OPINION:
There’s a trick magicians love: the reveal that never comes. You watch the hands, you wait for the rabbit and somehow the hat stays stubbornly empty every single time.
President Trump has been performing a version of this trick for years now, except instead of a rabbit, it’s a check — and instead of an audience of paying customers, it’s the entire American electorate.
The latest edition of the trick landed at the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, where Mr. Trump promised that if Republicans hold both chambers of Congress after the November midterms (very unlikely, what with grocery store and gas prices soaring), every adult American will receive a $5,000 “Trump dividend.”
“So if the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” the magician told the crowd.
There’s just one small catch, and it’s the same catch that’s followed every previous version of this promise: Nobody, including the president, seems to know where the money is coming from.
When Fox News’ Laura Ingraham pressed him on why the checks couldn’t arrive before the midterms if the funds already existed, Mr. Trump offered this: “Because the Democrats can’t do it. Because with them, it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive. So, we’re taking in $21 trillion.”
What? No one, including the Treasury Department, seems to know what $21 trillion he’s referring to. It’s the fiscal equivalent of pointing at the sky and insisting it’s actually the ocean.
This would almost be forgivable as a one-off flight of rhetorical fancy if it weren’t, at this point, a full-blown genre.
Conservative columnist Charles C.W. Cooke — no liberal firebrand — didn’t hold back, calling the plan “just preposterous” and writing that Mr. Trump, “painfully aware that, once the midterms are over, he risks being gradually consigned to irrelevance,” has “hit once again upon a Hail Mary plan for political success. That plan is bribery.”
Mr. Cooke also caught the tonal whiplash of a convention that spent its evenings warning against the perils of socialism before pledging, in Mr. Cooke’s words, that Mr. Trump “pledged some of his own.”
And the receipts, as they say, are extensive. In February 2025, Mr. Trump floated giving Americans “20% of the [Department of Government Efficiency] savings,” telling reporters aboard Air Force One: “I love it. A 20% dividend, so to speak.”
By October, on One America News, the number had drifted to “$1,000 to $2,000.” A month later, he promised “$2,000 or so to middle-income people and low-income people,” arriving “next year sometime.”
By that November, “next year” had softened into “probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that.” Come January, he was telling reporters he could deliver “a very substantial dividend” without even needing Congress.
And when NBC News finally asked him point-blank in February whether he could promise Americans those checks, he said, “Oh yeah, sure, I can do that,” before immediately walking it back by saying, “I haven’t made the commitment yet, but I may make the commitment.”
The DOGE dividend, tariff rebate checks, direct healthcare payments instead of insurer subsidies — each has been announced with theatrical confidence and then quietly allowed to evaporate, usually blamed on courts, Congress or some unnamed obstruction.
The Supreme Court blocked the tariffs that were supposed to fund one round of checks. DOGE itself, the agency meant to fund another round, was dismantled entirely in July 2026 and barely saved us a dime.
The pattern isn’t subtle: Announce a windfall, bask in the headlines, let the details quietly die in committee (or in this case, in the memory hole).
None of this is a partisan gripe either. Federal law prohibits offering payment in exchange for votes, and critics on both sides of the aisle have flagged that only Congress — not the president — actually holds the power to cut checks to 250 million adults.
Sen. Bernie Moreno’s post-speech promise on X to fast-track legislation “immediately after the November 3rd election” is itself an admission that nothing exists yet beyond a speech and a slogan.
Somewhere between “20% of DOGE savings” and “$5,000 if Republicans win,” the con has gotten more brazen, not less — because the earlier version, at least, pretended to be about savings and efficiency. This one is a straightforward transaction: Vote for us, get paid.
It’s less a policy platform than a magician insisting, for the fifth time, that the rabbit is definitely in there this time — you just have to believe a little harder and maybe vote a little more first.
So here’s the only question left worth asking, the one that matters more than tariff math or DOGE savings or whatever the scam turns out to be: How many times can a con man run the same con?
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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