J.D. Tuccille: Donald Trump’s bribe to American voters

U.S. President Donald Trump steps away from the podium after speaking at a dinner in the Rose Garden of the White House on September 17, 2026 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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At last week’s Republican midterm convention, U.S. President Donald Trump promised that “if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate — both of them.… I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

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His pledge combined two dumb notions — vote-buying and tariffs — into one package. True, Trump didn’t invent the idea of purchasing electoral support, nor is protectionism an original idea of his. But the president brings brazen excess to his promotion of the awful combination.

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The payments are possible, he insisted, “because our country is making so much money.” He added that it would be “very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

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“The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs,” he said.

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So, the promised payments to Americans will be funded by tariff income, the president says, but only if Americans vote for the Republican Party. At its core, politics is usually about courting voters with promised goods and services to be funded by somebody else. But rarely in modern times do we see such an overt offer of pay for ballots. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either bare-faced corruption or the distilled essence of democracy. Or both.

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Alexander Fraser Tytler, the 18th-century historian, wrote of democracy: “The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people — through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery.”

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Tytler also noted that under democratically elected rulers, the people abandon “their natural liberty … as if they were under the rule of a monarch,” though the inherently authoritarian nature of all governments is a subject for another conversation. For the moment, it’s sufficient to focus on the observation that democracy is largely an exercise in vote-buying.

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Before he became America’s first president, George Washington offered evidence for that point by winning election to Virginia’s colonial-era House of Burgesses through plying voters with booze. Smithsonian magazine recounted that “Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider and beer his election agent handed out — roughly half a gallon for every vote he received.”

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Honestly, it seems that Washington got a better bargain than the $5,000 promised by Trump.

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Openly buying votes — or else intimidating voters — was common through the 19th century. The Ohio Capital Journal noted in 2020 that “Political parties would offer food, drink and inducements ranging from offers of bribes to threats of beatings to encourage voters to cast the party’s official ballot.” The adoption of the secret ballot largely ended the practice of overt bribery and arm-twisting. Now, American politicians, like those elsewhere, try to bribe the whole electorate with promises of “free” stuff that will supposedly be paid for out of somebody else’s pocket.