Compass Counterpoint

10 November 2026

Americans, and their lost $5000

The world would never have seen anything like it.

Tremendous. Incredible.

People would ask him “Sir. How do you do it?”

Trump’s desperate and wildly extravagant pledge to give every American $5000 if the Republicans retained the House and the Senate in the mid-term elections would have come at a staggering cost.

Their failure to retain either would have relieved the now relieved US Treasury of a whopping 1.2 trillion dollars. That’s three times as much as the federal government collected in customs during the last fiscal year. It dwarfs the entire Medicare budget and much more.

It’s not clear how it would have been funded, or whether it was even legal. (Some experts hold that it was, because the $5000 applied to all adults, regardless of their circumstances or affiliations.)

What was named – what else? – the Trump Dividend, would nevertheless have had an uphill battle to achieve legislative approval at the time of spiralling deficit. It’s not an original idea either.

Former President Joe Biden promised more rational and purposeful $2000 Covid stimulus cheques if the Democrats won Georgia’s senate elections in 2021.

The real post war origins of Trump’s vote bribe belong to Achille Lauro, mayor of Naples in the 1950s. Lauro was a real Achilles heel, but at least he used his own money. He gave impoverished voters a left shoe, only to deliver the matching one if he got elected. A national counsellor in Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, the mayor maintained close links to the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. He was also a leading light in the post-war neo-fascist MSI party, which was somehow allowed to exist, despite a ban on all such parties. In the cold war, anti-communism was a greater priority than denazification.

In Trump’s America, anti-democracy is a greater priority than anti-communism.

Nevertheless, Trump and Lauro would have understood each other perfectly.

No greater authority than Il Duce himself said of fascism that it should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.

The American Heritage Dictionary (1983) agrees:

A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.