Trump Just Tried to Bribe You on Live Television

Lock him up.

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I’ll be honest with you guys: I didn’t watch most of the Republican convention last night. I assumed it would be a tremendous waste of my time, so I spent the evening with my family instead. and play Dungeons and Dragons with my son. My wife and I watched Ted Lasso. I caught a little bit of a nasty Cubs game against the Brewers. I regret none of it.

This morning I caught up on the so-called highlights, which is all anybody ever needs to do with these things. Tim Scott delivering an unhinged speech to a half-empty arena. A sitting U.S. cabinet official trying to slap the behind of a sitting female Republican congresswoman. You know, just weird, MAGA shit.

But I want to focus on maybe the only genuinely interesting thing that happened, which is Donald Trump’s newest scheme to hoodwink the American people into voting Republican in the fall: a promise that if Republicans hold the House and the Senate, every American adult gets a $5,000 dividend check.

Let’s call that what it is: a bribe. He is trying to buy your vote with your own money, out in the open, on a stage, in front of cameras, and nobody in that arena so much as blinked.

Trump talked for an hour and forty-seven minutes. From everything I’ve been told, it was the exact same speech he always gives — the same grievances, the same riffs, the same sixty-minute detour through whatever’s currently rotting in his head. And at some point in there, he dangled five grand in front of a country that is genuinely struggling to pay for groceries and boasted that he has brought the ‘most tremendous economic success’ in the history of our country.

You have to be a special kind of stupid at this point to believe he’s actually going to send you that check. Because seriously, how many times has he run this play?

First, it was the $5,000 “DOGE dividend” from all those billions Elon Musk was supposedly going to save the federal government. Never happened.

Then it was a $2,000 “tariff dividend” from all the money his beautiful tariffs were supposedly going to rake in. Never happened.

Then came the promise of $1,000 checks from the “savings” created by letting ACA subsidies expire and gutting healthcare for millions of Americans through his Big Ugly Bill. Never happened.

And now, conveniently, less than two months before an election, there's another check. This time it's five thousand dollars. This time all you have to do is keep Republicans in power.

He has been lying about this exact thing, in this exact form, for years now, and he keeps doing it because it keeps working on somebody.

Politicians lying is not new. I’ve been in this business twenty years; I’m not naive about it. But the way Donald Trump lies is so far beyond the pale that it belongs in its own category. Politicians have tried to buy votes before. Nobody has ever done it this brazenly, this shamelessly, with this little effort at cover. On some level you almost have to stand in awe of it. He isn’t even pretending anymore.

And then you’ve got JD Vance out on Fox News trying to defend it — and even Fox News isn’t buying it. Even they’re skeptical this money ever materializes. Good. So Vance is sitting there explaining that we’ve paid down so much of the debt and the deficit that we can just hand the savings back to you.

That is not true. It isn’t remotely true.

The debt and the deficit are exploding right now because of Donald Trump. This administration is spending enormous amounts of money on the war in Iran. It has single-handedly eroded trade agreements and relationships with some of our closest allies. It has pursued a dozen other stupid, expensive policies. And through all of this, the administration is helping itself to billions of dollars of the American people’s money while it happens.

The outright lying isn’t new. I’m still amazed by it every single time.

And I keep coming back to the promises that actually hurt. We all remember the big ones: everything was going to get cheaper. He wasn’t going to start new wars.

But it’s the seemingly forgotten promises that stick with me.

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During his 2024 campaign, Trump stood up and promised families dealing with infertility in this country that he was going to make IVF free for every American. Think about what a promise like that means to somebody desperate to start a family. Think about hearing the president of the United States tell you that the thing standing between you and having a child might finally be taken care of.

There are people who heard that promise and let themselves hope that something they desperately wanted might finally be within reach. But after the election ended, Trump moved on, and he has never thought about them again. He has done nothing. Not a damn thing.

He used them. That’s what makes this shit so cruel.

And here’s the part that should end this whole conversation:

Republicans control the House. Republicans control the Senate. If they wanted to send every American a $5,000 check, they could do it right now. Today. Trump could get his party in a room and it would be done by the weekend. They won’t, because he doesn’t have the votes — he doesn’t really control his own party anymore. So instead of governing, he’s selling a check he can’t write to voters he thinks won’t notice.

And that’s the part I don’t want anybody to lose sight of. Donald Trump isn’t asking you to judge Republicans on what they’ve done with the power they already have. He’s asking you to ignore it. He’s asking for more time. More power. More opportunities to enrich himself and the people around him at the expense of the American people. More opportunities to erode the already fragile foundations of our democracy and further corrupt the institutions that are supposed to protect it.

And he’s doing it by exploiting something incredibly human: hope. Giving people false hope when they’re struggling goes beyond being dishonest, it’s fucking cruel.

It’s absurd. And it makes me angry.

So I’m going to do what I always tell you to do, which is turn the rage into something useful. I’m writing this in my head walking to work this morning, the way I usually do — record it into my phone, clean it up at the office, take out at least some of the f-bombs. I’ve got a couple of media hits today where I’m going to call this administration exactly what it is. I’m going to keep organizing people in my own community to make sure our democracy holds here, block by block. I’m going to keep telling people the truth. That’s what I can do.

Here’s what you can do: don’t waste another minute of your life on that convention. Nothing new is coming out of it. Take the anger, take the rage, take the frustration, and put it somewhere it does damage. Don’t let them sell you false hope. Channel that anger into building something real—for yourself, your family, for your country.

Let’s give these guys exactly what they’ve earned this fall — a massive, historic electoral defeat that ends this presidency in everything but name, turns Donald Trump into the lamest of lame ducks, and clears the way for a new generation of Democratic leadership. Leadership that can actually fix this broken economy, undo the damage, and — most importantly — deliver some accountability for the staggering corruption inside this administration.

I believe we can do all of it.

Hang tough.

With urgency,

—Mike