Donald Trump’s new promise to give a $5,000 check to every adult American citizen if Republicans win the midterm elections may be an effort to answer a variant of an age-old riddle: Can Trump devise a policy so ill-conceived that even Trump’s intelligence is insulted?
Candidates often make inducements part of their campaign pitch. One obvious peculiarity of this plan is that Trump’s party already controls both chambers of Congress. Why, then, should the bonus checks be contingent on voters giving Republicans another two-year majority?
Trump has told reporters that he could distribute the loot without congressional approval. This is untrue. (It’s a facially unconstitutional infringement of Congress’s spending authority.) If it were true, however, it would make his decision to hinge the checks on the election’s outcome even more mysterious. If the choice were his alone, the outcome would seem totally irrelevant.
Under certain economic circumstances, distributing checks to everybody can make sense. In a deeply depressed economy, in which consumer spending is too low to maintain high employment levels, juicing it with a cash infusion can help keep it alive.
[Jonathan Chait: Does Trump want Republicans to win the midterms?]
However, current circumstances are quite different. Unemployment is low and growth is healthy. The problem is that inflation is running well above target levels. Injecting roughly $1.2 trillion (the one-year cost of the checks) into the economy would likely make inflation worse—more cash would be chasing the same number of goods and services, driving up their price. This, in turn, would probably force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to tamp down inflation, which would throw recovery into jeopardy.
J. D. Vance has suggested that the checks could be paid for with tariff revenue. In theory, that would offset the inflationary effect of the new spending. But the tariffs are already in place, meaning that he’s citing a current revenue source to fund a new cost—at a moment when revenue is nowhere near sufficient: The U.S. government is running a deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion.
Trump, for his part, explained to reporters that he intends the checks not as an economic policy but as a treat: “I’m doing it as a reward for people having to put up for five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden … It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policy.”
When Trump ran in 2024 against Joe Biden’s policies, the “reward” was supposed to be having Trump and his policies in place. Now he seems to be suggesting that Trump’s incredible economy is not enough. This explanation is also impossible to square with his claim that the bonus would be contingent on Republicans winning the midterms. Why do Americans deserve a retroactive bonus for living in Biden’s America only if Republicans win the midterm elections? By Trump’s logic, if we were forced to endure two years of Democrats sharing power, that would make us more, not less, deserving of compensation.
The pretense that these checks have any economic logic has proved too great to bear for at least some Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dissented mildly, causing Trump’s advisers to heap them with ridicule. “Ron and Ted—the co-captains of your old high school Math-Lete Team—will nerd out on this while jockeying for 11th place in ’28,” a senior adviser to the White House told Politico Playbook.
In a normal administration, These guys understand high-school-level math is a credential, albeit a minimal one, to opine on economic policy. Only in the Trump era can it be presented as a disqualification.
The actual defense of the policy, obviously, is that it’s never going to happen. Last February, Elon Musk floated a DOGE dividend (which never arrived, in part because DOGE never produced meaningful savings). That year, Trump repeatedly promised tariff-rebate checks, which also never happened.
The Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Trump why he doesn’t simply send the checks out now. He replied, “Because the Democrats can’t do it. Because for them, it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.” What does this answer mean? Does it mean anything at all? Does Trump even believe it has any meaning, other than constituting a string of sentence fragments conveying the general sentiment Democrats bad; me good?
The actual divide within the party pits the Republicans who think that their voters are dumb enough to fall yet again for Trump’s free-money promise against those who suspect that the ruse has worn thin. Trump has spent his career betting against the intelligence of the American voter. The $5,000-check promise may be the moment he finally underestimated his audience.
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