Donald Trump is promising to give every American adult $5,000 if Republicans win the House and Senate in the midterms. He’s calling it a “dividend” because the economy is doing so well. This idea is so fucking stupid I scarcely know where to begin.

• The president, as I’m constantly required to remind people both in the media and on the Supreme Court, cannot spend money unless it is authorized by Congress. Congress would have to appropriate the funds for this “dividend.”
• Giving every American adult $5,000 would cost around $1.2 trillion, which is roughly the yearly budget of the entire US military. So when Trump says this, don’t think “Oh, $5,000.” Think “Oh, so we’re just gonna build a second military.” 
• Injecting $1.2 trillion into the economy would cause immediate inflation. Around an extra 1.5 percent, according to experts. 
• Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House RIGHT NOW. Just give us the money right now if you’re going to do it, you lying sack of shit. If you won’t do it now, why would I believe you’ll do it later, after the election, when you are (technically) a lame-duck president who (arguably) won’t even have the kind of pull over your party you’ll need to pass it? After the midterms, the only person who can (falsely) promise me $5,000 bucks is JD Vance. 

Catherine Rampell was first over the line on my feed. She detailed a bunch of other times Trump promised to give people money and then never followed through: the $5,000 we were supposed to get from DOGE, the $2,000 we were supposed to get from tariffs, the $1,000 we were supposed to get from expiring ACA subsidies.

Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz followed by pointing out that this latest false promise is not a “bribe.” Not in the illegal sense of the word. Technically, it’s a policy proposal. 

He’s right. It’s a stupid, ruinous, unworkable policy proposal. But what really angers me, as a progressive, is that people in the establishment media constantly claim that my preferred policies amount to giving people “free stuff” in exchange for their vote. When I argue for housing subsidies or food programs or healthcare or childcare, all I hear is, “How are you going to pay for it?” or “All those people are just takers” who want “free stuff” instead of “hard work.” 

But now this orange asshole is out there offering free money if he wins, and somehow this is an acceptable Republican policy? Bite me. 

If the Democrats were smart, their official response to this $5,000 dividend proposal would be “Universal Basic Income now or GTFO.” 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I forced my 13-year-old to take in all the tweets and interviews I could find from Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic whistleblower who gave voice this week to the extinction-level threat posed by AI. I wanted him to fully appreciate this threat. 

Instead he laughed it off: “So does this mean I don’t have to go back to school, since I’m not going to make it to my 30s?” I corrected him that he wouldn’t make it to his 20s, and he snickered, “Proving my point.” As I searched for a comeback, I realized the folly of my endeavor: What did I expect him to take away from all this? What did I even want him to take away from it? If he had fully grasped what this man was saying, he would have been filled with existential dread. I was essentially telling a child that a robot was going to come by his house and murder him and his whole family at some unknown point in the near future. What was he supposed to do with that information? Indeed, if what Coxon is telling us is true, “Why do I have to go to school?” is a rational response. 

My child has the same three choices the rest of us do: hedonism, paralysis, or denial. The early returns suggest that most people are going with option three: denial. People are saying that Coxon is exaggerating, or it won’t be that soon, or that rational self-preservation will kick in before it’s too late. Personally, I’m more in a state of paralysis: I believe Coxon, but I feel utterly powerless to do anything about it. I mean, I can’t even get the Democratic Party to add seats to the Supreme Court as that court engineers the party’s political extinction. I don’t think my powers of persuasion are going to work on Silicon Valley tech bros designing superintelligences so they can make themselves more money. 

And hedonism is really only a practical option for the very rich. For everybody else, the penalties for mistiming the end are too great. The difference between AI killing us in 2030 or 2050 is insignificant on the scale of existence, but it’s massive in terms of how long one must live with the downside of cashing out your 401(k) early to embrace a lifestyle full of Eyes Wide Shut sex parties and blow. 

I can only comfort myself with this: In every society, at literally every point in human history, there have been a minority of people who truly believe they are living through the last act of their society. There are always people who think they’re living during the “end times,” and those people are almost always wrong.

And when they’ve been right… well, there was nothing those true believers could have done about it anyway, because the mistakes that caused the end were made generations earlier. If this is truly our end, all we can really do is be kind to one another, and do what we can to minimize the suffering. 

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