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President Donald Trump on Wednesday tried to bribe Americans for their votes in the midterms, saying that if Republicans won in November, he would magically send each adult in the United States a $5,000 check.
Trump made the offer in a rambling speech that droned on for nearly two full hours at the politically idiotic midterm convention he is hosting in Dallas. He said the payments would come after the midterms, naturally, and only if Republicans held onto their House and Senate majorities.
“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000, very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders, or like last year when I gave our great members of the military [$]1,776,” Trump said.
Of course, Trump cannot simply authorize payments that would cost well over $1 trillion in total. He’d need Congress to appropriate the funds, which would balloon the already astronomical federal deficit, which he and the GOP are making worse with their tax cuts for the rich.
Republican-controlled Congress is also unlikely to agree to such an absurd idea. One unnamed GOP operative admitted to Politico that the payment pledge was merely “a desperate attempt to change the political mood.”
It’s not the first time Trump has promised Americans cash, only to not make good on his end of the deal.
Last November, Trump vowed to send Americans $2,000 tariff rebate checks. But those payments haven’t materialized—and likely never will—because the majority of Trump’s tariffs were both ruled to be illegal and haven’t brought in the revenue he promised.
And who can forget the idea floated by Trump and former co-President Elon Musk to send Americans rebate checks from the cost savings they said the so-called Department of Government Efficiency would find?
“We’re thinking about giving 20% back to the American citizens and 20% down to pay back debt,” Trump said last February. “If it were a real-estate balance sheet, the debt is tiny, but we still, we still want to pay it down.”
In an April 2025 fundraising email, Trump then said the DOGE rebate checks would be—wait for it—$5,000.
DOGE, however, was an abject failure that saved the government little and made life much worse for Americans by hacking away at key services and resources. And those DOGE dividend checks? You’ll get old and gray waiting for them to hit your bank account.
Ultimately, the fact that Trump is offering what amount to cash bribes in order to sway people’s votes shows just how bad the midterms are going for the GOP. Trump clearly thinks voters are dumb enough to believe that if they vote for Republicans, they’ll get a windfall.
But the response on social media shows that he has, once again, badly miscalculated.
Sen. Roger Marshall, the Kansas Republican facing an unexpectedly challenging reelection bid this fall, wrote in a post on X, “Comment how you will spend your $5,000 Trump Dividend when Republicans win in November.”
But he was met with angry commenters responding that they know they’ll never see a dime of that payment, and that his promise that they’ll come after the midterms is as empty as his assertion that gas prices will come down after the midterms.
“I’ll add it to my new healthcare plan in two weeks, and the DOGE check that’s still in the mail…after the war that isn’t a war in Iran ends again, the Ukraine war is over in 24 hours, Greenland, Canada, and Cuba are ours, and the rest of the world loves us more,” one user responded.
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