The President Donald Trump pledged at the midterm Republican convention on Wednesday (the 9th) to give every American adult US$ 5,000 if his party maintains control of Congress in November.
“This will be called the Trump Dividend,” he said in Dallas, and added a caveat — the money must be spent within the United States — although he offered few additional details.
After the president’s speech, Vice President JD Vance defended the proposal in an interview with Fox News, pointing to the administration’s tariff revenue.
But many questions remain, including how Trump would finance the payments or obtain legislative approval for them.
The proposed payments, which would cost the government more than US$ 1 trillion, could have a significant impact on the U.S. economy. And they echo other proposals from the Trump administration that did not materialize.
Here are some questions raised by Trump’s idea.
Could Trump approve the payments unilaterally?
Experts say that he would likely need Congress’s approval, which, under the Constitution, has exclusive authority over the U.S. government’s spending. That means he probably could not issue the checks via an executive order, said John Day, a former prosecutor in New Mexico who now works on cases involving government misconduct and civil rights.
Trump, in his speech, compared the payments to the $1,776 checks he gave to members of the armed forces last year, which were drawn from funds appropriated by Congress for housing improvements.
Even with Republican control of the House and Senate, Congress resisted Trump’s calls last year to send $2,000 stimulus checks to families, which would have been financed with money raised from his tariffs.
Could these payments face legal challenges?
It’s complicated. Federal laws prohibit spending to influence voting decisions, such as vote buying or election bribery. But Trump framed the checks as a benefit for all American adults, regardless of how or whether they voted, legal experts said.
Experts said it would be difficult to mount a legal challenge based on the premise that the payments constituted bribery, comparing Trump’s “dividend” to a promise to grant a tax benefit.
“A promise to cut taxes also gives voters a financial reason to support a candidate, but that, by itself, does not make the promise bribery,” Day said. “Under the proposal as announced, an eligible adult could vote for the Democrats — or not vote — and still receive the same payment if the program were implemented.”
Experts also pointed to a 1982 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Hartlage, which drew a distinction between broad promises of public policy and illegal vote-buying. The court unanimously held that a state could not void an election because a candidate had made a public promise to reduce government spending or to cut his own salary.
Has an idea like this been proposed before?
Trump has cited similar payments in the past. At the start of his second term, he promised to distribute to Americans the money that the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, planned to cut from the federal budget. Trump also mentioned tariff refunds, through which the public would receive a share of the revenue from his import tariffs.
These proposals did not materialize due to a lack of funding: Musk’s efforts did not yield substantial savings, and the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s tariffs, forcing his administration to reimburse billions of dollars to importers.
In the 2024 presidential election, Musk wooed conservative-leaning voters by distributing $1 million to people who signed a petition, payments that were later approved by a judge. He made a similar offer before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and was forced to back down after appearing to violate state bribery laws.
Democrats made similar moves. In 2021, before the Georgia Senate runoff elections, President-elect Joe Biden and the state’s two Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, promised their support for $2,000 stimulus checks for voters.
They won both seats, giving Democrats the majority, and the stimulus checks totaling that amount were paid that year.
What is the impact on the economy?
There are about 240 million adult citizens in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, which means Trump’s payments could cost around US$ 1.2 trillion. Economists said such spending would worsen the federal budget deficit of about US$ 2 trillion and the national debt, which recently surpassed US$ 40 trillion.
Read also: U.S. crosses historic $40 trillion mark in public debt
The payments would probably lead to higher inflation, though by how much is difficult to predict, said Ina Simonovska, a professor of economics at the University of California.
The payments could also lead to higher interest rates, which are already elevated and tending to rise, said Lee Ohanian, a professor of economics at UCLA. “Significantly expanding the deficit at this moment would bring considerable challenges, including the cost of future financing, how markets would react and how the dollar’s exchange rate would be affected,” Ohanian said.
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