Five thousand dollars if we win, a million if you find fraud – Trump's price list for the election

In September he was still promising five thousand dollars to every adult American if the Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress, and now he has put a million-dollar reward on the table for anyone who provides information about election fraud that leads to an arrest and then a conviction. Ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, Donald Trump is trying to use promises of money to make sure Americans watch the vote with the right kind of enthusiasm: ideally seeing a Republican victory in it, but if not, at least finding something to point to.

Trump made the five-thousand-dollar offer in September at a Republican event in Dallas, tying the payout explicitly to his party keeping its majorities in the House and Senate. According to an AP report at the time, fulfilling the promise could cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval — in other words, the president was handing out from the stage money he cannot spend on his own. In campaigns, though, the conditional clause usually gets said much more quietly than the headline claim that everyone is owed five thousand dollars, as long as they vote the right way.

Now comes the million-dollar offer, which Trump announced on Truth Social on October 26, and which would apply equally to past elections and to the upcoming midterms. The promised reward is conditional on an arrest and a conviction, so a report by itself would not entitle anyone to the money. Its political effect, however, does not require waiting for the end of an investigation or a court verdict: the presidential call to hunt for election fraud, backed by a million dollars, is already part of the campaign. It is almost an invitation to a dance, especially in a political climate where Trump has for years been telling his supporters that the election system is swarming with cheaters and that some dark scheme must be behind any result unfavorable to him. In a country this size there can be real irregularities, just as there can be misunderstandings, administrative errors and malicious accusations — and the promise of a million dollars makes it easy to drum up the latter two as well. The danger is that by the time it becomes clear what actually happened, part of the public will remember only that fraud was found again, and that the president himself said so.

Meanwhile, the details of the program show the usual Trumpian level of preparation: according to the reports, the administration has not specified where to file a report, who will verify the information, under what rules payments will be made, or where the money would even come from. When the White House was asked about funding, inquirers were simply referred back to the president's announcement, as if the Truth Social post were simultaneously a budget appropriation, a grant regulation and a bank guarantee. On the same Monday, the Department of Justice announced charges against forty-eight people without U.S. citizenship in Pennsylvania, California, Florida, New York and Nevada. The cases listed include unauthorized voting, voter registration based on a false citizenship declaration, and false statements made during naturalization proceedings, with several cases linked to past elections. By the department's own account, these are charges, not convictions, and the list of individual cases does not prove a nationwide, coordinated fraud that altered election results.

Still, simply placing the announcements side by side can already be useful for the campaign: the president promises money for finding fraudsters, the department reports that it has found people charged with fraud, and voters can easily feel they are looking at proof that the whole system works as claimed. From there, all it takes is a well-timed speech to turn a handful of specific criminal cases back into a nationwide conspiracy. Trump's election offer is thus slowly turning into a full-service package: five thousand dollars if the Republicans win, a million if someone finds a fraud case that leads to a conviction — while the question of how the payments will be funded and under what rules is left for some later date. As the poet once said: The Art of the Deal...

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