President Trump’s surprise pledge Wednesday night to pay a $5,000 “dividend” to every American adult if and only if Republicans maintain control of both chambers of Congress in November’s elections may be a cunning bit of populist politics, an outlandish vote-buying scheme of questionable legality or a practical impossibility. It could be all three. Or maybe it’s just a sign of Trump’s utter desperation as the midterms approach and his approval ratings hover at historic lows.
Since he returned to the White House, Trump has made clear how important it is to him that Democrats don’t win control of one or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections — and with it, gain the power to challenge his agenda, launch new investigations and otherwise push back on the legacy he wants to leave. He’s essentially betting now that his best shot at avoiding that outcome, despite historically low approval ratings, is to boost turnout among his loyal MAGA base, especially the low-propensity voters who might not show up if he’s not on the ballot.
Trump offered his pledge on the first night of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. But first he asked his voters to pretend that he is on the ballot. “Just one more time,” he said, “because if we lose, you're going to lose your border, you're going to lose your tax cuts, you're going to lose your safety and security, you're going to lose your wealth. Our country is going through hell.”
In case that entreaty doesn’t work, Trump must have figured that cold, hard cash will. He framed his $5,000 offer as a sign of the riches he claims to have generated for the country through tariffs and said it was an offer only he could make.
“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic — tremendous economic success, like in, in history, we've never had anything like what's happening, but 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.”
Trump added that the only condition he would impose is that the money must be spent in the United States. “We don't want you going to Canada to spend the money. We don't want you going to China, to Germany. You got to spend the money in the United States of America.”
The cost question: The U.S. Census Bureau says that there are just over 245 million citizens aged 18 and over. Sending each of them $5,000 would cost more than $1.2 trillion — more than the government has spent over the first nine months of this fiscal year on Medicare ($955 billion) or defense ($804 billion) and nearly matching the spending on Social Security ($1.38 trillion). The cost of Trump’s proposed dividend would far exceed the total cost of all three Covid-era stimulus payments combined.
Vice President JD Vance told Fox News last night that the plan is meant to help the middle class, which might indicate that a smaller group of people would get checks. Even so, the total cost would be huge.
Where would the money come from? Vance told Fox it would come from Trump’s tariffs. The projected annual revenue from Trump’s latest tariffs falls well short of the cost.
“This ‘dividend’ would spend, on a one-time payment, almost all the revenue that the new tariffs are projected to bring in *over a decade.* There has been no paying down of the debt with tariff revenue, and there certainly won’t be if you spend it all before you even collect it,” Erica York, senior economist at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, wrote Wednesday in a post on X Wednesday night.
Would Congress approve such payments? Any Trump dividend checks likely would have to be enacted by Congress and while some Republicans have indicated they support the idea, lawmakers in both parties have already pushed back hard against it.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio quickly wrote on X that he will get a bill ready for Republicans to pass “immediately after the November 3rd election.”
That’s highly unlikely, given the makeup of Congress during the lame-duck session — and probably wouldn’t be possible in the next Congress given the bipartisan backlash that has greeted Trump’s idea.
“Trump’s presidency is so failed and broken, he is resorting to trying to bribe the American people for their votes,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X.
Democratic opposition comes as no surprise, but some Republicans also raised concerns. “Some of us think dependency is evil & soul-sucking in all its forms,” Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas wrote.
Fiscally fraught: Fiscal conservatives are already complaining about how Trump’s dividend plan would raise the deficit, which is already projected to top $2 trillion this year.
A $5,000 dividend payment “would more than double next year’s projected $780 billion primary deficit to $2 trillion and increase total projected deficits to $3.1 trillion,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said Thursday.
And the payments would also be expected to boost inflation, which has continued to run hot, adding an economic drawback to the fiscal concerns. “The policy would also likely boost interest rates, as the Federal Reserve responded to higher inflation and the markets to higher debt,” CRFB said. “The result would be significantly more debt and a higher cost of living for ordinary households.”
Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at CRFB, told the Associated Press that Trump missed an important point in comparing his promised dividend to corporate dividend payouts, noting that companies pay shareholders out of surplus profits. The U.S., meanwhile, continues to run large deficits. “The idea that we’ve had fiscal success is backwards and bordering on laughable,” Goldwein said. “We don’t have surpluses to give away.”
A history of unfulfilled promises: This isn’t the first time Trump has proposed to send Americans cash. He floated $5,000 “DOGE dividend checks” that were supposed to come from the savings generated by Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government and promised $2,000 tariff dividend checks from the money generated by his import fees. What did you do with that money? Oh, right, the money never matched Trump’s promises and those checks never went out.
Trump also promises Obamacare rebates: The White House today announced that the administration will send out $500 rebate checks to nearly 1 million Affordable Care Act enrollees across 30 states, alleging that they had been overcharged by the Biden administration. “The relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged and the rebates are going out in just a few weeks,” Trump said in a video posted to social media.
Democrats called it another election-year stunt, and Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank, criticized Trump’s announcement. “First, no one was ‘overcharged,’” he wrote on X. “Second, Trump's decision to give surplus fees to only people who don't get subsidies means he's giving money to the richest people on the exchanges *at the expense* of lowering premiums for the poor and working class next year. Bad policy choice.”
The bottom line: Trump may have succeeded in generating headlines and changing the political conversation, at least briefly, but voters shouldn’t expect the $5,000 dividend payments to materialize. “Not gonna happen,” the Tax Foundation’s York wrote on X.