Showcasing his desperation over sinking chances of enough GOP wins in the November mid-term election, America’s convicted felon president, Donald J. Trump, is promising to bribe voters with $5,000 payments each if they manage to keep his party in power.
Is this a bribe? Of course.
“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Mr. Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” a haggard-looking Trump said in a close-to-two hour speech during a staged “mid-term convention” Wednesday night.
“Whether it’s legal or not, it seems — just like with a lot of his election disinformation — it seems rather desperate,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials, told The New York Times in an interview after the speech. “Ultimately, it’s going to be up to the voters whether or not they trust this man to deliver on his promises.”
“If I were a voter, I would be asking myself, why are you promising to do this in 2027? You control both houses now. Why not deliver on this promise now?”
Katie Rogers, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times, reported:
The president did not seem particularly concerned about the details of the plan, but he was sure about what he would call it: The $5,000 payments would be known as Trump Dividends.
Trump is floundering amid his increasingly erratic style, hobbled by increasing dementia and failing health. He spends most of his time on expensive, taxpayer-funded paid “vanity projects” like the under-construction ballroom replacing the East Wing that he ordered torn down without Congressional approval or review by the federal agency designed to review such items, his proposed “Monumental Arch” praising himself that could hamper aircraft approaching Washington National Airport and block Capital views that are supposed to be protecting, including the Veterans Memorial Cemetary.
Writes Dan Friedman in Mother Jones:
Donald Trump’s beloved White House ballroom is moving ahead—at a reported cost of $900 million and counting—thanks to a 5-4 ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.
The ballroom is just one of a slew of active or would-be construction sites where the president is hoping to leave his mark on Washington. But for now, it’s an exception. Many of Trump’s other pet projects are in limbo, stalled by botched construction and legal challenges. Congress has declined to appropriate billions of dollars the administration wants for so-called “beautification” efforts in DC, but the White House has used money from elsewhere in federal budget, including roughly $100 million collected as National Park entrance fees, to pay for the work.
A mile west of the White House, the Kennedy Center remains closed—a tarp obscuring the facade where a federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed. Trump’s plans for the performing arts center, including custom marble armrests, more shows like “Cats,” and his name on the wall, have so far failed. His dismay seemed to animate a recent court filing in which the Justice Department threatened that the center could be demolished if Trump’s plans remained blocked in court.
A mile or so south, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool sits drained and fenced off—months after the president trumpeted its grand reopening. Following its renovation, the pool closed due to algae blooms and peeling “American flag blue” liner. In late July, the Justice Department acknowledged the peeling resulted from flawed work by a contractor that had received a no-bid contract, worth more than $15 million so far, from the Trump administration. That admission came in a court filing dropping felony charges against an alleged vandal who Trump had blamed for the damage. Trump recently claimed the reflecting will re-open, again, within weeks. But his track record on this topic suggests skepticism is warranted.
Across the Potomac River via Memorial Bridge, the administration hopes to construct what critics have dubbed the “Arc de’ Trump.” The plan for that 250-foot monument, which Trump has said is for “me,” received initial approval this summer from a key federal commission packed with Trump allies, and backing from the Trump-controlled National Park Service. But the proposal has faced stiff legal opposition, in part because the arch would block views of Arlington National Cemetery, leaving its future is uncertain.
Even less likely to be built is the so-called “National Garden of American Heroes.” That’s the statue garden featuring sculptures of 250 Americans that the president hopes to plant along the Potomac near the Jefferson Memorial. Trump first floated the statue garden in 2020 as a sort of anti-woke answer to the removal of statues of Confederates, slave owners, and other historical figures around the country. Congressional Republicans allocated funding for the project, and the administration initially hoped to complete it by July 4 of this year—in time for the semiquincentennial. Trump’s team also set up a nonprofit and began seeking corporate donations for the plan. The same foundation is also raising funds to build a luxury golf course on a flood-prone island in the Potomac, where Trump has claimed construction will start soon.
But July 4 has come and gone, and the statue garden is nowhere close to ready. Sculptors have called the plan “unworkable” due to limited statue-making capacity. And the site also sits in a location where new “commemorative work” cannot be built without additional congressional approval. Congress has not approved this specific plan for the garden, meaning a lawsuit seeking to block the effort might well succeed.
Trump has, however, planted statues elsewhere. He put a new statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds—take that, Indigenous Peoples’ Day. And in Freedom Plaza, a park just southeast of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, the administration in April installed 14 statues. These include a large equestrian depiction of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. That statue had sat in storage since 2020, when it was removed from a perch in Wilmington, Delaware, due to Rodney’s status as a major slaveowner. We reported in July that Trump’s Interior Department paid $527,000 for rushed construction of the pedestal on which it now stands. That’s around twice what the department had estimated the statue base should cost. “The work was expedited to ensure it is done before our nation’s 250th,” an Interior Department official told Mother Jones.
Back by the White House are other public works projects the administration rushed to complete by July 4. The National Park Service spent $17.4 million through a no-bid contract to repair two ornamental fountains. The contract, first reported by the New York Times, was secretly awarded to Clark Construction, the same firm that is building the ballroom. The fountains now work. But they are hard to see because of the 13-foot steel fences the administration installed around Lafayette Park. That fencing was supposed to be temporary, but the administration has now proposed permanently fencing off the park. For now, the whole park, including the refurbished fountains, remains closed to the taxpayers who paid for it.
It is not unheard-of for politicians to tie the possibility of an economic stimulus to an election’s outcome. In 2020, Democrats in Georgia pointed to $2,000 coronavirus relief checks if their party took control of the Senate.
But few have been as brazen as Mr. Trump, who often dangles the possibility of free money if it means achieving his political goals, even as he seeks to undermine public trust in elections. In the same speech, Mr. Trump insisted that he won the presidential election three times (he didn’t) and accused Democrats of trying to cheat in elections.
In several cases, the money Mr. Trump has promised in the past has not materialized. He has proposed $2,000 checks based on tariff revenues (in an interview with The New York Times in January, he said that money could arrive by the end of this year). He has also floated $5,000 payments from money saved by eliminating thousands of federal jobs, and assorted payments to Americans from government health care subsidies.
Republicans did send Americans larger, direct payments this year in the form of heftier tax refunds. Mr. Trump and Republicans designed last year’s tax cut so that it would deliver bigger refunds, rather than slightly lower their payments over time. The hope was that one larger lump sum could help Republicans win the midterms.
But Mr. Trump’s latest notion would be exorbitantly expensive.
It would cost more than $1.3 trillion to send $5,000 checks to each of the roughly 270 million adults in the U.S., making such a plan almost prohibitively costly for a country with a $40 trillion national debt.
Mr. Trump said that the money would come with just one caveat: It must be spent in the United States.
“We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money,” he told the crowd. “We don’t want you going to China, to Germany. You got to spend the money in the United States of America.”
Outside the cost and the complications of carrying out a plan that would track voter spending, Mr. Trump’s latest pledge could raise legal questions. Federal laws prohibit expenditures to influence voting, but he has framed his proposal as a promise that will be delivered upon later, as an economic incentive.
Jessica Levinson, who teaches election law at Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said that Mr. Trump’s statement did not seem too far afield from a promise to lower taxes.
And Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Mr. Trump’s promise was protected speech under the First Amendment, pointing to Brown v. Hartlage, a unanimous Supreme Court decision from 1982 that struck down the application of a Kentucky law preventing candidates from making monetary promises in return for votes. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion that “so long as the hoped-for personal benefit is to be achieved through the normal processes of government, and not through some private arrangement, it has always been, and remains, a reputable basis upon which to cast one’s ballot.”
So, if anyone votes for Republicans this year with an expectations of getting five grand from Uncle Sam as a payment, just remember that more than polls show that 50% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 now say they regret the votes because he failed to deliver on his promises to eliminate inflation, stay out of new wars and other lies.
Trump is a convicted felon, a civil court-certified sexual predator, a documented liar, a convicted cheat and an accused seditionist who tried to use a mob of his thugs to overthrow our government on Jan. 6, 2025, an outright act of treason.
In our opinion, anyone who votes for and/or supports such a criminal and traitor should be considered a co-conspirator in such crimes.
