To steal a phrase from Anchorman: 60 percent of the time, Donald Trump is honest every time. The Republican president has a, let’s say, difficult relationship with the truth. There’s something quite postmodern about his approach to reality.
But part of Trump’s mass appeal has been a willingness to, as his MAGA movement sees it, tell it like it is. Not a common man by any means—he’s a billionaire who inherited the family business, and grew it, to be fair to him—but a man of common sense. Of course, common-sense politics of the everyman is a language of vulgarity and insensitivity to left-liberals.
They tend to speak a modern tongue moderated by other people’s feelings and fear of committing heresy in the eyes of progressive puritanism. Yet there was a crude honesty to Trump’s big retail offer to voters at his so-called "Trumpalooza" event in Dallas on Wednesday, the first midterm convention his party has ever staged. It used a language everyone speaks, even if usually indirectly: money.
"If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000," Trump said at the RNC event, touting it as a "dividend"—there’s that postmodern approach to truth again—for Americans, his trade war paying off in one of their pockets (as it picks the other). That is not coded or cloaked in any way like this kind of pork barrel politics usually is. It is naked, shameless, and conditional—and your side of the bargain comes first.
It is tempting, as many of Trump’s critics will point out, to say the president has reduced American democracy to a cash-for-votes proposition, priced at somewhere north of $1 trillion. But Trump was being unusually open about what already happens in every election. He hasn’t debased the transaction so much as removed its typical wrapping.
Democratic politics has always run on material bargains—tax cuts, welfare rises, child credits, farm payments, student debt relief, free health care—presented as expressions of a governing philosophy rather than as offers. Is this really so different? What Trump did in Dallas was collapse the distance between the payment and the reason given for it.
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