Five thousand dollars per voter is excessive, President Trump. Trust in Italian tradition: “Cchiù pilu pe’ tutti”

Someone really ought to tell Donald Trump that five thousand dollars is too much. He has promised to hand it out to every adult American if the Republicans win the mid-term elections. The announcement, which certainly caused quite a stir, has left us in that state of measured melancholy that overtakes the master when he sees his pupil tackling, with boundless resources, a problem that he himself had solved, in poverty, many years earlier. Because the art of political exchange is by no means a question of quantity, and anyone who believes otherwise merely demonstrates that they are wealthy and new to the trade. The art of gift-giving is an exact discipline, with its own rules, its own treatise-writers, its own Neapolitan school, and with only one country in the world where it has been practised to perfection. Ours, of course. The bibliography is vast and we know it by heart; it ranges from Silvio Berlusconi’s ‘denture plan’ – which was the dental route to moderation – to the ‘gra-dui-da-men-de’ chanted syllable by syllable by Giuseppe Conte in thirty-one different squares, an event that remains the pinnacle of the genre, for it promised not a sum of money nor an object but, in fact, a state of mind. After all, Italy has quite clearly built its most competitive industry on electoral handouts.

The abolition of the Ici in 2006, the IMU refund in 2013, Renzi’s 80 euros, the ‘dedicated to you’ card with 500 euros, the 1,000 euros that Meloni would now like to give to every newborn, the excise duty discount, Schlein’s minimum wage, the universal basic income, and finally the 110 per cent ‘superbonus’, which had the ingenious peculiarity of being worth more than 100 per cent – just like the votes in the Bulgarian constituencies – and which has left behind scaffolding, thermal insulation and a financial chasm that those born next year will pay for (with Meloni’s 1,000 euros). All this without taking into account, of course, the minutiae consisting of building amnesties, tax amnesties, tax shields, regularisations and debt write-offs – now as numerous as blockbuster films – early retirement pensions granted after fourteen years, six months and one day’s service, various quotas, and yet another deluge of bonuses – for culture, holidays, scooters, taps, mosquito nets, glasses, psychologists, locks and air conditioning – distributed by governments of every political hue with the absent-minded hand of someone tossing food to the carp.

The man behind it all was Achille Lauro, who one morning in 1952 sent his men out into the neighbourhoods of Naples with packets of pasta, sugar and flour, odd shoes and 1,000 lire notes cut in half, with the promise to hand over the other half once the election was over. In that gesture – which textbooks dismiss as vote-buying but which is, in fact, a formal invention comparable to the sonnet – everything was already there. There was frugality, because only half a banknote was given. There was suspense, because the rest would arrive later. Above all, there was the left-hand shoe, which remains the stroke of genius, since a man with only one shoe is not a man who has received a gift, but a man with a problem, and to solve it he will have to return to the one who caused it. In short, Donald Trump has reinvented the wheel with the enthusiasm of someone who believes they have discovered fire, whilst we’ve had that wheel on the hob for seventy years. Now, however, we must welcome the newcomer with the kindness due to latecomers, and with the generosity of advice drawn from our experience as Italians: ‘More for everyone, Mr President, and don’t give it another thought.’