Hello, from the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where on Wednesday night Trump definitely, definitely, did not try to bribe the American public into voting for his party in November.
Speaking for almost two hours at the American Airlines Center, Trump promised to pay every adult citizen in the US $5,000 if Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterm elections. The speech felt very much like a desperate last pitch to voters: the electoral equivalent of a dumped boyfriend offering to take his estranged girlfriend on a mini-break to Venice.
It’s very important that even if the $5,000 offer might sound like a bribe – “if you do this for me, I will give you this money” – it is not a bribe; instead serving as a “dividend”, paid because of what Trump says is his administration’s “tremendous economic success”.
The $5,000 non-bribe – inducement, perhaps – was the headline of Trump’s speech, during which the president was the liveliest he’s appeared in months. There were no surreptitious naps here as Trump rattled through some of his greatest hits (Sleepy Joe, Barack Hussein, Crooked Hillary) to the delight, initially, of the crowd. I say initially, because this was evidence that you can have too much of a good thing. Even your favorite entertainer can go on too long.
That was the case here, as an arena that wasn’t even full to begin with began to quietly empty after an hour and a half as Trump, becoming visibly drained by this point, leaned on his lectern and called Democrats “communist” for the 11th time.
Earlier there had been energy from the audience, with the Maga base cheering and laughing in the way a crowd might will on a comedian who is fondly regarded, but way past his prime. They went wild for Trump’s bizarre character assassination of Ken Paxton, his handpicked candidate for Senate, who was the butt of the joke. Trump has invested a lot of political capital in Paxton – a flawed candidate who is running neck-and-neck with the Democrat James Talarico – so you might have thought the president would spend his time here lavishing praise.
But this is Trump, who a) is just odd, and b) can never resist an opportunity to put another person down.
“He may not dress right. He may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” Trump said of Paxton. He wasn’t wrong, but it’s not the kind of thing that will convince people to vote for the guy, although Trump rounded off the remarks with the claim that Paxton “is the greatest attorney general in America”.
That statement is worth a fact check, and we should be skeptical, too, about whether Americans will ever get that $5,000. As the Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell pointed out, Trump has previously discussed paying Americans: a “DOGE dividend”; $2,000 tariff dividends; and checks from Obamacare rebates. Those payments also were not bribes, but neither did they ever come to pass.
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