Charles C.W. Cooke, a senior editor at the conservative magazine National Review, has slammed Donald Trump’s promise to give Americans $5,000 each if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms.
The idea is “in every sense possible, catastrophic,” Cooke wrote in a column published Thursday titled “Trump Breaks Glass, Joins Socialists, Embraces Bribery.”
Cooke, who has criticized the president on multiple previous occasions, first noted the “obvious moral problem that the money in question does not belong to those to whom Trump is promising it.”
It is also a “reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it,” he said.
The idea is “deeply irresponsible,” he added, because of the additional federal debt it would heap on the U.S.
And politically, argued Cooke, it would essentially confirm “for all time that the second Trump administration has been a failure” because he had to resort to what’s been dubbed by critics as bribery of voters.
Read the full column at National Review.
Trump promised at the GOP midterm convention on Wednesday that if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress, then “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
Journalists, pundits and critics have since pointed to Trump’s history of making promises of cash payments to Americans that have yet to materialize.
Even anchor E.D. Hill of conservative network Newsmax asked a GOP lawmaker if the promise was “basically a bribe.”