Will Trump’s $5,000 offer convince US voters?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30and more options to their lineup, can shop at machinefinder.com. Booyah! John Deere is putting in work and putting up highlights. Oh man, look at those passes. Tillage, planting, harvesting. Three years in and these pre-owned machines are still at the top of their game. We're talking reliability, performance, and long-term potential. And get this, these veteran machines can pick up the latest precision tech with ease. You know it and fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at machinefinder.com.

1:07Donald Trump thinks he has found the magic ingredient that will help the Republicans win the midterm elections. And surprise, surprise, it's him. So I'm asking you to pretend that I'm on the ballot. I'm on the ballot. I'm on the ballot. Just one more time. We're in Dallas, where Donald Trump is throwing an event, a very unusual Republican Party convention that is going to put him front and centre of his party's midterm election campaign. He's even promising voters a large cash handout if his party can win both houses of Congress in the midterm elections. But some of his most high-profile candidates are staying away.

1:51They don't want to be seen with Donald Trump at this event in Texas. Is that because they think the president's no longer a great electoral asset? Has he actually become a voting liability? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league. The tide is coming. And this time we intend to win it all. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. When I'm not around, you're going to be broke.

2:35There's not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

2:44Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. And it's Sarah here at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas. Woohoo, Dallas, Texas. Tell us about it. It's great fun. It's really terribly hot. It's over 100 degrees. The best news is that I have already managed to acquire a new cowboy hat. So I'll show you here, Justin. It's a very nice white hat with some turquoise and cowrie shell trim. We were interviewing a lady yesterday who's a big Trump supporter who also has a stall at the RNC where she sells these hats and people can design custom decorations on them.

3:21And she was a fascinating interview, actually. I'll tell you more about her later. A Trump fan who's a bit worried that he might not be the best advocate for their party come the midterm elections. Yeah, and I suppose that is the serious side of this, isn't it? It's whether the whole thing, I mean, number one, it's very unusual, but number two is whether there's any chance at all that it can work. Yeah, and there's a real disconnect when you're here between what's happening with this convention and what we know is happening in the rest of the country. And this is one of the things that's really fascinating because Donald Trump threw this party for himself, essentially.

3:55It was his idea to have a convention in a midterm year, which has never been done by the Republicans before. And it's a big showcase for Donald Trump with him giving the keynote speech for almost two hours on Wednesday night. He's closing it out with a speech again on Thursday night. and everybody in the convention is a very, very big Donald Trump fan. You wouldn't have come all the way here, paid all the money you have to to attend unless you were an absolute diehard Donald Trump supporter. But that is such a contrast with what we know polls say about his record low approval ratings, about the discontent there is with high prices, with his war in Iran that's driving prices up further.

4:35And the real sense from a lot of Republican candidates, as well as from voters, that Donald Trump maybe is not the best advocate for his party at all because he's personally pretty unpopular at the moment. So, yeah, there's this Trump-a-palooza, as it's being called, event inside the convention centre just at the point when actually probably Donald Trump is more unpopular now than he has ever been. Yeah, and we ought to remind AmeriCasters, AmeriCasters know this stuff already and we've talked about it so much, but these midterm elections are terribly important because of the balance of both houses of Congress.

5:07So it is quite likely, we're saying, aren't we, that the Democrats will win back the House and that would be a serious blow. They might win the Senate. That would be a very serious blow. And then there's all sorts of hearings they could hold of impeachment and all the rest of it. And it just ties up the Trump administration then in this really kind of desperate final two year slog. So they're desperate to avoid it. We should also say, and AmeriCast does know this, that generally a midterm election doesn't go the way of the party that has the presidency. That is generally the case. There are some important exceptions.

5:43And given the commemorations for 9-11 going on at the moment, it's worth remembering all the way back to 2002 because of the kind of coming together of the nation and all the rest of it. W. Bush did very well, actually, in its midterms, or at least the Republican Party did. And I suppose that's the point, isn't it, that conventionally the president just sits there and is a sitting duck and the party has to accept all the disappointments that there are two years in with that presidency. And Donald Trump is, I mean, it's fair to say, isn't he, he's having a good old go at changing that script. Yes, absolutely.

6:21So, I mean, a lot of presidents in the scenarios you described, they sometimes bow out of these midterm elections because they know that standing beside some of the candidates won't necessarily be helpful. That if you've got a tight Senate seat somewhere, maybe a presidential visit is not going to sway voters in your direction. But Donald Trump is insisting he is going to visit at least 35 different tight races because he thinks he's the biggest asset the Republican Party have got. that may or may not turn out to be true, but he is doing all he can because he knows how crucial these elections are going to be.

6:54And just as he was describing this scenario last night in this very long and rather self-indulgent speech, we were a really good way into it when he suddenly tossed out this absolutely remarkable promise to pay every American adult, every American voter $5 ,000 if and only if Republicans retain control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. So that's a pretty unlikely scenario, according to the polls at the moment. But it was such an odd way of announcing such a very peculiar policy. I thought he was joking at first, because we had been through a whole lot of familiar Donald Trump jokes about renaming New Mexico as New America.

7:39He'd been talking about renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the Strait of Trump and all this kind of stuff. And then he just drops into the conversation that everybody's going to get a$5 ,000 Trump dividend if the Republicans win the midterm elections. And he had to say it twice before I realised he was serious because this is not the way you go about announcing a big policy like that. Take him seriously, Sarah, and take him literally. Let's listen. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in history we've never had anything like what's happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for$5 ,000.

8:34We don't want you going to Canada to spend the money. We don't want you going to China, to Germany. You got to spend the money in the United States of America. In other words, if the Republicans win, if you win, we might not win. The reason the Democrats can't do that is because they don't do tariffs. They don't take in money. Sarah, do you get this money? As a U.S. person, you're living there under the jurisdiction thereof. etc etc? Oh fascinating question that hadn't even occurred to me Justin because I am a US taxpayer whilst I'm living and working here I'm not a US citizen and there is so little detail about this policy it's impossible to know whether it's only for citizens or whether it's for resident taxpayers because he didn't tell us how he was going to pay for this it will cost well in excess of a trillion dollars I mean that's probably the biggest kind of spending promise that's ever been made in a speech like this at a time when the US deficit is absolutely enormous.

9:38And it's not the first time Donald Trump has promised money that hasn't materialised. And people are still waiting for what he said would be a$2 ,000 cheque for every American adult that was going to come from all the money that came in from his tariffs. But of course, remember, those tariffs were then struck down by the Supreme Court and quite a lot of money is having to be paid back from those tariffs. And there's no sign whatsoever of anybody getting a$2 ,000 cheque. But maybe J.D. Vance kind of suggested in an interview later, maybe it's tariff revenue that the$5 ,000 could come from. I mean, I don't know fundamentally whether it's a serious promise or not.

10:14And there's another thing probably occurred to you, Justin, as soon as you heard about it, I would imagine it's not entirely clear it's legal either. No. Well, it is illegal, isn't it, to bribe voters to vote for you in a kind of individual sense, just as it is in Britain and has been for a long time. It strikes me that it's a campaign promise, though. And I mean, I think back also to the way it has been done. So I think I did get maybe 700 bucks or so when Obama was rescuing the banks and all the rest of it. and they were also trying to get things going in the economy. And there was, I can't remember whether it came on money off your taxes.

10:56I think you actually got a check. So I don't think it's a unique thing in relatively recent US history, but the promise of it, kind of if you vote for us, you'll get this. Obviously, it's unusual, as you say, but I wouldn't have thought it's illegal just because it's a campaign promise. And in a sense, because it's as vague as you've just pointed out it is. And also the chances, I think, of Republicans winning both the House of Representatives and the Senate seem remarkably slim at the moment. And unless this$5 ,000 promise is going to turn around their electoral fortunes, I think there's not too much difficulty that the Treasury are likely to have to try and find this money at any point anyway.

11:37It's just possibly a sign of desperation from Donald Trump because he's doing two things at the moment. He is insisting that he's the face of the midterm campaign. And he even went as far as to tell people, pretend I'm on the ballot, behave as though I'm running for re-election myself and come out and vote as though there was a Trump candidate. So he's tying himself very, very closely to these results at a time when he knows it's going to be quite difficult for Republicans to succeed. So, yeah, maybe now is the time for making extravagant promises because it would be difficult for him to govern, as you've explained already, Justin, if he loses the midterms, but it will also be deeply humiliating.

12:18Yeah. And on the business of tying himself to these midterms, let's actually listen to the man himself, because there's one thing to hear you say that and you think, yeah, obviously, a Republican president is going to say, I very much want you to vote Republican. and that's what I'm trying to persuade you to do. And presidents of both stripes generally do that at the midterms, as we've said in the past, not always very successfully, but they generally do. They come out and say, look, I want you to vote for my side. But it's worth listening, actually, to his actual words because it is really striking, isn't it?

12:55So this is the part of the speech where he's going into what you've just mentioned. When I'm on the ticket, Republicans always do very well. We won the presidency three times. But I say, why is it that no matter how well you're doing, we seem not a president, Democrat or Republican, almost never wins the midterms. We've got to change that because we have something going that's so good. We can't let that string be broken. So I'm asking you to pretend that I'm on the ballot. I'm on the ballot. I'm on the ballot. Just one more time. So I am going to visit and you have so many of those great senators.

13:37And I said, you know, the ones I want here, we have some that are leading by 30 points and they've been there for 25 years. I said, don't come, please. Don't come. The ones we need are the ones that you've heard, the ones that are very close. They might be winning by a little or losing by a little or tied. We can win every one of those races. but I'm going to go to every one of those states for congressmen and for senators. I'm going to do that. I'll do teletown halls, and I'll be coming back to Texas because we have to elect Ken Paxson. We have to. He may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I've ever seen, but you know what he is?

14:23He's the greatest attorney general in America, and he deserves to be your next senator. And food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down. And by the way, oil will be going down as soon as we win the war with the Rand, which is taking place right now. We'll win it. We're winning it. We control the hormone strain. I think we should call the hormone strain, we should call it the Trump strain. I should get something out of it. The Trump straight. OK, lots to unpick there, Sarah. Just a kind of slight sidebar issue, but it's interesting. He talks about Ken Paxton there. So Ken Paxton, the Senate candidate in the state of Texas, where he is in a very tight rate with Tallarico, the Democrat.

15:17Ken Paxton, not the perfect candidate. If you were Ken Paxton listening to that, I suppose you'd be thinking, thanks, Mr. President. But frankly, a lot of worse things have been said about him, haven't they? And he is challenged in all sorts of ethical directions, according to all sorts of bodies that have found against him. So Ken Paxton is not a not a good candidate. I think it's reasonable to say that. And you might also say that James Tallarico has his problems as well. But in that race, Sarah, if this jamboree in Texas itself has galvanized a few people to vote who might not have bothered, you wonder if I mean, it could come down to one seat, couldn't it, in the Senate?

15:56And it might genuinely be useful then if he has properly boosted Ken Paxton with those mild words of approval. That's true. But look at the situation where we're even talking about a Senate seat in Texas being up for grabs or that Donald Trump needs to do anything to try and boost the Republican candidate. That's practically unheard of. But we've got this particular situation where Donald Trump handpicked Ken Paxton as his candidate and supported him through the primaries. and he was able to win, even though many Republicans had their doubts about whether or not he was the best candidate, because, as you say, there are fraud allegations against him, all sorts of other ethical improprieties.

16:36Trump's already had to spend$10 million on Ken Pax's campaign so far, and many, many tens of millions are to follow one thing. All to save the embarrassment of losing a Senate seat in Texas. I mean, things have come to a pretty pass for the Republican Party when this is somewhere that they're having to defend. And as you say, having this event here could very well galvanize enough Texas voters, maybe some of those low propensity voters, as we call them, people who tend not to vote in midterm years, who only come out for presidential elections, but who are Donald Trump fans. Those are the people he was very much trying to appeal to when he said, pretend I'm on the ballot and come out to vote as though it's my name that's on the ticket.

17:18Maybe he'll do enough of that in Texas and maybe in some other seats to boost some of his candidates. But it tells you a lot about the state of this election that he even has to try in Texas. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it is an extraordinary situation they're in where there is a real possibility that they lose Texas this time around. There have been all sorts of efforts, haven't there, in the past by the Democrats to do well in Texas. I remember going around, following around this guy, Beto O 'Rourke, who was the great coming thing at one stage a few cycles back. And it never really kind of happens for the Democrats.

17:49They just find it incredibly difficult. They haven't won statewide for so long. And yet this year, it does seem that they've got a real chance of doing that. And you're absolutely right. That is the situation that they're in. Having said all that, I wonder if Donald Trump, though, is right when he says it is all about me and it has always been all about me. And I am staggeringly popular and able to win elections because, yes, he's not popular at the moment. All the polls suggest he's staggeringly unpopular, actually. He's way down in kind of low to mid 30 percentage points, which would generally mean that he hasn't got a hope of winning any kind of election, whether he's on the ballot or not.

18:29But, you know, he did win in 2016, obviously. He didn't in 2020, although we've just heard that he did. Yes, but he didn't lose by much. And of course, in 2024, he did win and he won all the swing states and he won the popular vote as well. So he is capable of winning on behalf of the party that he is, in effect, taken over. And I just wonder the extent to which that actually could bring out those voters that you've just been talking about, the low propensity voters, in a way that the current polling just doesn't pick up. In other words, this is not quite such a lost cause, certainly in the House, as all of us have been sort of suggesting it might be.

19:17Very possibly. And we have some recent polls that have been pretty far off when they were looking at the primary races. So we shouldn't be guided entirely by what they tell us. And of course, this has been an opportunity for Donald Trump to appeal directly to voters about some of the issues that are seen as his weakest points. So the war on Iran, pretty universally unpopular, and particularly because of the impact it's had on oil prices, pushing them up to$100 a barrel again this week. and the resulting petrol gas price increase that there is at the pump here in America and costs across the board.

19:50He was able to make a case that he knew there would be an economic impact from starting the conflict with Iran, but he thought it was worth it. He described an almost certainly mythical, but a conversation, metaphorical conversation with his economic advisors, telling them that even though the economy was in a fantastic state, he was going to have to take an economic risk by launching this war with Iran because it was so important to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, which he claimed they were only two or three weeks away from doing if he hadn't launched the war at the end of February.

20:23Now, of course, at the time he told us it was likely to last about six weeks. It's now been over six months and voters have lost a lot of patience with that. But he very clearly made the case, and we heard him in the clip there, saying the war will end very shortly after the midterm elections. He's convinced that Iran will drag it out until then in order to try and hurt him electorally. But he thinks he can conclude it very shortly after the elections and that prices will plummet as soon as the war is over. Now, it remains to be seen whether or not that happens. It's not entirely within Donald Trump's control to decide when the war with Iran ends.

20:56But, you know, he's forcefully making that case that there was a reason to start this and not to worry. The pain is going to be over soon. And, you know, it's possible if people were watching this lengthy, it was almost two hours, speech on their television screens last night, if they weren't watching the football game instead, that, you know, they could be convinced by Donald Trump that this is worth it. The delegates I spoke to on the floor of the convention, they all told me that they were absolutely sure that there was an existential risk from Iran that was worth taking this gamble. And maybe that's something you can convince voters of between now and polling day.

21:30On the subject of him going around to these states, all the swing states, sometimes twice. Number one, OK, in Texas, we've said that that might work, actually. His presence in Texas might be a good thing for Ken Paxton. Number two, though, in quite a few of those swing states, it's not a good thing at all. And I'm thinking of Maine, which we've talked about quite a lot, where Susan Collins is the moderate Republican. I mean, moderate's a silly word, isn't it? But anyway, she's a Republican who doesn't think much of Donald Trump. Gave this interview recently where she acknowledged that J.D. Vance had come to her state and she had decided she needed to be doing something else that day.

22:13And the state of Maine is not huge. I mean, she probably could have broken her schedule to go and see him, but chose not to. So, for instance, here's my question. We don't really know the answer to this, do we? But does Donald Trump seriously go to Maine, where Susan Collins is in the fight of her life to keep that Senate seat? Does it help her by getting a few people out who wouldn't have voted otherwise? Those keen supporters you've just talked about who will be, they'll exist in the state of Maine. Or does it hinder her because lots of people have general supporters who are kind of those in the middle of the road and plenty of Democrats actually also in Maine who traditionally have voted for it?

22:48In other words, electorally, the Trump presence, it's really difficult to say, isn't it, whether it helps or hinders. And there will be some like Susan Collins who probably think it hinders and won't want to have anything to do with it. Yeah, so much that she's not here in Dallas. Susan Collins is one of the big high profile candidates who's chosen to skip this convention. Donald Trump will not be happy about that. But yeah, her in Maine, Dan Sullivan, the Republican candidate in Alaska. quite a number of people who are standing in house races have said they think it's more important to be campaigning in their own districts than it is to be coming to Texas to take part in this Trumpapalooza event.

23:25And that's pretty clear. They just don't think there is any electoral advantage in being seen alongside Donald Trump. It remains to be seen whether they will be punished for that when it comes to Donald Trump handing out electoral funds, because he has a huge tens and tens of millions of dollars that he can spend on some of these tight races. But I mean, I think it's a very clear sign that, yeah, not all Republicans are entirely on board with this event. But you probably spotted, Justin, we did get a kind of special guest appearance from a Democratic senator. Oh, who was that? A video popped up of John Fetterman, the idiosyncratic Democratic senator from Pennsylvania.

24:03And there he was introducing the Republican senator from Pennsylvania and saying he had chosen to give this video address to a Republican convention because although he was still a Democrat, he stood against any kind of socialist extremism in America. A big room of Republicans in Dallas. Yes, I'm Senator John Fetterman, Pennsylvania. Yes, I'm a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today? Because, well, I'm a common sense Democrat. I'm always going to stand with America. I'm always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life. And this feeds really neatly into what the Republicans are pushing as one of their lines for the midterm election, which is that the Democrats have now gone so far to the left that they're not even Democratic Socialists.

24:59They're communists, essentially. Donald Trump was decrying them as Marxists and Leninists who wanted to dismantle capitalism in the American way of life last night. And there you had John Fetterman, elected Democrat, saying essentially he thinks his party has gone too far as well and giving his tacit support to his Republican fellow senator. Now, he has told reporters that this doesn't mean that he's about to cross the floor. He's not going to start voting with the Republicans in the Senate. If it comes down to very tight numbers after the election, he will still be voting as a Democrat. But that will not have made him popular, as you can imagine, among his own party that he gave a VIP appearance here in Texas.

25:38Yeah. And it's a reminder, actually, isn't it, also of the power of being a senator. There are only 100 of them. You get this six years. He's not up for re-election. You are a considerable person in your own household, aren't you? And more widely in the nation. I mean, senators have a kind in a sense, their own self-importance, don't they? But rightly, because it's an extraordinary role. It's not like, I don't know, the British House of Lords or anything else. It is a unique institution, isn't it? It was designed to have this rolling, constant presence. And if you decide, hey, I am so important, I'm going to say goodbye to my party or at least only occasionally support them, as Susan Collins actually, in a sense, has decided, and it looks as if Fetterman is now, then you do have the ability to do it.