It seems we have a choice: We can either let the most successful politician of the last hundred years or more do his thing or we can listen to those who have produced nothing except hot air their entire lives.
Last week, President Donald Trump prompted something of a complete and total meltdown among so called conservatives when he promised the audience at the Republican Midterm Convention and around the country $5,000 “dividend checks” if the GOP prevailed in November. “Here is my promise: if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them … because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” he said while referencing the “warrior dividend” checks of $1,776 sent to soldiers late last year and the $1,000 Trump Accounts made available earlier this year as part of the Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, neither of those was nearly on this scale – estimates are $5,000 for every adult citizen would cost a whopping $1.2 trillion – but neither is the proposal as outlandish as it might sound on the surface. In 2001, President George W. Bush issued $600 stimulus checks, then again in 2008. While President Barack Obama didn’t pursue that precise approach, he provided a $400 or $800 tax rebate depending on your filing status, temporarily cut payroll taxes amounting to a rebate, and expanded other tax credits as part of his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. During the pandemic, President Trump himself issued checks up to $1,200 in March 2020, then $600 in December, more for families with children. President Joe Biden followed up in March 2021 with up to $1,400 per person. Whatever the merits of these policies – and certainly their economic impact was debatable, even in some cases potential negative – President Trump’s proposal is simply another incarnation of an older idea, one that has been done new fewer than four times in the past 25 years, and potentially a fifth if you view President Obama’s policy as a rebate paid out over time.
Of course, none of these previous Presidents were Donald Trump and therefore, it was no surprise that his version was greeted with hyperbolic accusations ranging from bribery to socialism, including from his own supporters, rather than sober analysis. Barely a few hours after the President’s speech, CNBC – echoing the bizarre debate last year about illegal orders and potential war crimes, suggesting some ideas simply never die and are instead reborn in a new form – was claiming there were significant “legal questions” even beyond the potential policy concerns, “Trump’s latest announcement also quickly raised questions about whether such a policy — essentially, the promise of money in exchange for a preferred political outcome — would constitute a bribe under U.S. law…Under U.S. federal law, offering or making a payment to induce someone to vote, withhold their vote, or vote for or against a candidate is a criminal offense, punishable by a fine, up to one year in prison, or both. A willful violation can carry up to two years’ imprisonment.” While this might be true in terms of federal law, the President said nothing of the sort and they know it, which is why the word “essentially” is oddly inserted into the sentence describing it in the first place. A bribe is something given to an individual to affect an outcome, and is necessarily withheld from other individuals who do not affect the outcome. If you are to bribe voters, one would need to offer money or whatever only to those voters that did whatever it was the politician wanted. President Trump, however, clearly mentioned all adult citizens, not just those who voted for a Republican, meaning that the potential outcome would be paid to everyone, equally, and also clearly noted that the dividend payments were not merely predicated on the outcome of the election, but because of “our tremendous strength and success economically.”
CNBC just as clearly knew that, and yet persisted with fantasy that the mere mention of it was somehow illegal to the point where they “contacted the White House for clarification on the legal implications of Trump’s dividend proposal,” and rather incredibly, they weren’t done with this complete falsehood yet. From there, they even more oddly tied it to an Elon Musk initiative during the 2024 election, where he offered million dollar checks as part of a voter registration and outreach effort. Though they are well aware one has nothing to do with the other, if only because one is a state issue to begin with and the other is federal with different legal standard between them, they still managed to make it seem like the President was in some sort of legal jeopardy, writing “In July, a bipartisan panel found Musk likely broke state law by giving $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election. The Wisconsin Elections Commission referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, paving the way for prosecutors to decide whether to charge Musk.” If you doubt my assertion that the two are not connected and that even if one constitutes a bribe, the other is merely a campaign promise, how is it that Democrats can regularly run on free healthcare, free college, forgiveness of student loans, and every other giveaway without the same proscription? Is promising to pay for something on someone’s behalf should you win a bribe as well? If not, why not when you can be convicted of bribery for providing services rather than merely direct payments?
At the same time, we might forgive the media or at least accept that transforming a statement of President Trump’s, practically any statement, into some kind of illegal scandal is standard operating procedure. As mentioned earlier, they did almost exactly the same thing almost exactly a year ago with the so-called illegal military orders. For better or worse, this is simply what they do and have done since he rode down the golden escalator in June of 2015. While supporters might not like it, it’s the reality that we have lived with for more than a decade, and I believe most of us know it’s not going to change whatever we may prefer.
Increasingly, however, and far more troubling from my perspective, some segments of the President’s own supporters are doing much the same, finding it necessary to criticize and attack, at times even using the same language as Trump’s opponents. For reasons that defy rational political explanation, they too reacted to the statement with nothing short of outrage. “I am hugely in favor of winning the midterms, and love much about this admin, but am strongly against bread and circus bribes,” Palantir co-founder and Republican donor Joe Lonsdale posted on X. “Will post-conservative Republicans also try to defend Trump’s $5K ‘dividend’ socialist vote-buying scheme that would cost nearly $1 trillion?” former House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good wrote on the same platform. “Dependency is evil and soul-sucking in all its forms,” claimed Congressman Chip Roy. “No matter which party you vote for you get socialism,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted. “Economically illiterate” and a “trillion-dollar-plus redistribution scheme” blared former Congressman Justin Amash. “I don’t know about you all, but frankly I’m insulted by the notion that my vote this November could be bought for 5k,” outgoing Congressman Thomas Massie mocked. “Not to mention the inflation this would cause,” he added. “But Mr. Trump’s proposal would be worse than the Biden stimulus in the sense that in 2026 the economy already has an inflation problem,” Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, told the Associated Press. “Trump would be pouring gasoline on lit inflationary embers and hoping it wouldn’t ignite.” Conservative influencer and blogger Matt Walsh complained, “Spending over a trillion dollars to randomly send everyone in the country a check for five grand, including people who are not even net taxpayers – which makes this, yes welfare – is idiotic. Sorry. We did that during covid and it didn’t help anything. Only made inflation worse. This is flagrant bribery. Which I could maybe stomach if the plan itself was at least sensible and coherent, but it isn’t.”
Beyond providing ammunition to the mainstream media – once again using the very same, overwrought, inaccurate language – and completely failing to support the President who leads their party in the middle of a mid-term election where the stakes are nothing short of another impeachment, one has to wonder how many elections these guys and gals have won. Can someone, anyone, themselves included tell me or anyone else when they have once in their entire lives implemented the sort of changes they seek rather than merely bitching about them? Or do they do nothing except complain, ignoring the successes they have demanded, more on that in a moment, while complaining about perceived failures which in this case haven’t even happened yet?
Ultimately, there appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between electoral politics and economic theory. As economic theory and assuming it has any chance of passing the Senate in the first place, something we can imagine the President himself is aware would be extremely unlikely given it would likely need a 60 vote majority and no Democrat save perhaps Jon Fetterman would ever support it, I tend to agree that the proposal is problematic for some of the reasons listed here. Generally speaking, the government should not be in the business of writing checks to citizens and assuming we had an extra $5,000 per adult, there are better ways to distribute the money via tax cuts, credits, or whatever. In that regard, whether it has done so before isn’t really relevant and some criticism is justified; a bad idea then, should not be recycled now. At the same time, elections are not won or lost on the strength of an economic theory. Instead, they are won by which side can cut through the noise with proposals and promises that are simple enough for voters to understand in an oversaturated media environment. As everyone knows, the current environment isn’t exactly thrilled with the economy or inflation, something Mr. Walsh and others have had no issue harping on themselves – while providing next to no solutions of their own, I might add. Many voters need help, or at least believe they do, and in that regard, the President’s proposal speaks to them directly, letting them know that he understands people might be struggling and seeks to do something about it while conveniently mentioning that good things are happening as we speak. Given the rapidity with which the soundbite was shared over social media and broadcasted over the regular media, before many people even woke up in the morning, the proposal likely served its intended purpose to galvanize attention on the stakes of the election if nothing else.
Further, I can’t be the only one to note the inherent ungratefulness in the constant anklebiting. Why do these same people never praise the President for enacting the sort of generational changes they’ve long demanded yet no one has delivered? Why do they spend all of their time criticizing rather than showcasing huge successes? In this regard, I can point you to four recent charts. The first shows the foreign born population in the US since 2009. Between January of that year and January 2025, when President Trump took office for the first time, the line generally goes up with 7.9 million foreign born added to the US across President Obama’s two terms and President Trump’s first term, then an incredible 8.3 million added during President Joe Biden’s term. Suddenly, however, it starts going down, fast. In barely a year and half, there are 2.9 million less foreign born people living in the United States. If you’ve been clamoring for mass deportation as Mr. Walsh and many others have done, this is it. Similarly, if you have been concerned about the increase of crime and a seemingly never ending line of drug overdoses, the crime rate is set to have its largest two year decline in recorded history and the number of drug overdoses is expected to be cut in half (or more) from their peak. Likewise, if you have been concerned about the growth of government, another chart shows the number of government workers since before 1940. Outside of a drop after World War 2 and the occasional fluctuation, it too seems to have risen inexorably since at least 2000, only to suddenly start plummeting after President Trump retook office, bringing it town to the closest level since the 1960s. Last, but not least, the manufacturing index, that bugaboo of politicians who have promised jobs in the sector for years, has shown the most striking of recoveries, hitting the highest levels in the past three years by huge margins, rapidly approaching numbers during the pandemic when the government funded the manufacturer of large quantities of goods, only doing so organically.
If this isn’t success these people should be cheering, I don’t know what it is, but I do know one thing. It seems to me we have a choice: We can either let the most successful politician of the last hundred years or more do his thing in his own way and trust that he will come up on top without constant interference, or we can listen to those who have produced nothing except hot air their entire lives, having never won anything or implemented a single on of the policies they seek. On second thought, is that really a choice?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 