‘Tyrant Donald Trump’s shameless blood-money bribe to purchase again America smacks of a demented game-show host’
Donald Trump’s economic masterplan is simple: wreck household budgets, start a needless war, then offer voters $5,000 of their own money for the privilege of enduring the most incompetent president in US history.
Naturally, this stroke of genius was unveiled last night at “Trump-a-palooza”, the desperately grand title given to his midterm convention in Dallas, an event designed to demonstrate his iron grip on the Republican Party but which at times looked more like political pantomime with a faulty projector. Trump had boasted it was sold out. Unfortunately, nobody had told the empty seats; organisers were reportedly scrambling to fill sections, and the enormous screen behind him started glitching almost as soon as he began speaking.
Nothing screams unstoppable political juggernaut quite like begging people to sit down while promising them more than £1trillion you do not have. Yet that is the grotesque bargain now being dangled before Americans as November’s crucial midterms approach. Ensure Republicans keep the House and Senate, Trump says, and every adult citizen will receive a $5,000 (£3,700) “dividend”.
By the time Trump waddled off from his latest car-crash appearance, one awkward detail remained. There was no funding plan, no legislation and no authority allowing him to order the Treasury to start firing cheques around America like a demented game-show host. Even revenues from his crippling tariffs would cover only a fraction of the cost.
It was a political bribe dressed up as generosity, financed by taxpayers and offered by the same man whose economic policies have helped make ordinary Americans poorer. At the same time, billionaires somehow continue to muddle through. Worse, it is blood money.
Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu took America into war with Iran in February, a conflict Americans did not demand and increasingly do not support. Only a quarter now believe the war is worthwhile, while disruption to the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up energy costs and inflicted yet more pain at the petrol pump. Trump’s response to this misery would be funny if the consequences were not so grim. He has told Americans oil prices may not come down until after the midterms and suggested the war itself may continue until then.
So keep enduring the killing, swallow the higher fuel bills, watch household costs climb and, if you vote correctly in November, perhaps Uncle Donald will bung you a few grand afterwards. That is some bargain. It amounts to a rebate on suffering, a calamity of Trump’s own making reduced to a campaign cheque.
Americans should also examine the small print because the salesman has tried this trick before. Late last year, Trump promised a $2,000 tariff dividend, boasting that his beloved import taxes were generating so much revenue that ordinary Americans would get a slice. The cheques never arrived.
Before that came the great DOGE dividend, when Elon Musk’s supposedly revolutionary government-efficiency drive produced excited talk of $5,000 payouts funded by all those miraculous savings he was supposedly uncovering. That money disappeared too, presumably into the same cupboard where Trump stores his healthcare plans and infrastructure weeks.
The grift is especially insulting because Americans are already paying for Trump’s tariff obsession. For years he told them foreign countries would pick up the tab, when in reality American businesses and consumers shoulder much of the cost through higher prices. Trump taxes Americans, celebrates the revenue and then promises to give some of their money back if they keep his party in power. Even Del Boy might consider that a little obvious.
And Trump knows precisely what November could mean. His approval rating has sunk so low that it has managed to beat a previous Trump low – akin to losing a stupidity contest to yourself.
Faced with voters worried about prices, war and chaos, another president might reconsider his policies, listen to the public or perhaps even display a flicker of humility. Trump asks: “How much for your vote?”
That was why Trump-a-palooza was so revealing. It was supposed to project swaggering strength but instead resembled a nervous political operation desperately trying to manufacture excitement around a president who knows losing either chamber of Congress could place real restraints on him.
Trump even told Republicans to “pretend I’m on the ballot”. Losing Congress could mean investigations, blocked legislation and meaningful scrutiny for an administration that increasingly treats constitutional checks and balances as annoying paperwork standing between Trump and whatever idea has entered his head that morning.
Hence the chequebook. Not his, obviously. The taxpayers.
But even while discussing a war that has cost lives, shaken energy markets and left families paying more, the perma-tanned president somehow found time to suggest renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait”. Even an international bloodbath needs a gift shop, right? That is Trump’s presidency in miniature. Every crisis becomes personal branding, every institution becomes an instrument of his ego, and every election becomes a loyalty test in which America is expected to prove its devotion to one man.
Now he is putting a price on that obedience. Give him Congress and perhaps the cheque arrives. Keep Republicans in power, and perhaps some of the economic pain he helped create will ease. Reward him politically, and he might generously return $5,000 that belonged to Americans in the first place.
It is desperate, grubby and breathtakingly cynical. Americans should remember the vanished Trump dividend, the vanished DOGE dividend and all the other fabulous promises that somehow evaporated once the applause died down. This latest bung is being dangled before families battered by tariffs, war and rising bills while other families have buried the dead. Blood money. And the most Trumpian joke of all?
While the cheque may never arrive, the blood already has.
