SINGH, MONT & RUIZ-ZEPEDA: Keep Republican control and get $5,000: how politically absurd – The Vanderbilt Hustler

Trump has discovered a new way to campaign: promise every American $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress.  

It is the kind of political proposal that sounds like it was written by a satirist who was told to play the joke up for laughs. At some point, American politics stopped needing writers.  

Political absurdity depends on the disconnect between what is happening and what we believe should be happening. A politician promising to personally hand every American thousands of dollars for voting his party into power widens that disconnect.  

Now the reality is that it happened. And then we all just went to class. 

That is the part that feels distinctly American. We have developed an incredible ability to compartmentalize political insanity. A president can announce a wildly expensive election promise in the morning and by lunchtime the country can be arguing about something else entirely.  

The absurd gets absorbed into the news cycle and eventually replaced. 

Of course, it was reported. Reuters reported it. The AP reported it. There were headlines consisting of plenty of people pointing out that the proposal would cost well over a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. But that is almost beside the point. The fact that something this extraordinary can enter the news cycle and then get pushed aside by the next Trump headline is precisely what makes it interesting. 

President Trump: you must be willing to accept that America is tired of your absurdity. 

To put it simply: Trump does not have the power nor constitutional authority to write $5,000 checks to every American, especially when it is presented as an incentive.  

First, under 18 U.S.C. § 597, it is illegal for any candidate or person to offer a person payment for a vote and for a person to accept payment for voting for a certain candidate. In this case, Trump cannot incentivize the American people to vote Republican during the midterm elections, and the American people legally cannot accept payment. Punishments include fines and imprisonment.  

Let us set the record straight: Trump cannot run for a third term. This indirect incentive program remains illegal based on our Constitution.  

It is absurd that the President is encouraging the American people to bend the law to maintain a Republican majority in Congress. It gets clearer by the day how unfit Trump is to continue serving as president of the United States.  

Next, Trump cannot sign an executive order and send out money to the American people. Congress has the power of the purse, or the ultimate authority in all government spending, as explicitly written in the Constitution.  

The Constitution is not up for debate.  

Finally, to pass such a spending bill, Congress would first need to win a Republican majority in November. Then, Congress can propose, as part of a reconciliation bill, to increase federal spending for this payout, which would be an estimated $1.2 trillion to cover the cost. The bill also must be written in a way to satisfy the Byrd Rule, which lays out specific instructions on budget reconciliation so as not to place the United States in a poor financial position.  

A stimulus injection of roughly $1.2 trillion would spike consumer demand, worsening this current imbalance and resulting in greater inflation. 

Inflation for August 2026 stood at 3.4%. While this is less than inflation’s peak increase of 9.1% under the Biden administration, the inflation rate remains nearly 75% above the Federal Reserve’s goal of a 2% rate. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law, which authorized $1.9 trillion in federal deficit spending. The result was a deficit of $2.1 trillion.  

Trump rallied against the Biden administration’s budget deficit in 2024. The Trump administration claims this increase in spending will be offset by additional federal revenues from tariffs. However, tariff revenues have only totaled some $200 billion since January 2026, which does not include refunds following the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.  

If the administration cannot find another way to fund such a stimulus package, it would certainly result in additional deficit spending. This spending would contribute to the nation’s staggering $40 trillion debt, in contrast with Trump’s 2024 promises. 

At some point, the sheer volume of political absurdity becomes its own form of political power. If everything our president says is outrageous, then nothing truly is. 

The Trump administration should refocus on policy solutions to the ongoing affordability struggle that are grounded in economic reality, as opposed to simply injecting money into the market and growing the national debt. In turn, the lives of college students, such as those here at Vanderbilt, would become easier as goods across campus, Nashville and the country become more affordable. The administration’s current stimulus proposal would likely lead to the opposite: less affordability and more economic pain. 

To the Vanderbilt community: political absurdity should not be your new norm. In a political landscape where the absurd arrives faster than we can process it, paying attention becomes a form of resistance. We have to preserve our ability to be surprised. Political chaos should not become the baseline against which we measure our reality. The fact that something has happened before does not make it reasonable. The fact that we have heard something ridiculous a hundred times does not make the hundred-and-first time less ridiculous.