Julio Cortez/AP
The year is 2026, and by now, you know, with clarity, that Donald Trump is a brazen liar with an unusually impressive record of promising free cash—only to rarely ever fulfill those lofty pledges. It is the personality of a deadbeat that long precedes his entry into politics. But in between flashing “meat pics” of Hasan Piker and a surprise video appearance by John Fetterman, rabid cheers greeted the president’s offer to hand out $5,000 checks to every adult in the United States if Republicans win both the House and Senate in the November midterms.
“It will be called the Trump Dividend,” he said at Wednesday’s GOP convention in Dallas, as a beaming Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, applauded along.
The plan, as many have now weighed in, would cost at least $1 trillion and arrives just as alarm bells are clanging over a ballooning national debt and everyday expenses continuously get more expensive. But Trump’s latest pledge is as fantastical and mendacious as many of Trump’s previous promises of free cash: $2,000 checks from supposed tariff revenue, $5,000 checks from all that money we never saved from DOGE, etc. This time around, though, some on the right don’t appear to be buying it. Here’s Fox News cautioning against believing Trump:
The rare caveat by Fox News comes amid signs that Trump’s frantic midterm strategy—which has involved a whole lot of lying, efforts to feign indifference, and impossible Iran war predictions—isn’t agreeing with Republicans, as more appear to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular president. But at Wednesday’s convention, the first of its kind for the midterms, Trump continued to demand attention to the one person Republicans could afford to hear less from these days. “Pretend that I am running,” he told the crowd.
It isn’t a coincidence, then, that also on Wednesday night, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel announced that his interview with James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, would no longer air on broadcast television after new threats from the FCC. As Kimmel told the audience, Trump’s “FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations—based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.” The announcement, which follows a similar move by the FCC when Stephen Colbert interviewed Talarico in February, reveals more of the same chaos ahead of the fast-approaching November elections, as well as a president desperately using every lever of political power to keep the spotlight on himself.