Trump’s $5,000 promise shows how few ideas MAGA has left

Not long after President Donald Trump offered to bribe voters to back Republicans in this year’s midterm elections, Vice President J.D. Vance was asked about the idea by Fox News’ Bret Baier.

Vance’s response is, in many ways, more important than Trump’s ridiculous pitch—that he would send $5,000 checks to every adult citizen of the U.S. if the GOP retains control of Congress in November.

Baier asked Vance the obvious question: How does the administration plan to pay for such a scheme, which would cost an estimated $1.3 trillion?

“We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue,” said Vance. “What the president is saying is: ‘If you keep it going…if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we are creating in the United States of America.'”

As a practical matter, it is simply false for the vice president to suggest that tariffs will fund this expensive promise.

Revenue from tariffs, which are really just taxes on Americans, will not come close to covering this proposed expenditure. In fact, tariff revenue has been in negative territory in recent months as the Trump administration issues refunds for the illegal tariffs it levied last year. (There are several other practical hurdles too, like the fact that the federal government is already $40 trillion in debt and the likelihood that stimulus spending on this scale would cause more inflation, as Reason‘s Liz Wolfe explained this morning.)

What’s more interesting is Vance’s suggestion that those checks reflect “this incredible wealth that we are creating.”

Government doesn’t create wealth, of course. All it can do is redistribute money from one person to another—which is exactly what Trump is proposing. Opposing those kinds of schemes used to be a core tenet of conservative politics.

That Vance is willing to play ball with such a ridiculous, unconservative, fiscally irresponsible idea is telling. After all, the vice president likes to position himself as a serious, thoughtful critic of the political and economic status quo. His supporters see him as the heir apparent to Trump—the guy with the political and policy chops to make this populist movement stick and to redefine the Republican Party and the conservative movement for the next generation.

Even amid Wednesday night’s parade of absurdity, longtime Vance cheerleader Rod Dreher condemned Trump’s bribe idea and wrote that he is “ready for [Trump] to go away and let JD be president, and focus on the economy.”

But how can that notion of Vance be squared with vice president throwing his support behind a recklessly impractical, utterly unprincipled (and possibly illegal) plan to bribe voters?

Focus on the economy? Please. Promising to drop free money out of government helicopters is the stuff of outlandish socialist caricatures. It is, as National Review‘s Charles Cooke put it, “a reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it.”

The alternative, of course, is that Vance knows this is a silly, unworkable idea. But that means he just plainly lied to Baier, Fox News, and the American people. Is that better? I’m not sure.

This entire incident exposes how completely out of ideas the entire Trump political project is. The president promised that he would make life more affordable and that tariffs would deliver a “golden age” for Americans, but the reality has fallen well short. Prices are still rising uncomfortably fast—data released this morning shows that wholesale prices rose by 0.4 percent in August and are up 5.4 percent over the past year. The tariffs and Trump’s foolish, endless war with Iran are contributing to that.

Now, the president is literally promising to throw money at the problem, and Vance is dutifully playing along. This is the inevitable end of all populist movements, which begin by promising easy solutions to complex problems and eventually collapse when those “solutions” are revealed to be grifts or oversimplifications. Hey, remember when everyone was going to get a DOGE dividend check?

Vance is supposed to be the guy with the real answers, but it is becoming obvious that there is no there there. If you’re unwilling to say that nakedly bribing Americans with their own money is a bad idea, you’re not fit for public office. (And for that reason, every Republican running in the midterms ought to be asked about this.)

Trumpism is out of ideas, and soon it is likely to be out of power—no matter what ridiculous promises the president makes along the way.