“Vote Republican. I’ll give you $5,000.”

That’s Donald Trump’s mid-term pitch, and in addition to underscoring how desperate The White House thinks the situation might be, the promise of cash handouts is quintessentially populist.

I won’t pretend to have read a large sample of mainstream media articles covering Trump’s characteristically brazen attempt to buy votes (remember: it’s not illegal if you do it in plain sight), but my guess is that the populist angle didn’t get a lot of play.

To the extent that’s true, it’s understandable: Trump’s far-fetched quid pro quo raises a lot of obvious questions, some of them urgent in the macro-market context. Leading with political theory thus isn’t the most natural editorial choice.

But it’s important to acknowledge that populists have an observable propensity for diverting public resources to clientelistic initiatives.

That isn’t unique or exclusive to populists, of course. But populist governments, and particularly those which double as personality cults, do exhibit a natural affinity for what, in the political science context, is formalized as “discretionary distribution.”

There’s a simple explanation for that affinity, and for why populist clientelism tends toward literal cash-for-vote schemes, the crudest of all quid pro quos. In simple terms: Handing out money transforms a leader’s purported bond with “the people” into something highly tangible.

What differentiates populist clientelism is the emphasis on creating a direct, undeniable link between the leader (or the party) and the distributions (in this case cash handouts), such that there can be no doubt about who “the people” should thank.

Apropos, Trump’s calling the proposed payouts, which he floated on Wednesday evening during a speech in Dallas, a “Trump dividend.” You can be sure he’d insist on signing the checks himself (the same way he demanded his name be printed on stimulus checks during the pandemic), and with any luck, at least some of the people who cashed their “Trump dividend” checks would receive physical banknotes bearing his signature (Trump this year became the first sitting president to have his John Hancock on paper currency).

What little mainstream media coverage of Trump’s proposed “dividend” payments I read Thursday emphasized the legislative hurdles to clearing the checks (figuratively and literally) in the event the promise of free money is enough to keep Republicans in power on the Hill.

While those hurdles are real and may indeed prove too high for Trump to clear, it’s important to note that any Republican who opposed Trump’s payouts would play right into his narrative.

Populists everywhere and always frame clientelistic transfers as a direct, me-to-you end-around that circumvents the bureaucratic processes of an “establishment” that’s “rigged” against “the people.” Do you really want to be that guy or that gal? The ingrate “RINO” who denies to “the people” their “Trump dividend”?

Consider that food for thought, and remember: A hallmark of clientelism, and particularly populist clientelism, is the squandering of a nation’s public resources on absurdist initiatives, including and especially Hail Mary handouts and subsidy schemes to secure votes when the chips are down.