National Review Writer on Trump's $5K Pledge: 'No, No, No, No, No'

President Trump has just crossed a line he has long claimed to oppose. At a Dallas rally this week, Trump vowed that if Republicans win the midterms, he would direct the federal government to send every American adult a $5,000 "dividend." Now, in an op-ed for the conservative National Review, Charles CW Cooke calls that promise what he believes it is: bribery, via an attempt to buy votes with public money, not company profits, and a move that blurs any distinction that Trump tries to draw between populism and socialism. "No, no, no, no, no," Cooke writes of the president's pledge. "Did I mention 'no'?"

Cooke highlights what he sees as three core problems with Trump's idea: a moral one (the government doesn't "owe" equal cash to every adult, and it shouldn't make that payout contingent on election results); a fiscal one, leading to roughly $1.3 trillion in new spending, on top of massive debt and deficits; and a political one—it would, in Cooke's view, cement Trump's second term as an economic failure that fuels, not fights, socialist politics. "This isn't tax policy or fiscal policy," Cooke writes. "It is a reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm, divorced from the nature and purpose of our government and from the Constitution that created it." Read Cooke's argument in full here.