The $1.2-trillion desperation play — why Trump’s $5,000 midterm ‘bribe’ will backfire

Campaign trail theatre or not, Trump’s proposal of paying every US adult $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterm elections tells us considerably more about Republican weakness than Republican strength

Natale Labia writes on the economy and finance. Partner and chief economist of a global investment firm, he writes in his personal capacity. MBA from Università Bocconi. Supports Juventus.

Donald Trump has at last discovered an electoral mechanism familiar to politicians across much of the developing world. When the voters are unhappy, just give them money.

Last Wednesday night, 9 September, speaking at the Republican Party’s utterly bizarre and macabre midterm convention in Dallas , Trump made an extraordinary promise, even by his standards. If Republicans retain both the House of Representatives and Senate in the November midterms, every adult American citizen will receive a $5,000 “Trump dividend”.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” he told the Maga faithful in attendance.

This being Trump, there was no consideration of legislation.There was no detail on how it would be funded. There was not even much detail. Trump simply proclaimed that, provided Americans returned his party to power, he would give them cash. The White House subsequently dressed the idea up as the parallel of a successful company returning capital to its shareholders, as if that made any more sense.

It is not bribery in the narrow criminal sense. Trump is not offering voters $5,000 (R80,512) in return for photographing their Republican penned ballot paper. Governments routinely promise tax cuts or benefits before elections.

But politically the distinction is so fine as to be essentially meaningless. One is reminded of the famed mayor of Naples Achille Lauro, who would give voters a left shoe before the election and a right one after his re-election.

It is of course characteristically shameless to tell voters that they will receive $5,000 if – and only if – your political party retains control of Congress. In his trademark style, which still astonishingly seems to garner respect, Trump dispensed with the tedious intermediary steps of standard populism and went directly to the transaction. It is as simple as: vote for us, get money.

South Africans, and Africans more broadly, will recognise the strategy. Vote-buying remains depressingly de rigueur across the continent. Sometimes the inducement is cash. Sometimes it is food, fertiliser, T-shirts or a KFC Streetwise. During Kenya’s 2022 elections, EU observers recorded direct monetary handouts by both major political coalitions. Kenya’s human rights commission documented 193 cases of voter enticement or undue influence, including distributions of flour, water and of course cash.

Research using Afrobarometer data across 17 sub-Saharan African countries found that almost 18% of respondents reported having been offered money or gifts around elections.