By swiftly endorsing Trump’s ludicrous plan to buy votes in the midterms, J.D. Vance hints at the future of Trumpism—and there may not be one.
Soon after President Donald Trump floated a plan to pay voters to support Republican candidates in the upcoming midterm elections, Fox News’ Bret Baier put the idea to Vice President J.D. Vance.
Vance’s reply matters more than Trump’s own outlandish pitch—that he would issue $5,000 checks to every adult citizen of the United States if Republicans maintain control of Congress in November.
Baier pressed him on the obvious question: how would such a program be financed, given an estimated price tag of about $1.3 trillion?
“We’re bringing in an extraordinary amount of revenue,” replied Vance. “What the president is saying is: ‘If you keep us in power and allow us to continue these things, then you’ll share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we are creating in the United States of America.'”
Practically speaking, it is plainly false to claim that tariffs could fund such an expensive promise.
Tariff revenue, which are essentially taxes on Americans, will not come close to covering this proposed expenditure. In fact, tariff receipts have slipped into negative territory in recent months as the Trump administration issues refunds for the unlawful levies it imposed last year. (There are several other practical hurdles as well, such as the federal government already carrying about $40 trillion in debt and the likelihood that stimulus spending at this scale would spark additional inflation, as Reason‘s Liz Wolfe explained this morning.)
What’s even more striking is Vance’s suggestion that these checks reflect “this incredible wealth that we are creating.”
Government doesn’t create wealth, of course. It can only redistribute money from one person to another—which is precisely what Trump is proposing. Opposing those kinds of schemes used to be a core tenet of conservative politics.
That Vance is willing to engage with such a ridiculous, unconservative, fiscally imprudent idea is revealing. After all, the vice president presents himself as a serious, thoughtful critic of the political and economic status quo. His supporters view him as the heir apparent to Trump—the man with the policy acumen to stabilize this populist movement and to redefine the Republican Party and the conservative movement for the next generation.
Even amid Wednesday night’s spectacle of absurdity, longtime Vance booster Rod Dreher condemned Trump’s bribe idea and wrote that he is “ready for [Trump] to step aside and let JD be president, and focus on the economy.”
But how does that vision of Vance square with the vice president backing a recklessly impractical, utterly unprincipled (and possibly illegal) plan to bribe voters?
Focus on the economy? Not so much. The notion of dropping free money from government helicopters belongs to outlandish socialist caricatures. It is, as National Review‘s Charles Cooke described it, “a reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it.”
The alternative, of course, is that Vance knows this is a silly, unworkable idea. But that would imply he merely lied to Baier, Fox News, and the American people. Is that an improvement? Hard to say.
This whole episode exposes how completely bereft of ideas the entire Trump political project has become. The president promised to make life more affordable and argued tariffs would usher in a “golden age” for Americans, yet the reality has fallen far short. Prices continue to rise at an uncomfortably rapid pace—wholesale prices increased by 0.4 percent in August and are up 5.4 percent over the past year. The tariffs and Trump’s reckless, perpetual confrontation with Iran are contributing to that trend.
Now, the president is openly promising to throw money at the problem, and Vance is dutifully going along. This marks the natural end of all populist movements, which begin by promising simple solutions to intricate problems and eventually collapse when those “solutions” prove to be scams or oversimplifications. Remember when everyone was going to receive a DOGE dividend check?
Vance is supposed to be the man with the real answers, but it’s becoming clear that there isn’t much there. If you won’t openly condemn the idea of bribing Americans with their own money, you’re not fit for public office. (And for that reason, every Republican running in the midterms ought to be asked about this.)
Trumpism is short on ideas, and it seems likely to lose power soon—regardless of the president’s increasingly fantastical promises along the way.
