Donald Trump has probably been told by his political advisers that he’s not a popular president. The Republican incumbent, however, apparently has a plan to improve his standing with voters: He’s going to try to buy the kind of support from Americans he’s failed to earn.

The list of checks he’s planning to send keeps growing. After announcing that roughly a million Americans will soon receive $500 rebate checks related to the Affordable Care Act, the president also announced $90 checks for more than 20 million seniors to help cover Medicare Part B premiums, which may or may not be entirely legal.

And then, of course, there’s the big one: Trump promised to send $5,000 checks to every American adult, but only if they vote to keep a Republican-led Congress.

All of the problems that existed when he first pitched the idea a month ago haven’t gone away. He still can’t afford the roughly $1.3 trillion price tag; the plan still doesn’t appear to be legal; he’d still need congressional approval (which will never happen); it would definitely make inflation worse; and, if the president were serious about such a plan, he doesn’t have to wait until after the midterm elections.

Indeed, the problems have actually managed to metastasize in recent weeks. Polls show the public reflexively pushing back against the gambit, which has divided Republicans at a key moment in the election cycle.

Trump doesn’t seem to care. On the contrary, he’s started to lean into this nonsense on a daily basis, pretending it’s a real plan that voters should take seriously, as if Americans were idiots. (At a Monday night rally in Nebraska, he said it’d be “easy” to cover the $1.3 trillion cost of such an endeavor.)

The mind-numbing rhetoric is obviously impossible to take seriously, but it reminded me of something House Speaker Mike Johnson said over the weekend:

When people are out on the campaign and they’re promising free things to you, you must ask what the real price is: It is your freedom. It will drive costs up; it will ruin the economy; it will make people more dependent upon government, and ultimately, that’s the communists’ ultimate goal.

In context, I’m reasonably sure the Louisiana Republican wasn’t referring to the president, who’s out on the campaign trail promising free checks to 270 million people, but the disconnect between the House speaker’s concerns about politicians “promising free things” and Trump’s ridiculous campaign promises is hard to miss.

It’s easy to forget that in the recent past, GOP presidential candidates built much of their candidacies around the idea that Democrats were making an unforgiveable mistake by offering voters “free stuff” — a list of luxuries like access to affordable medical care and a college education.

A decade later, an unpopular Republican president appears quite desperate to buy Americans’ love with offers of free money.

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