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By Christopher Roberts
Global Publishing Editor
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In 2014, the author and activist Jonathan Rauch wrote a wonderfully provocative essay under the mischievous headline “The Case for Corruption.” Rauch, a Brookings scholar who has subsequently been an emphatic critic of President Donald Trump, wasn’t suggesting that congressmen start accepting envelopes of cash. His argument, in the pages of The Atlantic, no less, was that American politics had become so terrified of corruption that it had eliminated some of the perfectly legal bribery that once made government function properly. This included pork, earmarks and patronage. As this was a very different and simpler time, it might have involved a bridge here, an irrigation project there, rather than a humming data center. Rauch borrowed an old Tammany Hall phrase for it: “Honest graft.”
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Twelve years later, Trump decided that Rauch simply wasn’t thinking big enough. “If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said recently, promising everyone a “Trump Dividend” if Republicans keep Congress. Newsweek readers, however, were appalled. “It’s a bribe to voters,” Eric Lipps wrote. Thomas Foster simply asked: “Can you really offer to buy votes?” Others called it “offensive,” “highly illegal” and “the single dumbest idea I’ve ever heard from a public policymaker.” For sheer creativity, it was hard to beat Dawn McCullough: “He’s giving me back the tariff money that I paid. That’s rich.”
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I sympathize. The proposal would be enormously, prohibitively expensive, not to mention inflationary. And dangling $5,000 before voters shortly before an election does possess a certain Tammany Hall quality. But let’s take a brief trip back in time to Georgia.
It is January 2021. Control of the Senate rests on two runoffs. President Joe Biden tells voters that electing Democrats Jon Ossoff (co-star of this week’s cover story) and Raphael Warnock will mean an end to the Capitol Hill blockage of $2,000 stimulus checks. Ossoff went further. “You send me and Reverend Warnock to the Senate and we will put money in your pocket,” he said. Democrats won both seats. Ossoff and Warnock subsequently cast decisive votes for Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, including $1,400 checks, because the administration somewhat controversially counted the previous $600 stimulus payment toward the $2,000. Ossoff’s own office celebrated that the legislation had been possible only because Georgia voters elected them.
Of course, the country was emerging from a pandemic and, at the time, Trump himself had demanded $2,000 checks too. And Biden’s proposal wasn’texplicitly branded the Joe Biden Vote Democrat and Receive Cash Bonanza. But the transaction was essentially the same: Give us control of Congress, and we’ll give you money. Democracy has always involved offering voters material benefits; they just prefer the transaction dressed respectably, as a tax credit, stimulus or new highway. Trump’s innovation wasn’t such an innovation at all. But he forgot that “honest graft” needs an honest price tag.
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