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Trying To Buy Votes Is Just Plain Wrong, No Matter Who Offers The Payoff

It would be hard to find a more insulting offer than to exchange money for your vote. That's exactly what President Donald Trump did in announcing that if voters keep Republicans in power come the midterms, he'll send every adult citizen a $5,000 check.

Now, one would not put money on that promise. Even if Republicans do retain control of both the House and the Senate, the promise will surely be thrown in the same manila folder as the vow to release the Epstein files, all of them.

Of course, Trump would not be paying us five grand — the federal government would. That would cost around $1.2 trillion. Trump says the money would come from his tariff collections. The math doesn't work. The tariffs so far have raised only about $270 billion after subtracting the court-ordered refunds to importers.

To be fair to Republicans, the offer has turned a number of their stomachs. "I disagree with it," said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC). "It's pay-to-play ... Plus, where are you getting the money? I think we're in debt $40 trillion."

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) was less diplomatic: "Some of us think dependency is evil and soul sucking, in all its forms."

Others skipped the moral disapproval but questioned the mechanics of handing out all that dough. Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) said, "The devil's always in the details."

Actually, the devil is in the offer. It is a buying of votes. If Republicans attempt a partisan comeback by arguing that Democrats do it, too, they have a point. Democrats do buy votes, though they usually couch the exchange in less vulgar terms.

Was Joe Biden buying votes when he promised to help pay off student loans? He was. He announced his student-debt cancellation plan, which would have erased up to $10,000 in debt for qualifying borrowers, shortly before the 2022 midterms.

Helping pay for education sounds nice on the surface. But it raised resentment in families who saved money for college. One middle-income father, ordinarily a devoted Democrat, complained to me that he sent his high-achieving son to a community college for the first two years because it was free.

Has New York Gov. Kathy Hochul put votes on the auction block by mailing checks of up to $200 "to help families keep pace with the rising cost of energy"? Of course. A Democrat up for reelection, Hochul is in a surprisingly close race with Republican Bruce Blakeman, a Nassau County executive.

Her pitch is pretty blatant: "You don't have to do a thing. No application, no paperwork ... If you're eligible, the check is coming to you." She pretties it up by calling the payments an investment.

These days, Vice President JD Vance sees himself as Trump's sander, smoothing the abrasive edges of his policies without sounding overly critical, important if he harbors his own presidential ambitions. Vance also suggested that wealthy Americans wouldn't get those $5,000 checks.

"What the president is saying," Vance explained, "is if you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you're going to share in some of the benefits ..."

Which of "these things" is he referring to? Surely not the tariffs, the Iran war, the government borrowings that have made life in America a lot more expensive.

There's the argument that farm subsidies and tax cuts are also payoffs for votes. One difference is that the farm money goes mainly to farmers and the tax cuts go mostly to the upper incomes who least need the help.

All politicians should be called out for vote buying with taxpayer dollars. Trump's $5,000 bid just adds insult by being so blatant.

Are Mainstream Democrats Taking Back Their Party From The DSA Fringe?

You couldn't find a wackier candidate than Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist vying to become the governor of Wisconsin. She wanted to defund police and abolish ICE, topping it all off with a call to end Thanksgiving. Saturday Night Live couldn't have made her up.

Hong lost the Democratic primary but left behind some sobering thoughts. She finished second by only a hair and against a sterling Democrat with relevant experience. The winner, David Crowley, is the Milwaukee County Executive and an African American born into poverty.

Crowley will face off against Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany, a MAGA right-winger who voted against certifying the 2020 election. GOP-aligned groups spent heavily to promote Hong's candidacy in the primary for obvious reasons.

You know who put Crowley over the top? Rural Wisconsin voters.

Over in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed by the fringe-left leaders, beat Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens by a similar tiny margin. She did extraordinarily well in working-class areas in and around Detroit. El-Sayed flew to victory on the wings of college towns.

Could normal Democrats build an alliance between the urban working class and rural voters? That might become a more pressing requirement if El-Sayed loses to Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, which will probably happen. El-Sayed has burned bridges with many Jewish voters, a constituency Democrats have traditionally relied upon. He also has his inflammatory influencer friend, Hasan Piker — who said America deserved 9/11 — hanging around his neck.

Rogers is an establishment Republican who defended the 2020 election results that made Joe Biden president. He has since veered more toward MAGA and won Donald Trump's endorsement in the Republican Party.

But Trump undoubtedly figured that Rogers would have a better chance of victory in this swing state than a fire-breathing right-winger. And a Rogers win in November could keep majority control of the Senate in Republican hands.

Are we done with polls yet? Polls issued right before these primaries showed both Hong and El-Sayed beating their opponents by double digits. The photo-finish results suggest the pollsters know nothing. But belief in their "findings" can alter election outcomes.

A Marquette poll from March showed Crowley supported by only three percent of Democratic primary voters. He left the race, believing that Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez would be the stronger Democrat. He also didn't want to split the mainstream Democrats' votes. When Rodriguez later dropped out due to campaign finance accounting problems, Crowley jumped back in.

Looking forward to 2028, the Democratic National Committee has chosen South Carolina as the site of its first presidential primary. That makes some democratic socialists uncomfortable. In 2020, South Carolina played a major role in making Joe Biden the Democratic nominee over Bernie Sanders. In earlier contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, the generally white and college-educated electorate had sent Sanders toward the head of the pack.

Come South Carolina and the other southern Democratic primaries with their huge African American voting bloc, Biden shot ahead. It wasn't because the voters were "conservative," as Sanders grumbled. It's because they cared more about health coverage, racial fairness, and income inequality than the left's boutique issues: defunding police, transgender rights, and the obsession with identity politics. What did Latinx mean?

Mostly, it was the belief, a correct belief, that Biden could beat Trump, and Sanders could not. Black voters favored Biden over Sanders by four to one.

Moderate Democrats may be finally putting up effective resistance to the highly organized fringe left. Step one is reorganizing primaries to better reflect the preferences of the Democratic mainstream. Step two is getting Democratic normies out to vote. Step three is to build on issues regular people care about. They can do it.

Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.

Charting Corruption: Trump Grifting Dwarfs 'Biden Crime Family' Chump Change

Most people recognize that Donald Trump and his kids are stealing from us with both hands every day. But they are not as outraged as they should be because most have the view that everyone does it. While I will never defend the Democrats as paragons of honesty (what the hell are those crypto contributions?), they are not in the same ballpark as Trump and his crew.

Part of the confusion stems from the media’s refusal to ever put big numbers in context. They all know that the vast majority of their audience is not clear on the distinction between millions, billions, and trillions, and have no idea how large the federal budget is, but they refuse to take the ten seconds and ten words that would be needed to give readers a clearer sense of what is at stake.The other source of confusion is that the Republicans spent four years endlessly hyping the “Biden crime family.” They used Congressional hearings, as well as thousands of appearances on TV news shows, to yell (often literally) about Biden family corruption.

And it’s clear it was not zero. Hunter Biden, while struggling with drug addiction, openly traded on his family name to land a well-paying perch with a Ukrainian energy company. He also managed to sell his artwork, which is not obviously of great value, for $50k a painting.

Joe’s younger brother, James, also seems to have traded on the family name, but the sums involved appear to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and mostly during the years 2017-2019, when Joe Biden was not even in public office.

It is a bad practice for family members to profit from their ties to a vice-president or president, but there is zero evidence that Joe Biden ever did anything to directly benefit his son or brothers in their business dealings. We can be pretty certain of this fact because Republicans in Congress and the White House, both in Trump’s first term and his current term, have left no stone unturned in trying to show Biden’s corruption. (Trump’s first impeachment was over his effort to extort Ukraine’s president to lie about Biden’s corruption.)

While it is difficult to get clear numbers on the extent of the corruption of Trump and his family in his current term, since they disclose as little as possible, and no one can accept what they do disclose at face value, we can try to put some numbers on it. At the very least, it should be totally clear that Trump’s corruption, by any measure, is in a totally different universe from even the worst imaginable story that can be told about Joe Biden and his family.

The list below is far from exhaustive. We will probably not know all the ways that Trump put money into his and his family’s pockets until long after his presidency, and maybe not even then. But this should be a good start.

Venezuela’s Oil -- $13 billion

Trump has repeatedly said that “we” got $13 billion from selling Venezuela’s oil. This is after he kidnapped Venezuela’s president, Nicholas Maduro, and put his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge of the country. According to Trump, she is taking her orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Any money that the U.S. gets from selling Venezuela’s oil is essentially stolen from Venezuela. It is their oil. But to make matters worse, there is literally zero accounting of this money. Under the law, any money obtained from Venezuela should go to the U.S. Treasury. Any spending from this money should be approved by Congress.

Instead, Trump has sent the money to an account in Qatar, and it is unclear what is happening with it. Until it can be shown otherwise, it is reasonable to assume that Trump has personally pocketed it. If that is not the case, Trump should be able to document what has happened to this money any day of the week. Until he does show what happened to the money, we might as well assume it went into Donald Trump’s pockets.

Trump Family Crypto -- $1.4 billion

Trump created his own crypto coin, $Trump, which people could buy as a way of currying favor with Trump. Melania Trump also made a crypto coin, $MELANIA. His crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has also put out a crypto coin. In addition to making money from selling the coins directly, Trump also profits from transactions in the coins, since they pay him a fee.

Trump’s “Gift” Plane from Qatar -- $1.1 billion

A gift to the president, while they are in office, is a gift to the United States government. Nonetheless, Trump plans to take the plane that Qatar gave him back to Mar-a-Lago when he leaves office in less than two and a half years. The plane itself was worth $400 million. In addition, the Pentagon is spending between $400 million and $1 billion to install protective equipment which was already in place for the two existing versions of Air Force 1. I have included the middle figure of $700 million.

Trump Truth Social Insider Trading Sales -- $1.2 billion

Donald Trump recently announced that he will sell a special subscription service, where for $100,000 a month, investors could get advance notice of Truth Social posts that are likely to move markets. We don’t know how many investors will ultimately pay for the opportunity to trade on inside information. But if it ends up being 1,000, Trump will pocket $1.2 billion a year from this scam.

Selling pardons – $10 million

Reuters did an investigation of Trump’s pardons, noting that 96% did not follow the normal procedure. They noted that just ten prominent pardon recipients contributed over $10 million to Trump campaign funds. The full amount given by all the people receiving pardons is surely considerably larger. The New York Times had an excellent piece back in March on the pardon industry that has arisen around Trump.

Melania Trump’s 'Documentary' -- $28 million

Melania Trump was given a contract by Amazon for rights to a documentary on her. According to the Wall Street Journal, her take was $28 million. The film grossed $16 million.

Jared Kushner Hedge Fund Investments -- $5.4 billion

Shortly after leaving the White House following Trump’s first term, first son-in-law Jared Kushner started a hedge fund, Affinity Partners, that quickly drew billions of dollars of investments from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries. While Kushner cannot directly put this money into his pocket, he is certainly positioned to get hundreds of millions in fees from the fund, especially if his proximity to Trump allows for his investments to have large payoffs.

Trump Sons’ Military Contracts -- $315 million

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have recently taken an interest in several companies that are now getting contracts from the military. The Washington Post puts the value of the current and likely future contracts for these companies at $6.3 billion. If we say five percent will go to the Trump kids, this comes to $315 million.

While this list hopefully captures the biggest windfalls that Trump and his family are receiving from the presidency, it is certainly not a complete list of Trump family corruption. For example, Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor to the Kalshi betting market and an investor in Polymarket. The Trump administration has worked aggressively to block regulation of these markets that might hurt their profits.

Donald Trump also trades stock frequently, often buying shares in companies just before they get a major government contract. The Trump family business has been blessed with favorable treatment of hotel and resort projects in countries seeking lower tariff rates on their exports to the United States. And the Trump family openly hawks their merchandise at the White House and on official websites. But most of these items would likely to be small potatoes compared to the graft listed here.

The Biden Crime Family’s Haul

As with the Trump numbers, these are crude guesses. People can also decide for themselves the extent to which they represent presidential corruption. For example, when Hunter Biden gets payments from shady Chinese businesspeople in a period where Joe Biden is a private citizen, is that presidential corruption?

Anyhow, here is what I get.

Hunter Biden Burisma Payments -- $4.0 million

These were payments made to Hunter Biden for serving on the Board of Burisma, a large Ukrainian energy firm. Hunter Biden served on Burisma’s board, starting in 2014, when Joe Biden was vice-president, and remained on the board until 2019, leaving before Joe Biden’s term as president.

Hunter Biden Payment from Chinese Businesses -- $2.6 million

Hunter received $2.6 million in payments in 2017 and 2018 from Chinese business owners with dubious business practices. These were years when Joe Biden was a private citizen, his term as vice-president having ended and more than two years before his term as president began.

Hunter Biden Art Sales -- $1.5 million

Hunter sold 27 paintings between 2021 and 2023 that netted him approximately $1.5 million. Demand for his artwork has fallen considerably after his father left the White House.

James Biden Payment from Chinese Businesses -- $500,000

It seems that some of the money from Hunter Biden’s business associates may have also gone to his uncle and Joe Biden’s brother James. It’s not clear how much this might have been, but as with the payments to Hunter Biden, this was a period where Joe Biden was a private citizen.

If anyone is wondering, I did not forget to put the Biden numbers on the graph. They are just too small to be visible next to the Trump graft numbers.

The point here should be obvious to everyone. Joe Biden’s family members, or at least Hunter Biden, behaved in ways that most of us would likely view as unethical. But even if we blame President Biden for actions in which he had no direct involvement, his corruption is not anywhere near the level of corruption of the Trump administration.

Trump and his family seem to view the government as a massive candy store from which they can take whatever they want as long as Donald Trump is in the White House. And as long as Republicans control Congress and the Supreme Court, they might be right.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Hillary Is Right On Biden's Fatal Error, But Skips Troubling Questions About Harris

In a new interview this week, Hillary Clinton identified the key decision that resulted in President Donald Trump's election in 2024. It all boiled down, in her view, to a "terrible miscalculation" -- former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s decision to run for re-election. Mr. Biden made a "terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country" in deciding to seek re-election at the age of 81. Had he decided to "pass the torch" and the Democratic Party had held a competitive nomination process, "whoever emerged from that contest — whether it was the vice president, or a governor, or a senator or anybody else — would have beaten Donald Trump."

Or, I would add, they would have had a better chance than Biden did.

Joe and Jill Biden clearly live in a state of denial with respect to Joe's unpopularity. In some respects, it's understandable: He wasn't a bad president and he left the country in better shape than it is now. So why shouldn't Jill think that even though she was afraid her husband was having a stroke during the debate with Trump, he should stay in the race and if he had, they both seem to believe, he would have beaten Trump. It's delusional thinking that must have been reinforced by the deep-seated loyalty of those who had been around him for so long. Sadly, the cost of that delusional thinking is being borne around the world.

Democratic Party is still struggling to figure out what went wrong. The unofficial official autopsy report, which the Party commissioned and then disowned, studiously avoided any criticism of Biden's decision to seek re-election, which cast doubt on the rest of the report.

Of course, the question remains: Was Kamala Harris the right candidate? That's the one that even Hillary avoided, pointing out that Kamala would have been a stronger candidate if she'd emerged from a competitive process. But would she have? Emerged from a competitive process, that is. Kamala Harris was the Vice President for an unpopular President. She was caught between defending the indefensible and attacking her own Administration. She never figured out how to walk that line in the general election and there's no reason to think it would have been easier in the primaries.

The Democratic Party is still struggling to figure out what went wrong. The unofficial official autopsy report, which the party commissioned and then disowned, studiously avoided any criticism of Biden's decision to seek re-election, which cast doubt on the rest of the report.

The simple fact that Democrats need to accept is that Americans preferred the convicted felon to the vice president. They got to see them both, up close. Harris ran a better campaign than she gets credit for. She did put her best foot forward. She was well-financed. Experienced strategists surrounded her. She did not use a private email server, as Hillary did. She did not have investigators nipping at her heels, the way Hillary did. It was, considering everything, a smooth run. She just didn't win.

I have yet to hear any explanation for why she's a stronger candidate today than she was in 2024, and she would need to be a stronger candidate to defeat a Marco Rubio, for instance. Kamala is leading in most, although not all, of the early polls, but that is a matter of name recognition; perhaps more significant is the fact that a majority of Democrats, at this stage, favor candidates other than Harris. And Harris has done almost nothing since the election to distinguish herself as the party's leader.

Soon enough, we will be hearing more, not only from Gavin Newsom, who is already out there (and being investigated for it), but from J.B. Pritzker and Josh Shapiro and Pete Buttigieg, not to mention Jon Ossoff, Ro Khanna and AOC. The nomination process is flawed in many ways, but at least it's a test, one that Kamala will be forced to pass this time.

Susan Estrich is a celebrated feminist legal scholar, the first female president of the Harvard Law Review, and the first woman to run a U.S. presidential campaign. She has written eight books.

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