President Donald Trump’s offer of $5,000 to every American voter if Republicans keep Congress during the midterms is “sick” and speaks to the “moral” problems in the Republican’s administration, at least according to two conservative commentators: attorney George Conway and political consultant Sarah Longwell
“He’s dug himself in on that,” Conway told Longwell on a podcast for The Bulwark. “At the same time, the one thing he was promising to make things better was $5,000 a head, right? Nobody believes that. They’re truly affected by the diesel prices. They can’t afford things they normally could. $5,000 ought to be a real sale item. Of course, anybody who actually does the math — $5,000 times however many people you want to give it to — will say we can’t afford that. But they don’t believe it. And that says something about late-stage Trumpism, doesn’t it?”
Longwell agreed.
“It does,” Longwell told Conway. “There was a great woman in the focus group who said something like: He said there were going to be DOGE checks, and there were going to be tariff rebates, and now there’s supposed to be $5,000 if they win. This dude owes me $22,500, and I’m never going to see it. Most people at this point are hip to the fact that it’s not coming. But you know what’s even sadder? When you get people in the group who say, well, I heard he was going to give us this dividend, so I check my account and look for it, but it hasn’t come. The sadder thing is when people believe him and think there’s money coming, and they spend it…”
Conway interrupted, “It’s never coming.” After the two described how some Trump supporters will actually expect and depend on the president’s promise despite his previous broken vows, Conway noted that Michigan’s Democratic Seante candidate “Abdul El-Sayed made this great point. I wish we had the clip. I think it was last week. He talked about how part of what’s going on with Trumpism is that people don’t want to admit they were wrong. He said it better than I’ve ever said it. And to your point, it’s not just that people don’t want to admit they’re wrong. People don’t want to admit they were fleeced, that they were taken for fools. Do you sense a difference now? Not all Trump voters, obviously — not all three-time or two-time Trump voters — but are there people in the electorate feeling like, okay, I bought into a pile of lies and I was had?”
Longwell speculated, “There are sometimes people who describe it that way, but most people don’t, because people are psychologically motivated against saying they were wrong.”
Speaking to AlterNet in September, former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley described the proposed $5,000 divided as a “bribe.”
“I don’t think that’s socialism or capitalism, that’s bribery,” O’Malley told AlterNet. “That’s paying people to vote a certain way. If he stood outside a polling place in Baltimore and around the corner from it was offering to give people $5,000 to vote for him, they’d put handcuffs on him, if he were a citizen. So that’s not capitalism or socialism, that’s just straight-up bribery.”