The Republic, Inc

A $5,000 “dividend,” a hand-raised pledge, and what gets lost when government is mistaken for a business.

Good morning! Twenty-five years ago, I needed to understand why my son was being put in harm’s way. John had joined the Marine Corps just three weeks before September 11. Watching the towers fall, he was so moved that it sparked a wave of patriotism he had never experienced before, and he chose the infantry because he wanted to fight for his country.

Eighteen months later, I watched television images of American troops crossing from Kuwait into Iraq and knew my boy was somewhere in one of those transports. To this day, I still remember the terror of that moment, the sudden understanding that this was not a movie, and those weren’t anonymous soldiers moving across my television screen. One of them was mine.

I went looking for information because I needed to know what was happening to him. The embedded American reporting wasn’t enough for a mother desperate to understand the war her son had been sent to fight, so I began reading foreign correspondents and independent journalists. That search became my blogging career and, in many ways, the reporting habits I still have today.

At first, I was trying to understand why my government believed putting my son in harm’s way was necessary.

Eventually, I found myself trying to understand something much harder: why my government seemed to believe he was expendable.

A government can call us taxpayers, voters, consumers, even “shareholders.” But sometimes it asks us for something no corporation can demand: our children.

That distinction sat with me as, twenty-five years later, I watched the GOP attempt to weaponize that day for political gain.

Thursday was the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. It was also the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11th. Both dates were invoked repeatedly from the convention stage. Neither was merely commemorated so much as deployed.

Ted Cruz’s Thursday night remarks were the clearest example. He moved in the space of a single breath from Kirk’s murder to the September 11th attacks to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty in New York, folding all three into one continuous narrative of encroaching threat.

The naming itself had become part of the message. A night earlier, Rep. Brandon Gill introduced Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed by his fuller name, “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” while Trump reached again for “Barack Hussein Obama.” The device recurred often enough across the convention to become difficult to dismiss as accident: a name as evidence, foreignness as threat.

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump told Americans that if Republicans retain both houses of Congress in November, every adult citizen will receive $5,000. He called it the “Trump Dividend” and explained the idea by comparing the United States to “a successful company” making a cash distribution to its shareholders. The following night he repeated the promise, saying the country could afford it because “our country has never done better” and was taking in “trillions, trillions of dollars.”

There is a lot packed into that analogy before we ever get to the $5,000.

The United States is not a corporation. The president is not its owner. Citizens are not shareholders. Taxes and tariffs are public revenue, not corporate earnings, and money left in the Treasury is not profit awaiting distribution at the discretion of the chief executive. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse explicitly: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

More importantly, there is no surplus from which to declare a dividend. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the federal government will run a deficit of roughly $2.1 trillion this fiscal year. About $1 trillion of federal spending goes just to net interest on the existing debt, but even after removing interest, Washington is still spending substantially more than it collects.

In other words, the United States isn’t borrowing roughly $2 trillion a year despite being profitable. It is borrowing because its obligations and operations already cost more than its revenues cover. There is no profit in that arrangement. There is a shortfall, financed with additional debt, that a trillion-dollar “dividend” would make larger still.

A corporate dividend exists because shareholders own the corporation and therefore have a claim on its distributable earnings. Real dividends are calculated. A board declares a payout against actual earnings, cash flow and the company’s obligations, and it can show the arithmetic behind the number. There is no evidence $5,000 was arrived at that way, or any way. As best anyone can tell, it is simply the number Trump said out loud. The dividend came before the math.

Citizenship is not an equity position. We do not own fractions of the United States according to how much tax we pay, how long our families have lived here, whether we served in uniform, or which box we check on Election Day.

Plus governments do things corporations would regard as spectacularly bad business.

Roads are maintained without any expectation of turning a profit, while courts measure success in justice rather than quarterly earnings. Public money funds basic research, food inspections and weather satellites; it pays soldiers, maintains cemeteries and regulates the airspace above us. When hurricanes strike, Coast Guard crews head into the storm to rescue people who will never receive an invoice large enough to cover the cost.

Sometimes it sends somebody’s son to war.

Profit is not the metric because profit is not the purpose.

That may sound like Civics 101, but over two nights in Dallas the distinction became increasingly difficult to ignore. Trump repeatedly described national affairs in the language of transactions: tariffs producing revenue, trillions “coming into” the country, enormous investment totals, fraud recoveries and finally a cash dividend conditioned on his party retaining Congress. The convention was, on the whole, remarkably light on policy architecture, what passed for a forward agenda was a handful of named-but-undetailed bills and one large, mechanism-free promise, while most of two nights’ airtime went instead to retrospective credit-claiming and naming enemies.

And at almost the same time, the convention was performing a second kind of category error.

It was treating a pluralistic electorate less like a collection of fellow citizens to be persuaded and more like a company sorting people into those loyal to the enterprise and those threatening to destroy it.

Trump told Republicans to pretend he was personally on the ballot. By Thursday night, he was leading the audience through a hand-raised pledge beginning, “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States,” before telling them Democrats were communists, extremists, lunatics and criminals.

That is where the business metaphor and the convention rhetoric begin to meet.

A corporation can have a single institutional objective. A democracy cannot. It exists precisely because millions of citizens disagree about what the country should do, who should govern it, how much government should spend, what it should regulate, what it should protect and what it should leave alone.

Political opposition is therefore not a defect in the system. It is the system.

A government that has forgotten the difference between a citizen and a shareholder is a government that has stopped understanding what it’s for. It starts to believe its own borrowing is profit. It starts to believe an unfunded promise, said with enough confidence, is the same as a kept one. And on a week built around two anniversaries that asked for nothing but honest remembrance, it reaches instead for names and enemies, because manufacturing a threat is easier than making an honest case for why voters should give you Congress again.

Twenty-five years ago, I went looking for the truth about a war because the people telling me about it weren’t giving me enough data. I am still looking. So, it seems, is everyone else.