Trump in Ireland. (Screen capture from video posted to X.)

Everyone has been enjoying the stream of humor coming from the Oval Office since Donald Trump got back in the White House. We have bomber pilot Donald Trump dumping tons of feces on people protesting for democracy; he gave us the AI image of the Obamas as apes; he gave us fanciful stories of him rescuing 9/11 victims from the World Trade Center; and now he is promising us all $5,000 checks, if we re-elect his lackeys in November.

Incredibly, some are treating the $5K checks as a serious policy proposal, rather than a crazed scheme on a par with these other items.

The first and most obvious point is that if Trump thinks it’s a good idea to send out $5K checks, why hasn’t he done it already? He controls both houses of Congress, and with virtually no exceptions, the Republican senators and representatives will do anything he tells them to.

If Trump wanted to send us $5K checks, presumably he would have already done it. The fact that he hasn’t sent the checks yet makes it pretty obvious that this is one of those Trump lines like, he’ll bring down food prices on day one of his presidency, he’ll cut energy prices in half, gas will be under $2.00 a gallon, and he’ll end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza on the first day of his presidency. In other words, it’s fiction.

But it is also important for people to recognize how outlandish this proposal is. The current projection for the budget deficit for 2027 is close to $2 trillion. And this is before taking account of Trump’s war on Iran. He has already indicated that he wants to up military spending by more than $600 billion compared to the baseline. That would put the deficit for the year close to $2.5 trillion.

There are roughly 270 million people over age 18. That means that Trump’s election bonus would cost the country $1.35 trillion. That would take the deficit for 2027 to more than $3.8 trillion, close to 12 percent of GDP. Apart from the pandemic and World War II, we have never seen anything like that.

It is more than a bit bizarre that after being treated to Republicans insisting we can’t afford things like continuing the expanded child tax credit that President Biden put in place in 2021 — which would have cost roughly $100 billion a year — or extending Biden’s subsidies in the Affordable Care Act, at a cost of $27 billion annually. On the list of “wasteful” spending they also had PEPFAR, the program to combat AIDS in Africa that Elon Musk delighted in slashing. This was projected to cost $4.85 billion last year. The annual appropriation for public broadcasting was $535 million, before Congress nixed it.

Here’s the picture.

I know the last two items are not visible on the chart. That’s because they are incredibly small next to Trump’s election dividend checks. They are small items in the budget in any case. The idea that taxpayers would see any benefit from zeroing them out was always absurd, but apparently Republicans can benefit politically from ending a program that saves the lives of millions of people in Africa.

Anyhow, the point here is that the money involved in Trump’s election dividend check is off the charts compared to any policies Congress has been debating in recent years. There is never a point in spending any money on a bad program, but if anyone says that we couldn’t afford the expanded child tax credit or the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, but we can afford Trump’s election dividend checks, they are lying.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.