In a Trumpian world, shock value is a depreciating currency, even for the man at its center. This week, however, U.S. President Donald Trump managed to spend some anyway, pledging a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress come November.
The news expectedly drew outrage, with critics calling the stunt a “bribe” and pointing to the president’s earlier unfulfilled promises of similar dividends, but across large swaths of the developing democratic world, it landed less as a scandal than a recognition of a long-entrenched practice.
The line between a state benefit and vote-buying payouts shouldn’t be blurry, but in countries such as India, the Philippines, Kenya, Egypt and Indonesia, the practice is so widespread that voters no longer find flaw in politicians handing out cash or staples like rice, oil and sugar during election cycles, or after.
In fact, Indian politicians have graduated from cash to a full dowry — cows, goats, laptops, bicycles, blenders, wristwatches, even gold, drugs and alcohol — as if courting the electorate required a trousseau. The 2019 national election saw the country’s electoral commission seize cash and goods worth roughly $475 million distributed to buy votes; by the 2024 election, that figure had more than doubled to over $1 billion.
In Kenya, too, cash and in-kind gifts have been distributed openly at election rallies, while in Egypt, party workers have reportedly paid people roughly up to $5 outside polling sites, often topping it with a box of groceries and tickets to a Cairo amusement park. Indonesians have called this “politik uang,” or “money politics.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi coined a term of his own — “revdi culture” — using the name of the north Indian sweet as a stand-in for “freebies.” American political language has no equivalent shorthand for any of this yet.
Even as Modi has attempted to shame both voters and political parties for this indulgence, his own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hasn’t been able to resist the temptation. With a government payment system in place, India’s version of payouts lately comes disguised as public cash transfer schemes targeted particularly at women, promised on the campaign trail in the hope of winning votes, and rolled out once the party assumes power.
Reacting to the recent news from the U.S., Indians online quipped that the Trump plan was akin to the Ladli Behna (“Beloved Sister”) scheme, a monthly cash transfer of 1,000 rupees ($10) for women that helped deliver a landslide win for the BJP in a 2023 state election. Others joked that “freebies” designed in India were now getting manufactured in America. Trump, who only weeks earlier had invoked India’s voter ID requirements to argue for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, was now reaching for a different page of the same playbook.
In India, the entrenchment of this culture has produced situations so tragicomic they’ve drifted into folklore. Take the case of Hukum Singh. In 2019, as the farmer found a chunk of his savings missing, he discovered that bank officials had allotted his account number to another man with the same name. The second Hukum Singh, when asked to account for the windfall that mysteriously became his, said he believed Modi was finally keeping his election promise to recover “black money” and distribute it to the country’s citizens.
He was referring to a famous 2013 campaign speech, in which Modi mused that if all the laundered money stashed abroad were repatriated, every poor Indian could receive 1.5 million rupees — roughly $18,000 at the time — a statement that has haunted the BJP since, despite repeated attempts by party leaders to wave off the number as a figure of speech.
(While the second Hukum Singh splurged the jackpot in delight, the first Hukum Singh made several rounds to the bank without recovering his own.)
Despite the absurdity that thrives in a country as graft-prone as India, the debate over freebies keeps oscillating between charges of wastefulness and defenses of welfare. Amid widespread poverty, people simply feel they’re owed something for their vote. Meanwhile, political commentators, weighing in on the electoral math, warn that freebies alone don’t win you an election, but showing up without any is now a risk.
So if America follows the India example, and Trump offers $5,000 for the midterms, what will happen when the presidential election comes around? How much will Americans want then?