Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested.
The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front page of its website.
A day or two later, the story disappeared from most front pages. Admittedly, it was the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the NYT found space for stories about the Reflecting Pool fiasco and Trump’s presidential library.
I found one story in USA Today suggesting that the policy might be inflationary, but that’s about it.
The reaction from US financial markets has been similarly subdued. Interest rates on government bonds have continued the gradual increase of recent months. There has been nothing like the reaction that put Liz Truss out of office in the UK after a term that lasted less than the shelf life of a lettuce. Meanwhile, stock markets barely reacted.
Lots of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump has previously proposed handouts that didn’t happen, for example from the savings to be made by DOGE, which never materialised. But this is typical of Trump — he has a range of obsessions to which he returns from time to time, before his attention span expires.
Some are relatively trivial, like steam catapults for aircraft carriers, others more consequential, like his suggested conquests of Canada and Greenland, or retribution against his political enemies. But he never abandons them for good.
And, in the case of cash handouts, he’s had one big success — the Covid stimulus checks that were sent out with his name on them and almost certainly helped him come within an inch of victory in 2020 — as well as some smaller ones.
In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediate effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow-on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation-targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.
But the US is not a serious country.1 Over the past decade, at least 40 per cent of US voters (including sustained majorities of white men, the dominant identity group) have shown themselves willing to vote for a corrupt and deranged clown, while another third of the population hasn’t even bothered to vote.
Faced with these facts, mainstream media and establishment Democrats have continued to pretend that everything is normal,2 sanewashing Trump and hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.
As Adam Smith observed to a correspondent, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But it is running down its capital at a startling rate, and there is no real sign of things turning around in time.
1 Phillips O’Brien has been making this point with respect to foreign policy. ↩
2 Each new Trump outrage is met with feeble protests to the effect that “this is not who we are”, gradually replaced by tacit acceptance that this is who tens of millions of Americans are. ↩
John Quiggin 
100%. US debt is growing by about $2T per year, annual repayments well over $1T, bond yields rising and we have an incompetent and demented assclown hellbent on running the US economy into the ground the same way he bankrupted his casinos.