Trump Offers to Send $5,000 to Every Citizen If Republicans Retain Control of Congress

Recalls colonial practice of offering large quantities of alcohol at polling places.

When George Washington first ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1755, his campaign advisors recommended that he host parties at taverns near polling places and provide free booze to anyone who seemed inclined to support him. Washington refused to participate in what was essentially bribing voters with alcohol, and he lost the election. However, three years later, he decided to play the game and allowed his agent to provide roughly 160 gallons of alcoholic drinks for 391 voters—amounting to nearly half a gallon per person. This time he easily won the election.

I thought of this incident when I saw the news this morning that—during a speech Wednesday night at the GOP’s midterm convention here in my native Dallas, Texas— President Trump proposed sending every adult American citizen a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November. As he put it:

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. It will be called the Trump dividend. Now all we have to do is win. Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of our next 250 years or surges forward and never looks back.

Note that a $5,000 payout to 270 million adults would cost the US government approximately $1.35 trillion. Trump floated his proposal shortly after US public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time.

Uncle Sam’s infinite largesse has been enabled because Congress no longer even pretends to place limits of federal indebtedness. Since 2013, it has suspended the debt ceiling eight times, allowing for continued borrowing without a specific dollar limit for set periods.

With Trump’s announcement, the US government has officially entered what I call the “drunken sailor in port” phase of our Constitutional Republic. Dying of some tropical disease in a Caribbean port and knowing that a British Navy press gang will soon force him into service on a warship, the sailor spends all of his money on rum and hookers and consoles himself that he’s had a good run.