Bought votes, bigger debts, higher prices

On the 9th of September, the Republicans held an unusual midterm convention aimed at mobilizing the party’s base of voters and raising money for a final drive toward November’s election, when control of the House and Senate will be decided. While the balance of power is obviously important for influencing the direction of public policy, there is another matter that may be on President Trump’s mind. It just might be his big proposal to give Americans a $5,000 tariff dividend.

Back in January, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, warned the president about the impact of tariffs on prices, reportedly saying, “Mr President, if we get to November of [2026] and people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10–20% at the supermarket, we’re going to go into election day, and face a bloodbath. You’re going to lose the House, you’re going to lose the Senate, you’re going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week.” The president’s response, according to the report, was unprintable.

While tariffs could be expected to increase prices, at the time of the interaction reported above the United States had not entered into the fullness of its conflict with Iran. That conflict has led to a crisis with regard to world oil markets and substantially higher prices at the pump. Though Cruz’s concerns about the stock market have proven unfounded, his worries about affordability have retained their potency. Gas prices are attention-getting and affect the cost of virtually every other good and service.

President Trump, having experienced constant attempts and widely floated proposals to remove him from office in his first term, is surely attentive to the reality to which Ted Cruz pointed in their conversation. Accordingly, Trump has frequently told voters that he is aware the president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms and that he intends to defy that historical tendency. In the meantime, many political analysts believe the House is already a lost cause at this point and that the Senate may be in play, even when existing advantages had seemed to favor the GOP holding the upper chamber.

The Iran crisis and persistent higher prices left over from the Biden administration, perhaps exacerbated by the president’s tariffs, have made a tough task even harder. President Trump understands that and used the odd midterm convention in Dallas to attempt to rally voters and to prevent the situation Sen. Cruz prophesied. Most expected Trump to dominate the two-night event and to try to use it to make the appeal he has used more frequently of late, which is to encourage his voters to treat the midterms as though he is personally on the ballot. But no one expected a Republican president to take the stage and promise American citizens that if the GOP wins the midterms, he will make sure they receive a $5,000 dividend, ostensibly funded by his tariffs.

It has been typical in modern American history for Republicans to criticize Democrats for attempting to buy votes with their promises to enact new entitlements or to protect old ones. But no major American politician has made as nakedly transactional an offer as the one Trump put forth on Sept. 9. The fact that Trump must be concerned about what a Democrat-led House of Representatives will do after the midterms makes the offer all the more remarkable.

Let the consultants poll the people and decide whether the stunning offer is good retail politics. But it is a terrible precedent to set that American political leaders would offer direct and immediate financial benefit as an inducement for a vote. The president’s promise to repeal taxes on tips and overtime already approached such an offer, but promising to write checks takes it to another level. If it were to work, would political leaders fall all over themselves trying to offer more and more dollars for votes?

And what about the expense? The tag put on the proposal has been calculated to be over $1 trillion. That would be an extra trillion dollars worth of expense in an era when we are regularly running deficits of about $2 trillion each year with the overall debt hitting $40 trillion. Interest on the debt, depending on who you ask, exceeds spending on national defense. And we are looking at the near future in which the Social Security trust fund will be depleted and benefits will be automatically cut unless Congress acts. There is no cushion, no rainy-day fund. The credit card is badly overused.

Finally, if affordability is the great concern, a new round of government checks will only make it worse. The hot inflation of the Biden presidency was significantly worsened by round after round of COVID checks to individuals and organizations. The current president is known for the art of the deal, but what Americans need now is responsible, mature leadership. That’s the deal America needs.