United States President Donald Trump made a pledge last week to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives and Senate in the mid-term elections. It was an extraordinary gambit to reverse his party’s sagging fortunes in the November poll, and it wasn’t clear how he hoped to fund the pledge or whether it was even legal under the country’s law.
Watchers of American political-economy said it would take some $1.3trillion to fulfil the offer to an estimated 270million adult Americans. This portends worsening the country’s nearly $1.8trillion annual budget deficit and compound consumer inflation, against the backdrop of the national debt that topped $40trillion for the first time last month.
Speaking at the GOP’s mid-term convention in Dallas last Wednesday, Trump told the crowd: “If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend.” He likened the payout to a corporation’s dividends to shareholders, citing “our tremendous strength and success economically.”
Within an hour of Trump speaking, Vice President JD Vance assayed tempering the proposal by suggesting the payment would not go to wealthy persons. He also suggested it could be paid for by U.S. tariff revenues, but the amount involved dwarfs what America has received through the protectionist exertions by Trump. “We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the President of the United States is actually standing up to foreign companies, and also foreign countries that have been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” Vance said in an interview on Fox News.
“I don’t think it’s a controversial idea. It’s actually the President of the United States saying we’re all working together. We’re all on the same team, and if we continue to create wealth, that wealth is going to go back to the American people,” he added.
But the math does not add up. A body known as the Bipartisan Policy Center reported that it tracked tariff revenue since Trump began raising rates in 2025 and, as of 8th September, the US had collected about $210billion in tariff and excise tax revenue in 2026. At a rate of $21bn a month, Washington would have to collect tariffs for nearly five years to cover the $5,000 payment promised to American adults – and that is assuming every dollar of tariff revenue went to the payment, and discounting tariff payments refunded to retailers in legal challenges. These calculations put the funding of the proposed payout up in the air.
Many Americans described the proposal as bribery and vote buying. Trump had often lamented that in modern era, the president’s party almost always loses seats in Congress during the mid-terms. “We’re going to change that, there’s no reason for it,” he said. He is looking for unorthodox ways to change the trend, and the dividend proposal is one. Nigeria copied the American political model, but this Trumpian tack is surely something not to be emulated.
