Sinclair Lewis deserves a prize for prescience. Ninety years ago, the author of “It Can’t Happen Here” created a presidential candidate named Buzz Windrip who rose to power with an openly demagogic agenda.
Buzz believed nonstop lying was the best way to connect with voters (“it is not fair to ordinary folks – it just confuses them – to try to make them swallow all the true facts”). He played them for suckers, and won. He told them “lowdown crooks, liars, and schemers” were trying to rig the election against him, that dishonest reporters were plotting his downfall, and that members of the “Nordic” race were more American than “people of inferior races.”
And he promised that, once elected, he would give each person $5,000.
I kid you not. It’s in the book.
Surely you heard what Trump said the other day: “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000. Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”
P. T. Barnum never actually said a sucker is born every minute, but the carnival barker who lives at the White House construction site apparently believes, even at this late stage of his deteriorating regime, that he can somehow sow mass gullibility. Granted, his latest con is probably catnip for the willfully ignorant and woefully naive (roughly one-third of the citizenry), but by now most Americans know he’s running on empty.
Plagued by high prices (from his un-winnable Iran war and his self-destructive tariff war), Trump’s merely offering a distraction, a shiny object for everyone to chase. Sending $5,000 to 270 million adult Americans would cost roughly $1.3 trillion, explode the already $40-trillion national debt, and require congressional approval.
It’s all just a mirage anyway. Remember last year when he teased the idea of sending us money from Elon Musk’s federal government cuts? Remember last year when he teased the idea of sending us money from the tariffs he’d slapped on our trading partners? What follows is a primer for MAGA amnesiacs, proof that all he’s doing now is recycling old grifts.
Feb. 2025: “There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20 percent of the DOGE savings to American citizens.”
July 2025: “We’re thinking about a rebate because we have so much money coming in from tariffs, a little rebate for people of a certain income level might be very nice.”
Aug 2025: “There could be a distribution or a dividend to the people of our country, I wield say for middle income people and lower-income people.”
Nov 2025: “We’re going to issue a dividend to our middle-income people and lower-income people of about $2000.”
Nov. 2025: “”I’ll be giving back $2000 or so to middle-income people, low-income people, everybody but the rich. It’ll be next year some time.”
Dec. 2025: “And we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars. And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people.”
Jan 2026: “We will be able to make a very substantial dividend to the people of our country. I believe we can do that without Congress.”
Feb 2026: “I’m looking at it (dividend) very seriously. I’m the only one who can do it because I’m taking in literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I can do that. I haven’t made the commitment yet, but I may make the commitment.”
Big surprise, he never did. And you have to wonder why not. After all, he’s been governing this whole time with a Republican House and Senate, so how come he and his congressional supplicants haven’t shared the purported bounty with us citizens (while stuffing his own pockets with $2.2 billion)?
Even Fox News host Laura Ingraham, normally a doormat, asked Trump on the air why he doesn’t simply dispense those $5000 checks right now, given the GOP’s power dominance in DC. This was his answer, verbatim: “Because the Democrats can’t do it. Because for them, it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.”
Say what? He’s more coherent when he naps on camera.
In Ireland he actually uttered this sentence: “I always keep my pledge.” But don’t bet on any windfall for your gas and grocery tabs. Whether his MAGA candidates win or lose in November, it ain’t happening. Natalie Harp gets a dividend, not you. Stormy Daniels gets a dividend, not you.
But you already know these truths to be self-evident. As Tony Soprano warned us years ago, “One thing about us wise guys – the hustle never ends.”
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected].