With just five days remaining in the midterm election cycle, Donald Trump headlined a campaign rally in Ohio and dangled an offer to the state’s voters: If Republican Sen. Jon Husted won, the president said, he would agree to put the U.S. Space Academy in the Buckeye State.

Trump added, however, that if voters disappointed him, he would deliver the benefit to some other state.

The president, in other words, envisioned a straightforward transaction: He was prepared to deliver a treat to Ohio, but it was conditioned on his satisfaction with a specific election that had nothing to do with the Space Force or its academy.

Husted lost by roughly 5 points. I guess that means Ohio will go without.

But the related list was much longer. Trump told a North Carolina audience he wouldn’t approve federal disaster relief funds for the state unless they elected former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley to the Senate. (Whatley lost by 20 points.) He later told a Kansas audience he was prepared to approve a yearlong waiver for selling fuel blended with 15% ethanol (the E15 policy), but if Kansans elected a Democratic senator, “I’m not doing it.” (The Rev. Adam Hamilton soon after became the first Democratic Senate candidate to win in Kansas since 1932.)

In any normal American election, candidates tell voters about the priorities they’ll advance if elected. That’s not controversial in the slightest. What Trump said was qualitatively different — and vastly worse. The incumbent Republican president effectively told voters, in state after state, that he could deliver for them, but if he wasn’t satisfied with the election results, he simply wouldn’t bother.

Will the president now betray these states for ignoring his wishes? Time will tell, but let’s also not overlook his vows to send $5,000 checks to every American adult — but only if the election results made him happy.

As a practical matter, the campaign promise was foolish from the outset, and it probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that these payments were never actually going to materialize.

But while we wait for Trump to explain why his only new idea of 2026 won’t happen, I’m stuck on a related question: If the White House was prepared to spend nearly $1.3 trillion on these $5,000 checks, can we initiate a new conversation about how best to spend those resources, now that the checks aren’t going to happen?

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post After sweeping GOP defeats, what becomes of Trump’s transactional promises? appeared first on MS NOW.

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