Trump’s Desperate $5,000 Bribe to Save the GOP Could Blow Up in His Face

Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov celebrate the two-year anniversary of Raging Moderates with a sharp analysis of the first night of the Republican National

Key takeaways

• Trump's $5,000 dividend promise is framed as a fiscal irresponsibility that would cost $1.3 trillion and pass massive debt to future generations.
• The proposal reflects bipartisan fiscal recklessness, with both parties historically increasing national debt despite differing averages.

Main topics

• Trump's $5,000 dividend pledge at the RNC
• Fiscal irresponsibility and intergenerational debt

Notable quotes

"This is the equivalent of giving your kids a $5,000 credit card that they'll owe $13,000 on by age 18." - Scott Galloway

Conclusion

The episode underscores how political theater and short-term promises

Transcript preview

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No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox. Speaker 5 (1:13) Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness isn't just a destination. It's a grueling, lifelong journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices, and an unwavering drive to outclimb the achievements of yesterday. That is the journey of a WNBA athlete. And Delta is there every step of the way. Delta is proud to host these competitors, providing charter flights for every WNBA team to elevate their travel experience and champion equity on every leg of their trip. Keep climbing with Delta Airlines, the official airline of the WNBA. Speaker 8 (2:01) Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And Speaker 3 (2:03) I'm Jessica Tarliff. Speaker 8 (2:05) All right, Jess, let's get into it. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and the one-year mark since the Charlie Kirk assassination, Trump and the GOP gathered for night one of the first-ever RNC midterm convention. Trump used the stage to make a pretty remarkable midterm promise, pledging a $5,000 Trump dividend to every American adult if Republicans hold on to Congress. Kalshi currently has the odds that Democrats take the House at 86 % and odds of Dems winning both the House and Senate at 47%. Let's get a taste of night one. Speaker 1 (2:37) I'm the only one. I build the ballroom. No money, no tax. I don't want tax money. I don't want anything. It's me and a bunch of patriots. They put up lots of money to build this. And what happens? I get criticized. It's the most incredible thing. I have nothing to pay the same for you at some point, but I'll continue that right now. And it's, by the way, drone proof, bullet proof, everything proof. Democrats, extreme candidates won't rip that heart out of our chest in our culture. What it means to be American. He was also somebody that hated eating meat. He ran a campaign to beat meat. He called it beat meat. I don't know what the hell he meant by that. But he was recently seen having a barbecue and eating a lot of meat. Yes, I'm Senator John Fetterman, Pennsylvania. Yes, I'm Speaker 4 (3:27) a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? I'm always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life. Right back over my shoulder. That's the iconic U.S. steel mill. And that's exactly the kind of thing that will work together and will work with President Trump. Speaker 1 (3:57) Vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come. There'll be nothing like it. We're right at that. Speaker 8 (4:09) You first. Speaker 3 (4:11) I like can't breathe. Speaker 8 (4:12) You're laughing hysterically. Well, Speaker 3 (4:14) come on. It's like beat me. Hassan Piker's junk. Tim Scott having an aneurysm in the online discourse about, you know, paging Kenan Thompson. You're due at SNL for this weekend was incredible. Trump's so oily and like miscolored. Though I guess now it's clear he didn't actually dye his hair dark. That was a thing from over the weekend that he had gone to like my color. That you get $5,000, which is like bribing people to vote for the Republicans was a good one. What else was in there? I just thought it was insane. I thought it was, the expectation was this is going to be bad, right? This is going to be like an extended Trump rally. We didn't even put Ken Paxton in. You can tell why. The man does not go out in public. He's horrible. He's horrible speeches. I don't know the whole thing. And Grinder went out, which makes sense because of the Hassan Piker banana hammock situation. Like, what is going on there? Speaker 8 (5:20) Did Grinder really go down? Speaker 3 (5:21) Yeah, it goes down wherever the Republicans go. Speaker 8 (5:26) It's so deliciously ironic. Yeah, like, as much as I feel like I need to watch some of it, I have a tough time watching any of it. I found this mostly irrelevant. The thing I zeroed in on was this ridiculous offer of $5,000 for every U.S. adult. It's like, okay, I now, if I can't intimidate you by... posting ICE officials at polling booths, I'll bribe you and give you, say, I'll give you $5,000 if you vote our way. I mean, this is, and let's just go to the math. Well, let's talk about need and math. There are, okay, it's almost like a one-time universal basic income. It's embracing Andrew Yang, but it's not income. It's a universal kind of gift or bailout or whatever you'd want to call it. And the need is the following. 10 % of American adults are in poverty. 15 % of American children live in poverty. So if you were going to have some sort of targeted... payment to try and level up people, you would give it to the 70 Speaker 2 (6:27) million children, not the 280 million adults. This would cost approximately $1.3 trillion. As always, absolutely no revenue plan. So this would be debt. This would be deficit funded. So what is this? This is the equivalent of the government saying to you, Jess, you have two kids. I'm going to give you... I'm going to give you a $5,000 preloaded credit card. But if you sign up for it, in 18 years, when your kids go to college, they're going to owe, at 6 % on the debt, they're going to owe $13,000. So on their 18th birthday, they're going to be given a $13,000 debt, which they cannot discharge, which even if you die, they still owe in the form of deficits. Would we as a populace sign up for that credit card knowing that our kids are going to inherit a much bigger debt that they can't escape? And the sad, sad part of this is the answer might be yes, because both Democrats and Republicans need to own the fact that the American population is not responsible when it comes to fiscal management of our debt. George Washington to George Bush, $7 trillion in deficits. George Bush to Trump, too, another $33 trillion. And while Republicans have been worse than Democrats, Republican administrations have added, on average, 2.8 % of GDP to the debt, but Democrats have added 2.1%. So while the Republicans are worse, they have both engaged in bipartisan fiscal recklessness. And what's so sad about this is not only that it's stupid and immoral, passing debt down to your kids, but quite frankly, that it works. If you were to summarize the last 40 years in terms of our fiscal management into a bumper sticker, it would be the following. We can go to war and I'll cut your taxes. And that bumper sticker has worked. So that's what stuck out to me. And then the second thing that stuck out was Fetterman. And I think the way I would describe Fetterman's appearance is optionality. There's always one or two people, whether it's Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, that realize by being on the fence, they gain a lot of leverage. And as much as Democrats don't like him, as dangerous as his seat is, I think he gains a lot of leverage by threatening to go red. And that is they're going to try and, I don't know, placate him. He gets a ton of leverage. And also, if he's thinking, I want to stay in office, I think he's toying with the idea of maybe flipping to red and seeing what his options are. because that Wall Street Journal piece was really damning, basically saying that he's not interested in being a senator, that he's basically derelict in his duties. So I saw it as continued fiscal irresponsibility that unfortunately appears to work with our current populace, and two, optionality from Fetterman. Speaker 3 (9:15) I feel very immature that I thought we were just going to talk about Hassan Piker on the job. Yeah, but no, no, I have real things to say, too. I I was reading, you know, Catherine Rampell at the Bulwark. She compiled a list of all of the things that President Trump has monetarily promised us since he was reelected. The 5K stimulus check via Doge, right? Your Doge dividend. Didn't get mine. The 2K stimulus check from the tariff dividend. And they're paying more out than they took in in tariff revenues. A thousand dollars via savings for expiring ACA subsidies, which actually in reality is just that premiums are up 100 to 400 percent, depending where you are. And then this $5,000 if they win the midterms, coupled with the statement he made on the tarmac heading to Dallas, where he guaranteed that the war in Iran would end right after the election and gas would go below $2. So, I mean, he's been a terrible liar his entire life, but we are reaching fever pitch territory. What's different about this set of lies is that I sincerely doubt many people believed them. Trump works as a salesman because he can still con people. It feels like we have hit a wall on that front. And there was no one who was watching that last night, even, you know, the lunatics with the American flag glasses in the audience who thought, oh, no, I'm really getting $5,000 if all of this goes to plan and Republicans keep the midterms. You know, your fiscal sanity. It would be nice if people paid attention to it and thought about it. It is a bipartisan problem, though Democrats don't pay lip service to the idea of reducing spending the way that Republicans do. I mean, it's that much more egregious, right? Because they say, we're the dad, right? Like, you know, just... Show us your checkbook and we'll take care of things and we'll make sure, you know, everything's lined up and that we don't spend money that we don't have. And then Donald Trump spends like a drunk Democrat, basically. So that's what I think of when I hear that. And it's just it's not good campaign fodder unless you are running in a very, very conservative district, for instance. You know, no one wants to hear a stump speech about the debt and the deficit. But well, I mean, maybe John Fetterman does. Speaker 8 (11:45) I think you're right. First Lady Obama said when asked if she'd be interested in running for president, she said, I don't think America's ready for a female president. And I agree with her. I think we should be. I don't think we are. I worry it's an overdue conversation, but so far no one appears to want to have it. There's not a single Democrat who has put a chart on an easel Speaker 2 (12:10) or on a screen that says this is where we're going to cut spending. This is where we're going to increase revenues. Countries don't go out of business or fail because they're invaded. They go out of business because they go broke. And the way they go out of broke usually is through massive inflation that creates revolution. And we are headed, every fiat currency in history has failed because the political pressure in a democracy to spend more than you're taking in and use the full faith and credit and sacrifices of previous generations that have afforded you with credit to keep borrowing. is politically irresistible. And this has been true of Democrats and Republicans. And not a single candidate has so far said, OK, this is how we're going to. I don't think there's any way when you're spending seven trillion on five trillion. I don't think there's any way you could get it to five in one or even two administrations. What you could do is slow it down, reduce capital gains deduction, level it up similar to what Reagan did to ordinary income. close a ton of the loopholes, $2.25 trillion in loopholes, fund the IRS, the $750 billion tax gap, maybe raise the age on Social Security, lower Medicare eligibility, try and reduce health care costs. And you could construct a plan that says, within two terms, we're going to get the growth and the deficit below. the growth in GDP such that the credit markets begin to recognize we are a strong credit again, takes down interest rates, which takes down our debt payments, and we start this upward spiral of fiscal responsibility. There is a narrative and a story here, and to me it makes a lot of sense. To me, I think I'd like to think America is ready for it, but people smarter than me running the campaigns or hopeful campaigns of Democratic presidential candidates, no one has done it. anything. No one has articulated anything around, well, where would you cut? Where would you increase? Other than the only thing we hear is tax the billionaires. They're not paying their fair share. Speaker 3 (14:11) And restore everything that was cut. And I'm not saying that. It shouldn't be like I want USAID fully funded, you know, people who worked in civil service to get their jobs back, etc. But there is this reflexive, I'm just going to undo everything that happened, which actually forgets that in the first place, Doge was. wildly popular on a bipartisan level, not Elon Musk doing it, but the idea that you would go in and clean up, which the Clinton administration did in the 90s, and it had widespread support. It's interesting, though. I mean, you point out that no one is doing this kind of on the national platform, but we do have a lot of governors who have done this stuff. Right. And that should be in their plus columns. Right. You know, balancing budgets and cutting taxes. I mean, Josh Shapiro. Yeah. Yeah. Bashir Westmore. So it'll be interesting to see, like, what level bullet point it is on the campaign. You know, if it's like five or six, you know. And by the way, we're actually grownups. And this is why we have bipartisan support. I wanted to add on the Fetterman point. So when I