Dogs bark, ducks quack, and populists offer free stuff. Enrique Pena Nieto dispensed around 10 million TV sets to low-income Mexican households. Hugo Chavez gave Venezuelans steeply discounted refrigerators, air conditioning units, and, again, TV sets. In Argentina, Evita Peron would personally hand out children’s toys, sewing machines, clothes, and kitchenware.

None of these (for once the phrase seems precisely apt) tinpot populists, though, was so flagrant as to offer a straightforward cash handout in explicit exchange for an election victory. It took President Donald Trump to go there. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate,” he told a roaring crowd in Dallas, “because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”