What to know about Trump’s $5,000 ‘dividend’ pledge

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President Donald Trump has promised $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the November midterm elections.

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The pledge has raised questions about its legality, its cost and where the money would come from.

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– Is it legal? –

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Federal law prohibits offering payments in exchange for votes and separately restricts promises of federally funded benefits in return for political support.

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Trump’s offer would appear to skirt these prohibitions because it is more in the nature of a campaign promise and would apply to all adult Americans regardless of how they voted.

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Any such payment would in any case require congressional authorisation, as the Constitution bars the president from spending Treasury funds without an appropriation made by law.

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Trump has made similar pledges in the past which never came about, including promising Americans $2,000 checks from tariff revenues and $5,000 checks from savings made from drastic federal job cuts.

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– How much would it cost? –

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There are about 276.8 million adults aged 18 and over in the United States in 2026, and doling out $5,000 to each would come to $1.384 trillion.

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Trump said he was targeting “every American.” Restricting the payments to US citizens would reduce that figure to about $1.27 trillion.

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During the Covid pandemic, Congress approved payouts to income-eligible tax filers and their dependents only, a narrower approach that would lower the cost further.

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The three rounds of pandemic stimulus checks approved in 2020 and 2021 came to about $814 billion in total, according to federal oversight data.

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– Would the checks make inflation worse? –

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Almost certainly. This a serious problem for Trump as he faces voter anger over the cost of living.

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Direct cash handouts of this kind are sometimes described by economists as “helicopter money” — a term for no-strings-attached payouts from a central bank, meant to jolt an economy out of deflation, the opposite of the price pressures the United States faces now.

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US consumer inflation is running at 3.4 per cent, well above the central bank’s two per cent long-term target. So injecting roughly $1.27 trillion into consumer hands would stir demand in an economy where prices are already rising, partly because of the energy shock from the Iran war.

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Research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated that pandemic-era fiscal stimulus, which also included support for businesses, added about 2.6 percentage points to US inflation.

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– Could tariff money pay for Trump’s new promise? –

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Not anytime soon. The government collected a record $195 billion in customs duties in fiscal 2025, meaning a $1.4 trillion payout would consume roughly seven years of revenues from Trump’s trade policies.

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Moreover, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s signature tariffs in February, forcing the US Treasury to refund importers with interest, and net customs revenue turned negative in May through July.

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– ‘Corrupt’ and ‘Reckless’ –

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Democratic reaction to Trump’s proposal was withering.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, condemned the pledge as coming from “the most corrupt man ever to occupy the Oval Office.”

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“After making you sicker and poorer with his war, Donald Trump now wants to buy your vote with $5,000 in taxpayer-funded blood money,” Newsom said on X.

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Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, said Trump’s pledge was just the latest move in a “fantastically reckless and dysfunctional presidency.”

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“So after adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, driving it over an unprecedented $40 trillion, Trump now offers everyone a $5,000 political bribe (“the Trump Dividend”) if we elect Republicans to run Congress,” Raskin said.

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AFP

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