Whole-Hog Politics: A Pseudo-Policy at a Pseudo-Convention

DALLAS — They shouldn’t really call it a convention, since it isn’t convening anything. There’s no business being done — at least on stage — at the American Airlines Center. 

In the Democrats’ short-lived run at similar midterm events in former President Carter’s era, they were careful not to call them conventions, but rather “conferences.” A convention, if you care about your party’s power and prestige, is supposed to produce something. It is supposed to be important. Not here. No delegates are voting. No platforms are being debated. No leaders are being selected. It’s just a happening. 

The gathering here is the fullest flowering of the pseudo-event; the perfect realization of Daniel Boorstin’s description of “synthetic novelty.” It’s like a bigger, better version of CPAC. Even the star-spangled logos for the two events look alike. This is part fundraising blitz and part trade show for right-wing influencers, but mostly an effort to get the national news media to pay even more attention to President Trump than usual — which is saying something given that coverage of him has consumed all other stories like a galaxy-crushing black hole since 2015.

The Republican National Committee hasn’t produced a real party platform for a decade, opting in 2020 to wave a press release in front of reporters’ faces, saying in so many words that it wouldn’t be tricked into adopting policy positions that could be used against its candidates or as a way to highlight future reversals. In 2024, there was something it called a “platform,” but it was itself just a press release repeating Trump’s campaign boilerplate with hard or divisive issues all sidestepped.

At the Democrats’ convention of 2024, the last vestige of actual party work — the official nomination of a presidential candidate — was deemed too risky, so it was done on a glorified Zoom call in advance just to make sure nothing would interfere with the coronation of a nominee who had never won a single delegate.

So, in its own way, this gathering in Dallas is the ideal expression of the hollowed-out political parties of our time. A pseudo-convention for a pseudo-party.

But there is a question on the floor here: What’s a majority worth, anyway?

The president told his supporters here that the opening bid was about $1.3 trillion — roughly the size of Saudi Arabia’s annual gross domestic product — paid out in $5,000 bonuses to every adult citizen of the United States if voters agree to keep Republicans in power in the upcoming midterm elections. 

That’s in addition to Vice President Vance’s soccer mom stimulus that would pay $9,000 to married, stay-at-home parents and a newly unveiled $500 in preelection sweeteners to about a million ObamaCare recipients who are getting squeezed by ballooning insurance prices.

Unlike the Vance payments or the ObamaCare booster, which can be done by creative accounting under existing laws, the president’s self-titled “Trump Dividend” is pie in the sky. It’s not impossible that an imagined Republican majority next year would authorize an inflation bomb of that magnitude, but it seems extremely unlikely, even in the populistic GOP. 

Consumers are already getting crushed by inflation, high interest rates and high prices. Bond traders are punishing Uncle Sam for becoming a fiscal basket case with a $40 trillion debt and not even concepts of a plan for what to do about it. Even the most cynical Republican lawmaker would be able to see how the hangover would be worse than the high — a lesson Democrats learned the hard way in the Biden era. 

So, like the tariff bonuses and DOGE dividends Trump has promised voters before, the midterm payola probably falls into the familiar category of “stuff the president says.” But like his decision to try to rescue two struggling Atlantic City casinos by opening a third one, Trump loves to raise the stakes. Trying to pay off voters with money mortgaged against future generations is a little like using his creditors’ cash to bring in Michael Jackson for the grand opening of the Trump Taj Mahal. 

But who is the target audience for the dubious dividend? It certainly isn’t conservatives, who are already feeling seasick from a wild fiscal ride with Trump so far. It can’t be progressives and liberals since, even if they liked the idea of Trump’s anarcho-Keynesianism, they wouldn’t believe his promises anyway. The customers Trump is trying to get through the doors of the GOP casino are those who a) think a massive debt-financed stimulus would be good and b) still tend to believe the things the president says.

The share of Americans who believe that Trump keeps his promises slid from a November 2024 high of 51 percent to 38 percent this spring, and given his many failed efforts to declare victory in the Iran war since then, one does not imagine that number has increased. 

Are there enough voters who both a) believe Trump will actually deliver on his promise and b) think that it’s a good policy to lift Republicans’ chances to at least avoid a wipeout of the kind they faced in 2018? People do love free money, but the belated introduction of such a wild policy proposal makes it hard to predict. Certainly, Republicans running in suburban districts and states with large numbers of college-educated voters won’t look forward to explaining their thoughts on the debt bomb.

Their best bet will be to say that it’s just Trump being Trump, and not a serious policy proposal — just a little confection whipped up by the president and nothing to really worry about. That would be fitting: pseudo-policy at a pseudo-convention.