For at least the fourth time across his two administrations, Donald Trump has promised money to the American people that he does not have the ability to deliver. The Trump administration can claim that they don’t need congressional authorization to spend $1.3 trillion sending $5,000 checks to every American, but they do need authorization.
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Republicans have moved from calling Trump’s idea socialist to flatly stating that they lack the votes, or the political follow through on Trump’s plan to bribe voters in order to win the midterms.
Democrats wasted no time pouncing on Trump’s idea, and looking for ways to use it against Republican candidates.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) linked the midterm bribe to all of the other false promises that Trump has made:
My perspective on this is that we have a string of broken promises that we can point to. Donald Trump promised to lower costs on day one: broken promise. Costs haven’t gone down in the United States of America, of course, because of Trump policies, like his tariffs. Costs have gone up. Donald Trump promised that he was elected not to start endless wars in the Middle East, but to stop them, and then turned around, broke that promise, and has gotten us involved in a reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East that has now gone on for months.
Donald Trump promised, actually, to love and cherish Medicaid, then turned around and enacted the One Big Ugly Bill, which contained the largest cut to Medicaid in American history.