PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
“If the Republicans win, you win with us and get $5,000,” Trump bloviated during his rally-pretending-to-be-a-convention in Dallas last Wednesday.
He concluded, inevitably, with a branding exercise. The checks, he said, would “be called the Trump Dividend.”
Trump sounds like a carny salesman, not a president. That’s because he is a carny salesman. He’s shilling hard because the Republican Party he is selling for the midterms is about as appetizing as his patented explosive diarrhea lettuce.
Republican polling is currently hitting impressive new lows. Trump’s approval is hovering around 36 percent in the FiftyPlusOne aggregate, and the same site’s Senate forecast just hit a new high of a 61 percent likelihood of a Democratic flip. Gas prices are skyrocketing, inflation is spiking, the Iran war is somehow going worse than ever, and so is the trade war with Canada.
Faced with a crisis of his own making, Trump does what he’s always done — he lies, then lies again, and then makes promises he has no intention of keeping. He will gladly pay you in January for a vote in November, even if he has no way to do so, and also may just change his mind anyway.
Other Republicans, the media, and the public have been more skeptical than usual of the latest claim; the Trump magic looks a bit less magic when the Iowa Senate race is tied and Republicans have a four percent chance of winning the House.
Still, more skeptical than usual is a depressingly low bar. Twelve years into our endless era of Trump, mainstream outlets remain reluctant to tell the public in stark terms that their president is an orange bag of gas and flimflam whose promises are as much of a hoax as his increasingly grotesque hair.
There will be no checks
In response to Trump’s promise, a number of outlets published credulous headlines which effectively served as free Republican propaganda.
“Trump promises $5,000 ‘dividend’ for US voters if Republicans win midterms,” the Financial Times gushed. “Trump promised $5,000 checks if Republicans win the midterms. How would that work?” PBS asked.
Stay tuned and they will also explain how Trump plans to coordinate the logistics of golden turds falling from his every orifice.
To be fair, when you actually read the articles in question, the writers do admit that the answer to “how would that work?” is that it would not.
A $5,000 check to every adult would cost about $1.3 trillion. That is a lot of money, even for the US government. JD Vance went on Fox News and lied that the funds would come from tariff revenue. But as Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, pointed out, the proposed payments are almost as much as the projected revenue from tariffs over the next decade.
Since magic tariff money won’t work, that leaves the dull old boring constitutional method of asking Congress to fund your ridiculous nonsense. Some legislators are predictably eager to debase themselves; Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno rushed to Elon Musk’s fash-site to declare himself ready to introduce a “Trump dividend” bill.
But others, even in Trump’s own party, are leery of massive inflationary spending at a time when prices are already out of control. Many Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, think tanks, and advocacy groups were blindsided by the proposal.
Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy attacked the plan on the hyperbolic libertarian grounds that “Dependency is evil & soul-sucking in all its forms.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expressed the more reasonable worry that Trump’s proposal would cause “more debt and more inflation.” Along the same lines, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman argued that “we’re already more than $40 trillion in debt, and cannot support another massive spending package without a clear way to pay for it.” (Of course, taxing the wealthy or clawing back ICE funding is a no go for Republicans.)
Norman also worried that Trump’s offer sounded like “pay-to-play politics” — that is, a bribe. The offer probably is not illegal since Trump isn’t proposing paying only his own voters (at least not yet). But the way he talked about the “Trump dividend” makes it sound like he’s giving people a bonus for voting for him, personally. For Trump, the answer to every problem is always “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Then he puts a knife between your shoulder blades.
Of course, Trump also tries to knife you if you don’t go along with him. As he departed Texas late Thursday, ABC’s Rachel Scott asked him a smart question: “If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?” Trump babbled about how everything is Biden’s fault and then snapped at Scott that “your network … you’re the worst.”
Stiffing people is his art form
Biden, as it happens, did send out stimulus checks in 2021. So did Trump in 2020. The money went out during the covid lockdown — a good policy during a global catastrophe which led to unprecedented economic contraction and left huge numbers of people unemployed.
But we are not in covid lockdown. And while Trump got congressional buy-in for stimulus in his first term, in his second he keeps promising checks and not even trying to deliver.
At the beginning of 2025, for example, Elon Musk promised to pay everyone in the US $5,000 with the projected $2 trillion in savings from DOGE. Trump said it was a “great idea.” But in the end it turned out that DOGE’s main accomplishment was not savings, but dead bodies; shuttering USAID is expected to kill a horrific 14 million people abroad by 2030. The supposed financial benefits of this monstrous policy, and of DOGE’s other ill-conceived cuts, were slim to nonexistent. Musk left government in May 2025 to spend his days promoting white nationalism, and the checks were never spoken of again.
In July 2025, though, Trump began talking up a different, newer, better dividend. This time he claimed that he would send $2,000 to every adult using tariff revenues. Alas, the tariff revenues weren’t enough to cover even this smaller amount, and when the Supreme Court struck down most of them this February, Trump was required to refund $166 billion to importers.
Once more, there were no checks.
And that’s not all. In December 2025, Trump said he wanted to send $1,500 to every American based on the “savings” from cutting ACA subsidies.
”The people will get the money and they’re going to buy the health insurance that they want,” he said.
You are probably not surprised to hear that the checks did not materialize. Now, though, Trump has also proposed sending $500 checks to one million of the 19 million Obamacare enrollees. The payments would go to those not on premium assistance and using government exchanges, “meaning the payments would disproportionately benefit enrollees with higher incomes in red states,” according to Common Dreams. Trump says that the money will offset higher premiums. That’s probably a lie, even if he does send the checks, which no one should count on.
There is, then, a lot of precedent for President Trump telling Americans that he is going to send them checks only for him not to send them checks. And beyond that, there is even more precedent for Trump promising to pay people and then not paying them.
In 2016, while Trump was running for president, journalists uncovered 60 lawsuits by hundreds of vendors and businesspeople who said that Trump had stiffed them when they had contracted to work at his properties. Trump didn’t pay waiters. He didn’t pay bartenders. He didn’t pay lawyers who defended him in the suits by the waiters and bartenders. He illegally underpaid, or just didn’t pay, undocumented Polish workers who worked on building Trump Tower. He withheld a payment of $83,600 from a cabinetmaker who built desks and bars at Trump Plaza in the ‘80s, forcing the 40-year-old firm out of business.
Trump claimed that he withheld payment for inferior or substandard work. But he actually asked the cabinetmaker to do more work for him. That suggests that Trump was not carefully evaluating the value of cabinetry. Rather, Donald Trump simply feels Donald Trump is too important to have to pay people who work for him.
Along the same lines, Trump University, Trump’s real estate education swindle, was designed to “bilk money from people who dreamed of successful real estate careers,” according to the Center for American Progress. People who paid $1,500 for a course on the real estate industry were treated to an aggressive sales pitch designed to get them to pay even more money for worthless courses. One student commented, “requesting we raise our credit limits on our credit cards at lunch Friday seemed a little transparent.” Customers sued Trump; he settled the case for $25 million in 2018.
When Trump contracts for services, he doesn’t pay for them. When he contracts to provide services to others, he doesn’t provide them. Every business transaction is a con — the con being simply that Trump refuses to hold up his end of any bargain and leaves every and anybody else holding the bag.
For Trump, everyone is a mark
Trump treats voters the way he treated vendors and customers. He promises them benefits he has no intention of delivering, congratulating himself on his super clever strategy of sadistically betraying the trust of people who have faith in him. The $5,000 checks are a gimmick just like every other gimmick. He has no plan to send people money and no real interest in doing so. As always, he wants people to give him what he wants for free, just because he’s Donald Trump and he’s entitled.
The public appears to have finally figured out Trump’s one weird trick. A YouGov poll conducted after Trump’s $5,000 promise found that only 18 percent of adults said they were more likely to vote for Trump because of the checks. Forty one percent said his promises made no difference, and 29 percent said they were less likely to vote for him. Those are the kind of numbers you get when people don’t believe you’re going to do what you say and are angry at you for trying to fool them.
It’s good that voters recognize that Trump is a liar. It’s good that mainstream media is writing articles about how the $5,000 checks aren’t going to work. But why on earth, at this late stage, are outlets writing headlines that frame Trump’s promises as news in themselves. Whey must we pretend to treat his slimy word vomit as good faith policy proposals?
The important thing to know about Trump, the thing that all Americans need to know, is not how much money he says he’ll give you. The important thing to know is that he is a liar, a skinflint, and a scammer, and that he will give you nothing, because he wants all the money, all the power, and all the country for himself.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
The Republicons supporting adding $1.3 trillion to the $40 trillion debt will blame democrats for allowing this and use it to try to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and any program that helps the poor and middle class. Its what they do.
Not all of Trump's con victims were helpless. When one of his Atlantic City casinos opened, to great hoopla, the opening night was a disaster, with machines shortingbout all over the casino floor. Moral: never stiff guys who know exactly where to insert a screwdriver or monkey wrench into the wiring.