Catherine Rampell notes prior unfulfilled Trump payment pledges
The Guardian’s “This Week in Trumpland” column characterized President Donald Trump’s almost two-hour address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday night as “a desperate last pitch to voters,” comparing the speech to “the electoral equivalent of a dumped boyfriend offering to take his estranged girlfriend on a mini-break to Venice.”
Speaking at the American Airlines Center, Trump promised to pay $5,000 to every adult US citizen if Republicans retain the House and Senate in the midterm elections. The Guardian noted that even if the offer “might sound like a bribe — ‘if you do this for me, I will give you this money,’” Trump presented the payments as a “dividend” paid because of what he described as his administration’s “tremendous economic success.”
The column observed that Trump appeared “the liveliest he’s appeared in months” during the address, with “no surreptitious naps.” He worked through familiar attacks — “Sleepy Joe,” “Barack Hussein,” “Crooked Hillary” — described by the column as “some of his greatest hits.” The Maga base initially cheered and laughed “in the way a crowd might will on a comedian who is fondly regarded, but way past his prime,” The Guardian reported.
The crowd response did not hold. The Guardian reported that “an arena that wasn’t even full to begin with began to quietly empty after an hour and a half.” By the end, Trump “became visibly drained by this point, leaned on his lectern and called Democrats ‘communist’ for the 11th time.”
The $5,000 pledge is the latest in a series of Trump proposals to send cash directly to Americans, several of which were not delivered. Bulwark columnist Catherine Rampell noted that Trump has previously discussed paying Americans through a “DOGE dividend”; $2,000 tariff dividends; and checks from Obamacare rebates. Those earlier proposals “also were not bribes,” The Guardian wrote of Rampell’s observation, “but neither did they ever come to pass.”
A notable moment came when Trump turned on his own party’s Senate candidate in Texas. The Guardian described the segment as Trump’s “bizarre character assassination of Ken Paxton, his handpicked candidate for Senate, who was the butt of the joke.” “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, whom Trump endorsed. The remarks drew laughs from the audience. Trump rounded off the mockery with the claim that Paxton “is the greatest attorney general in America,” a statement The Guardian said “is worth a fact check.”
Paxton is running neck-and-neck against state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee. The Guardian described Paxton as “a flawed candidate” and reported that Trump has “invested a lot of political capital” in him despite the attorney general’s own political vulnerabilities.
“This is Trump, who a) is just odd, and b) can never resist an opportunity to put another person down,” The Guardian wrote.
The Guardian described the address as “a desperate last pitch to voters” as Trump and the Republican Party prepare for midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for the remainder of his term.