Journal’s
own reporting was substantiated by text messages shared with the paper,
including an exchange that seems to show Fetterman’s reluctance to attend the
police funeral.
Occam’s razor, then: He wasn’t playing three-dimensional
chess by cutting a video for Trump-a-palooza. He simply doesn’t like being a
senator, doesn’t like the left’s hostility to Israel and to him, doesn’t like
the nasty jabs they’ve taken about his mental condition since his stroke,
doesn’t like the backbiting from aides who’ve since left his office, and does
very much appreciate the Strange New Respect he’s gotten from Republican
colleagues like McCormick and outlets like Fox.
I don’t get a strong sense that he cares whether he’s
still in the Senate in 2029, or at least not as much as he cares about spiting
the leftists who began attacking him once he emerged as one of Congress’ most
outspoken supporters of Israel. That’s an unusual way for a politician with a
national profile to set priorities, but then Fetterman is an unusual
politician—a “low-conscientiousness” figure, to borrow Josh Barro’s term, who depended financially on his parents
well into middle age and has always been more than a little flaky.
That flakiness may have contributed to his relatability
as a Senate candidate in 2022, but it also might explain how he ended up as a
stage prop at a Trump rally in 2026. He’s not serious about his civic duties,
so it was more important to him to own the libs who have tormented him for the
past several years than it was to avoid lending bipartisan credence to the
president’s fascist enterprise.
I won’t grieve if a blue wave arrives this fall and makes
him the 52nd Democratic senator, leaving him with a choice
between two forms of irrelevance—sticking with his current party and being
ostracized or switching to the GOP and relegating himself to the minority. He
chose absurdity by doing a needless favor for a loathsome party. Irrelevance is
what he deserves.
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