Trump's midterm promise backfires as GOP voters revolt

Brian Tyler Cohen (0:01)

Trump's $5,000 promise to his voters backfires, and I interview Jonathan Swan about his new book Regime Change. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.

Just days ago, Trump decided to come out and promise $5,000 to every American, but only if the Republicans won the midterms. It was a lie as transparent as it was desperate, not to mention illegal. But still, Trump told it because, as I always say, he thinks his audience is stupid and never wastes an opportunity to show it. Well, we now have some data backing up that point, and it's not great for Trump. According to Elliott Morris, voters aren't confused about the motive either. 62% said Trump made the promise mainly to win votes in November, and only 13% think he genuinely intends to send the money. Moreover, 71% of adults say it is inappropriate for a president to promise government payments that depend on his party winning an election, including 53% of Republicans. Only about a quarter think the checks would actually go out even if Republicans win.

We also asked voters whether Trump's promise makes them more or less likely to vote for Republican candidates in Congress. 28% said less likely, 13% said more likely, and 53% said it makes no difference. But many voters in that 13% already told us they were voting Republican in November. Fewer than 4% of adults say the checks make them more likely to vote Republican and aren't already there. This offsets with large losses among independents who said by an 11-point margin Trump's scheme turned them off.

So, not only did voters not believe Trump's $5,000 promise, but the people who did believe it were already voting for Trump, and more people were actually turned off by it than it pulled in. Think about that. A net loss of voters after Trump tried to buy people off.

And I'd imagine that part of the reason that voters don't believe him is that he's done this before, constantly. He promised a doge dividend that never materialized, a tariff dividend that never materialized. Back in his first term, it was a middle class tax cut that never materialized. This guy has bait and switched his own voters more times than Lucy's pulled the football away from Charlie Brown. So no, they're not buying it. Another pretty funny byproduct of this is that it's undermined the Republicans' ability to frame the Democrats as these spooky socialists who are trying to give everything away, like for example.

SPEAKER_2 (2:13)

But the problem is this. Democrats, by a pretty wide margin, seem to like socialism.

SPEAKER_3 (2:21)

Well, they were never taught of the horrors of socialism and the greatness of capitalism.

Jonathan Swan (2:25)

A radical socialist platform that seems to be taking over the Democratic Party. Socialism doesn't fly.

Brian Tyler Cohen (2:32)

And just days ago, the Senate Republicans' official Twitter account wrote, Democrats, socialists love to promise free stuff, but they never mention who pays for it.

My dudes, your leader is out here promising money like Oprah. Only difference being that Oprah actually does what she says. So I'm heartened to see people waking up to the lies from this president and his party. For years, they have been treating their audiences and their voters with utter contempt, assuming that they will fall for whatever they say, no matter how many times they refuse to deliver. But this government has finally put an end to all of that. This is a Republican party that swore prices would go down, they've gone up, they swore no new wars were in one, they swore the Epstein files would be released, they're suppressing 3 million documents, they swore cheaper gas and lower inflation. Instead, they're rising or at record highs. It's bad enough to fail to deliver. It's something entirely worse to fail to deliver and yet still pretend like you are. And the blue wave that we're gonna see in November will prove that there is just a limit to how much Americans are willing to be lied to.

Next up is my interview with Jonathan Swan.

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