Most Americans, across the political spectrum, agree that moneyed interests have too much influence over politics in the United States, yet the Supreme Court has made it difficult to do anything about it.
On this episode of "Toppling the Duopoly," host Shawn Griffiths and Jeff Clements, president of American Promise, discuss overcoming partisan the barriers to approving a 28th Amendment that could reduce the influence of big money.
President Trump's newest promise to the American electorate carries a familiar shape and an unfamiliar price tag. At the Republican Party's midterm convention in Dallas on September 9, he pledged that if Republicans hold the House and Senate in November, "I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000." He compared it to a company distributing cash to shareholders. Vice President JD Vance followed up on Fox News, describing it as "fundamentally a dividend for American workers" funded by tariff revenue.
The pledge is explicit, the timing is deliberate, and the arithmetic does not hold up.
Start with the cost. The Census Bureau counts roughly 245 to 270 million American adult citizens, depending on how the eligibility is drawn. At $5,000 each, the payout runs between $1.2 and $1.35 trillion — a single line item larger than the discretionary budgets of most federal agencies combined. The president says the country can "easily handle" it because of the revenue tariffs are bringing in. The numbers say otherwise. The Bipartisan Policy Center puts total 2026 tariff and excise collections at roughly $210 billion. Even if every dollar of that revenue were diverted to the dividend, it would cover less than a fifth of the bill.
This is not the first time the math has failed to convey what the rhetoric promised. A year ago, Trump pledged a "$2,000 tariff dividend" to most Americans. It never arrived. Before that came a mooted "DOGE dividend" drawn from federal spending cuts that were themselves never fully realized. Congress never authorized either payment, and neither the Treasury Department nor the White House has articulated a legal mechanism for sending checks without an appropriation. Asked directly whether it has authority to pay dividends from tariff revenue absent congressional action, Treasury has not responded.
The fiscal problem is compounded by a legal one the administration has already lost. In February, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs at all. The decision struck down the reciprocal and trafficking tariffs that made up the bulk of the administration's trade agenda and left the government facing potential refund claims running into the billions. The funding stream Vance pointed to as the source of the $5,000 dividend is, in substantial part, the same funding stream the nation's highest court has already found unlawful. Whatever revenue survives under the administration's remaining tariff authorities is smaller, less certain, and nowhere close to $1.2 trillion.
Then there is the political question that has drawn less attention than it deserves: does conditioning a $5,000 government payment on the outcome of a federal election amount to vote-buying? Federal law bars offering or accepting anything of value in exchange for a vote. But Trump's pledge is not structured as a per-vote payment to individuals in exchange for how they cast a ballot; it is framed as a policy outcome contingent on which party controls Congress, a rhetorical device candidates have used for generations when promising what they will do "if elected." Legal scholars are largely skeptical that the framing crosses the line into a prosecutable offense, however transactional it may sound. The more pressing issue is not whether the promise is illegal. It is whether it is feasible, and whether Congress should treat it as a serious proposal or campaign theater.
That is where lawmakers have, so far, been conspicuously quiet. Senator Josh Hawley introduced the American Worker Rebate Act over a year ago to authorize tariff-funded rebates; it has sat in the Finance Committee since, without a single cosponsor and without a hearing. A competing bill from Senator Martin Heinrich has fared no better. Senator Bernie Moreno has said he will draft legislation to formalize the "Trump Dividend" after the midterms — a pledge to legislate a pledge, made before the votes that would determine whether Republicans even hold the majority needed to pass it.
None of this means the idea is dead on arrival as a talking point. It is a coherent piece of midterm messaging: a concrete number, an emotionally resonant comparison to a shareholder dividend, and a deadline that rewards turnout. But a promise repeated for the third time in two years, with no legislative vehicle, no identified funding source, and a legal foundation the Supreme Court has already dismantled, is not a policy proposal. It is a conditional IOU.
Congress does not need to adjudicate whether the pledge constitutes vote-buying under federal law. That is a narrow legal question with a fairly predictable answer. The more consequent question is whether members of either party are prepared to hold hearings on how — or whether — $1.2 trillion in payments to American adults would actually be funded, given that the administration's own tariff authority has been struck down and no appropriation exists. If the answer is that no such mechanism is being seriously developed, voters deserve to know that before November, not after the payments fail to materialize a third time.
Jose Navarro is the Founder of The Navarro Report, an independent publication delivering nonpartisan, fact-based coverage — tracking government spending, fiscal mismanagement, and the policy decisions that affect everyday readers, without political bias.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on September 29, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who built his political brand in part by arguing that politics had no place in sports during the Black Lives Matter protests, recently went on ESPN College GameDay to promote his bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, a bill that eventually cleared the Senate by a 77-22 vote and is headed to the House come November.
Cruz’ appearance didn’t go as planned, with the crowd greeting him with a chorus of boos and dealing him a devastating blow in his own home state. Beneath the surface, Cruz’s sting at College GameDay reflects a new trend in MAGA’s political playbook: using sport to advance legislation that hurts the constituents it claims to protect.
Ties to the political arena are not entirely new in sports broadcasts. For example, ESPN showed former President Barack Obama’s enthusiastic greeting of fans during a 2019 match of men’s basketball rivals Duke University and University of North Carolina.
On the other end of the political spectrum, 2012 Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate Craig James was a GameDay personality before (unsuccessfully) entering the political arena.
But what is so striking about Cruz’s appearance on GameDay ahead of the University of Texas at Austin’s show-off against Ohio State earlier this fall, however, is not the appearance of a political figure such as Cruz on the sports show.
It is the fact that his appearance on one of ESPN’s most prominent college sports platforms served the sole purpose of promoting a piece of federal legislation.
The timing of Cruz’s shameless lobbying attempt on ESPN is no coincidence. With the midterms looming on the horizon, the Texas Republican party is becoming increasingly vulnerable when it comes to holding onto power.
In the Texas primaries held earlier this year, Democratic turnout outpaced that of Republicans for the first time since 2020. In February, a Democratic candidate won a special election to serve in the Texas state senate by a margin of 14 percent – a double-digit win some have described as a “wake-up call” for Republicans.
Amid declining national approval ratings, the GOP held its national midterm convention in Dallas, a spectacle appearing to be a rescue mission for the party.
With Democratic momentum growing, it is not surprising that the party once fighting to the nail to keep politics out of sports for the sake of “unity” has now discovered that, perhaps, sport is not so apolitical after all.
Research by sport scholars has, of course, shown that there is no such thing as apolitical sport and that sport. Quite to the contrary, sport is often used to advance political goals.
In one of my research studies, my co-authors and I have shown how supposedly “neutral” policies prohibiting political protests in sport draw from the myth of neutrality to suppress athletes calling attention to social issues and challenging an unjust status quo.
In the MAGA world where hypocrisy runs as deep as the roots of Longhorn football in Austin, the spectacle of big-time sports now presents a fruitful arena for Republican opportunism.
President Donald Trump has spent years cultivating that arena to push his political agenda, from his appearances at UFC events, college football games, and the FIFA World Cup this past summer to turning the historic White House lawn into the hosting site for a UFC fight card. Now other MAGA Republicans like Cruz are taking notice.
Some may argue that a media platform like ESPN’s College GameDay is the perfect place to talk about legislation affecting college athletes. At first sight, that argument seems reasonable: GameDay reaches precisely the audience that has a stake in the future of college sports.
But Cruz’s appearance was not simply an effort to inform college sports fans about a piece of legislation. It was a calculated political pitch delivered on one of the most influential stages in college sports, using the emotional pull of a cultural institution to advance his political agenda.
But there is more that lurks beneath the surface when it comes to Cruz’s appearance on the ESPN broadcast. The piece of legislation he is promoting, the Protect College Sports Act of 2026, seeks to give greater regulatory power to the NCAA and its major conference, which could in turn limit college athletes’ power in advocating for more just labor relations.
Labor advocates such as the AFL-CIO, in particular, raised alarm bells that the Trump-backed bill can potentially weaken athletes’ bargaining power.
Similarly, the Congressional Black Caucus has issued a scathing statement opposing the act, describing it as falling short of “providing Black athletes with the rights, representation, economic opportunities, and meaningful safeguards they deserve, while also failing to adequately recognize the interests of Black coaches, Black agents, HBCUs, and other professionals whose futures will be shaped by this legislation.”
Given the legislation Cruz is advocating may ultimately be hurting the constituents it seeks to protect, voters seem to look right through the senator’s playbook. The crowd’s response in Austin was, perhaps, the clearest indicator that the audience recognized the political calculation behind Cruz’s stunt.
A striking parallel between college football and politics is that there must ultimately be winners and losers. Historically, athletes from marginalized communities, and Black athletes in particular, have scored important wins when it comes to social justice reform.
Their work has shown that politics, not politicians, belong in sport.
Come November, voters must ask themselves whether they want politicians like Cruz to exploit the power of sport to advance their own political agenda – or whether the political torch should once again be placed in the hands of those who most benefit from a shift in power: the athletes themselves.
Yannick Kluch, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sport management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project and the University of Illinois system.
“A republic – if you can keep it,” was Benjamin Franklin’s reply in 1787 when asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced. For the first time since the Civil War, whether we can keep that republic is again in question. The answer will depend on the actions we take and also on the words we use, because political discourse is the soil and climate in which actions grow.
Like a lexical chick trying to hatch, the term “fascism” has cracked the surface of American political discourse but has not fully broken through. Whether it does has intellectual and moral consequences. So we must ask: What is fascism? Is it accurate to call Trumpism fascism? And if it isn’t fascism, what is it?
No one has written more trenchantly on this subject than Umberto Eco. In “Ur-Fascism” (New York Review of Books, 1995), Eco drew on his Italian childhood under Mussolini to identify fourteen features that cluster within the concept. They include (paraphrasing Eco):
Eco also borrows Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance.” Games share no single essence. Some are competitive and some are not; some involve money and some don’t. Fascist regimes likewise share no single defining trait. As Eco writes, “one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.” Resemblance, not identity, is what makes fascism a coherent rubric for a particular variety of misrule.
That leaves some unavoidable vagueness around the edges. As Orwell noted, even the major fascist states “differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.” But vagueness doesn’t strip a word of its validity or descriptive power. “Fascism” is in the lexicon because it is useful and sufficiently clear, and rigorous analysis of exactly the kind Eco performed makes it clearer.
The New York Times has editorialized persuasively on how the United States has accelerated toward autocracy in Donald Trump’s second term. Although it does not use the word “fascism”, the second Trump Administration has exhibited many of Eco’s features:
We should add kleptocracy to the list of frequent, if not universal, markers of fascism.
Additionally, we must not overlook the ways Trump departs from Eco’s model. His policies are not overtly antisemitic, even if he has not distanced himself from backers who are, and until attacking Iran he had shown little appetite for large-scale war. Courts and grand juries have often stymied his efforts to persecute opponents. Unlike Franco’s Spain, his movement is not formally tied to a church, though the Christian Right’s influence cannot be ignored. Thankfully, since the January 6th attack on the Capitol, he has not inspired violence along the lines of Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s brownshirts.
The largest difference is that Trump operates within a democratic system and erodes it, rather than replacing it. We are not living in a full-blown autocracy like the classic fascist regimes of 20th-century Europe. Trump has moved the United States toward “anocracy,“ a weakened democracy that allows fascistic policies. Our trajectory resembles Hungary, Turkey, or Poland, where authoritarians were elected and then eroded democracy without extinguishing it. The pattern also has American precedents: the Know-Nothings, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, McCarthyism. Ours is not a sudden seizure of power like Chile in 1973. It is a gradual kind of national electoral suicide.
One more dimension goes beyond Eco’s scheme: the movement is essentially non-ideological. All politics is emotive, and democracy is not designed for robots. But as Robert Paxton writes, fascism “does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings.”
Some figures in Trump’s orbit, such as Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, could be called explicit, ideological fascists. Trump himself is an implicit fascist, as are many of his followers, most of whom would not recognize themselves as fascists. Among Trump’s supporters there is a genuine sense of threat and loss, and it is not baseless. What distinguishes fascism is not emotion as such but the emotional terrain that feeds it: racism, grievance, cruelty, openness to violence, and at times contempt for reason and expertise. MAGA isn’t a moral theory of how politics should work. It is a moral vacuum.
Like all general terms, “fascism” is imprecise and open to abuse. But we don’t banish words like racism, genocide, or terrorism because they can be misused or sound inflammatory. Fascism is both descriptive and implicitly prescriptive, and that is no reason to avoid it. To shrink from using it stunts discourse and amounts to unilateral rhetorical disarmament.
The same goes for how we talk about polarization. Yes, we are more polarized. But the casual use of the word implies that both sides are equally responsible for the chasm. It hides the fact that one side has drifted far further from democratic norms. Polarization is not like the weather, falling on everyone equally.
I am not suggesting we attach the fascist label to voters, as opposed to politicians and policies. People vote for all sorts of reasons, including the better and worse angels of our nature. Nor am I urging anyone to “understand” Trump’s movement as if it held a coherent worldview waiting to be fathomed. Reading Eco relieved me of that burden.
For the political class and the commentariat, the task is different. Focusing only on safer themes like corruption, incompetence, or affordability is a failure of moral nerve. Naming fascism plainly, and holding leaders and policies to account for it, is the first step toward the reckoning that must ultimately come.
The Faces of Fascism and Challenges to Democracy was first published by Expand Democracy and is republished with permission.
Jeffrey Scheuer is the author of The Sound Bite Society, The Big Picture, and most recently, Inside the LIberal Arts. The arguments and recommendations here are the authors’ own.
After moving to Orlando alone, a young leader helped plan the city’s first Good Neighbor Week and learned why knowing your neighbors builds real citizenship.
To expand community, trust, and freedom in our democracy, the Democracy Architects Council is helping everyday Americans build a more hopeful future for democracy by 2030. The Democracy Architects Council is a partnership between Bridge Alliance and Civics Unplugged, bringing together young leaders from diverse sectors with demonstrated impact and commitment to a bold future for democracy.
In May of 2025, I moved 800 miles away from home to a city where I knew nobody. This September, my new home issued a proclamation celebrating Orlando’s first-ever Good Neighbor Week.
Like many new transplants, I missed the feeling of home. For four years, college had been a place where I almost overdosed on in-person interaction. I hung out with students on my floor, took long walks to visit friends in other dorms, and spent warm days joining picnic blankets on the lawn.
So I felt eerily alone as I moved to a new city. My old friends were far away, and it was hard to find and build new friendships around busy schedules, work demands, and burgeoning responsibilities of being a real adult.
And it’s not just me. There is higher reported loneliness among Gen Z and Millennials, with busyness and living far away from friends being the biggest barriers to connecting.
Jimmy Carter proclaimed Good Neighbor Day (September 28th) a holiday in 1978. The point is simple: get to know and celebrate the people around us because good neighborhoods make communities safer and healthier. Becky Mattson, who created the holiday, observed that while technology let us connect with people around the world, we seemed less likely to connect with our next-door neighbors. Robert Putnam’s research in Bowling Alone supports this with a staggering decline in social interaction beginning around the introduction of TVs, a trend that has only worsened with social media. Our new media environment makes it easier to avoid the awkwardness, small talk, and inconvenience of spending time with other people.
So I was thrilled when I met Megan on a Zoom call and learned she was from Orlando. When we grabbed coffee a few days later, she started my journey of calling Orlando home by asking me to help her plan the city’s first-ever Good Neighbor Week.
At first, I hesitated. Who was I, as a new resident, to help plan a celebration for a city and its people whom I didn’t know?
But then I remembered how I wanted living in Orlando to feel. Last Thanksgiving, I visited my godparents who had just moved to Syracuse and somehow were already enmeshed in their new home. Walking through downtown, I was amazed at how many people they knew by name: the liquor store owner, the pizza store employees, and everyone in the local hot chocolate spot. My godmother moved through the city with ease. And I wanted to feel that in my new city.
So I said yes, mostly because I knew I could make up for my lack of familiarity with Orlando by running our social media and website. But also because I wanted to move through Orlando with ease, like it was home.
For months, we planned. We hosted Neighbor Meeting Zones, where we sat in the park with a dog or lemonade and talked to anyone who wanted to meet a neighbor. I took my phone and a tripod to feature third spaces around Orlando. We secured some funding to help neighborhoods host Front Yard Fridays to encourage neighbors to spend time together. And we worked with our local government to officially proclaim September 28 through October 4 as Good Neighbor Week.
Megan started every meeting with our guiding principle: “Good enough for now and safe enough to try.” We didn't wait to be official, and we didn't need high attendance. The goal was to do what we could to bring neighbors together, and that was enough. This mantra gave us an exhale. It was okay if our Good Neighbor Week wasn’t the “best” in the country, engaged millions of people, or got a profile in a national newspaper, because that wasn't the goal. We were practicing being good neighbors and helping other Orlandoans do the same.
As we planned Good Neighbor Week, being a good neighbor started to feel natural. On my runs, I waved hello to the same two older men who took their daily walks at the same time and chatted with the park groundskeeper. I got to know the barista in my building’s coffee shop, and she told me which of the new seasonal drinks had milk in them. When my friends and family visited, I knew exactly where to take them to show them how big and beautiful Orlando was outside of the theme parks. Orlando felt like home.
The city’s proclamation said, “When neighbors know one another, they participate more in their community, care more and help build a more engaged and connected city.” And it’s right. I started feeling a responsibility to Orlando that I had not felt before. I kept a closer eye on local news and watched the mayoral debates. I became the go-to source for my new friends on the city’s new initiatives and ways to get involved. I realized I had begun choosing to make Orlando home instead of passively living there.
At its core, being a good neighbor is about taking responsibility for where you live. In her book Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen evokes the image of a president moving through crowds without fear, shaking hands and kissing babies. “The more fearful we citizens are of speaking to strangers, the more we are docile children and not prospective presidents; the greater the distance between the president and us, the more we are subjects, not citizens.” Fear looks like avoidance and turning inwards. I felt it, thinking it wasn't my place to bring Orlandoans together. Good Neighbor Week isn't just an excuse to say hi to the people we share space with; it's a reminder of our responsibility to ourselves and our communities: to choose to belong and assert our power as citizens instead of giving it away.
If this story resonates with you, consider it a push to create the neighborhood you want to live in. Check out National Good Neighbor Day's resources for how to get involved locally, and if you want to support hosting events to build the future of your community, reach out here.
