Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested.
The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front page of its website.
A day or two later, the story disappeared from most front pages. Admittedly, it was the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the NYT found space for stories about the Reflecting Pool fiasco and Trump’s presidential library.
I found one story in USA Today suggesting that the policy might be inflationary, but that’s about it.
The reaction from US financial markets has been similarly subdued. Interest rates on government bonds have continued the gradual increase of recent months. There has been nothing like the reaction that put Liz Truss out of office in the UK after a term that lasted less than the shelf life of a lettuce. Meanwhile, stock markets barely reacted.
Lots of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump has previously proposed handouts that didn’t happen, for example from the savings to be made by DOGE, which never materialised. But this is typical of Trump — he has a range of obsessions to which he returns from time to time, before his attention span expires.
Some are relatively trivial, like steam catapults for aircraft carriers, others more consequential, like his suggested conquests of Canada and Greenland, or retribution against his political enemies. But he never abandons them for good.
And, in the case of cash handouts, he’s had one big success — the Covid stimulus checks that were sent out with his name on them and almost certainly helped him come within an inch of victory in 2020 — as well as some smaller ones.
In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediate effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow-on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation-targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.
But the US is not a serious country.1 Over the past decade, at least 40 per cent of US voters (including sustained majorities of white men, the dominant identity group) have shown themselves willing to vote for a corrupt and deranged clown, while another third of the population hasn’t even bothered to vote.
Faced with these facts, mainstream media and establishment Democrats have continued to pretend that everything is normal,2 sanewashing Trump and hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.
As Adam Smith observed to a correspondent, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But it is running down its capital at a startling rate, and there is no real sign of things turning around in time.
1 Phillips O’Brien has been making this point with respect to foreign policy. ↩
2 Each new Trump outrage is met with feeble protests to the effect that “this is not who we are”, gradually replaced by tacit acceptance that this is who tens of millions of Americans are. ↩
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
JPL 09.13.26 at 11:32 pm
My impression is that nobody thinks that proposal will actually happen. I recall one
Republican congressman saying, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”. The sanewashing, however is still a big problem, esp wrt the media, and esp wrt white house reporters.
What I find puzzling is that even Democratic politicians and supporters on TV talk of the Iran war in terms of “winning/losing”, or “not being able to end this war”, or “not having any well-defined objectives”, and so forth. It seems obvious that the way to end this war is to immediately bring all the military forces home, get them all out of that area, and preferably close all the military bases in that region. And then try to solve any residual problems by other means, like negotiation, alliances, etc., i.e., the inverse of the Clausewitz dictum. This, or any other originally political problem, can not be solved by military force. The fact that all these ships and troops are still there is baffling to me. It’s real madness. Take all the military options off the table before you do something even more stupid. Am I missing something here? That war crimes have already been committed is intolerable, and people should be making more noise; but we need to start now to repudiate the dominant approach of Hegseth, Miller, et al., including the primitive psychopath Trump, that allowed participation in Netanyahu’s totalizing genocidal intent, their whole Satanic perversion of ethical ideals and the glorification of 50,000 year old impulses associated with “masculinity, etc.
mw 09.14.26 at 6:47 am
“hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.”
As opposed to doing what exactly? The electoral system is not broken. Trump is proposing crazy schemes to try to win the midterm elections-not behaving as if this is no longer a concern. Trump is not the result of a failure of democracy in any kind of mechanical sense. He is the result of the expressed preference of a (small) voting majority. That is subject to change.
oldster 09.14.26 at 9:16 am
“… hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.”
Suppose that establishment Democrats were to lose that hope. What should their next move be?
Alex SL 09.14.26 at 10:54 am
The only implication I would disagree with here is that this is more or less particular to the USA. All across at least the ‘Western’ world parties and right-wing populists in the mold of MAGA are on the rise. Everywhere, approximately 30-40% of voters are some combination of deeply immature (e.g., wanting the advantages of EU membership/government services/cheap immigrant labour without the price of EU membership/taxes/immigration), xenophobic, cruel, and authoritarian. Whether they can take over government is often more of a function of the electoral system than of the seriousness of the rest of the country.
steven t johnson 09.14.26 at 3:37 pm
” But he never abandons [his obsessions] for good.” I agree wholeheartedly. The notorious TACO cliche ignores how Trump doesn’t actually reverse a policy, as in replacing it with a new policy, he merely does something else. I suspect the people with the short attention span are the ones who forget that there’s a difference between a boxer back pedaling in the ring and one who throws in the towel. It’s just as likely that it’s they who are distracted when Trump suddenly perpetrates some other outrageous stunt. They forget to look and see if the previous policy was actually reversed.
I not sure I agree that it is such a deadly insult to claim that a country is not “serious.” So often that seems to mean, willing to make the hard choices, which are generally at someone else’s expense. In the nicer variant it means, well-dressed and well-mannered and completely untainted by any radical or utopian nonsense.
I’m afraid I definitely disagree with the proposition that Trumpery emerges from the filthy masses. As Alex SL reminds us, the same shift is taking place globally. It is I think the owners of the global system, world economy, who have been turning to Trumpery here and variants thereof abroad. These people have worked assiduously, directly through their media and their politicians and indirectly through their policy institutes and lawyers, to create the electoral support. (I firmly believe that a lot of them are getting very tired of paying so much for elections to go the right-wing way!)
They have purged, drowned out dissent, sowed moral panics, pushed hot buttons, for decades to create the majorities that are purported to have created the kind of regime the owners have wanted, more or less. We are all supposed to be surprised that the vile vulgar rabble happen to want a victorious war to restore American domination of the world to the glorious past; to want low/no taxes on wealth; to want to cut social services to pay for war. What a convenient coincidence that is?
somebody who remembers DOGE 09.14.26 at 6:40 pm
you can only take this tendency in american politics in conjunction with the fact that the average american thinks that homeless people get around a hundred thousand dollars in free government aid every month, and foreign aid is most of the budget, sending THEYRE TAX DOLLERS OVERSEAS to WOKE BLACK black black BLACK BLACK black BLACK black BLACK black BLACK!!!!! the idea that you can’t just send five grand to everyone is silly – don’t we already send a million dollars a week to every lady on “food stamps”??????? for her to laugh at me and buy a T BONE STEAK in her CADILLAC?!!?!?!? while i can barely afford GAS ?????
MisterMr 09.14.26 at 7:20 pm
Just here to say that the “user verification” thingie is showing up for me.