President Donald Trump recycled a familiar concept Wednesday in pledging to send Americans $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms. Similar payments he promised previously never materialized.
- In 2025, Trump floated a “dividend” based on spending cuts achieved by the U.S. DOGE Service, led by donor Elon Musk. The idea came from James Fishback, who calculated taxpaying households could receive $5,000 based on Musk’s stated goal of saving $2 trillion. DOGE ended up claiming to save only $110 billion; the Government Accountability Office determined that figure wasn’t sufficiently documented and counted cuts that were already in progress.
- In November, Trump promised Americans (excluding high earners) $2,000 from tariff revenue. At that time, the administration had raised about $205 billion from import taxes, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. But the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, ruling that he exceeded his authority, and the government had to refund more than $100 billion, according to an August court filing. Current tariffs cost households about $1,100 annually, according to an estimate from Yale University’s Budget Lab.
- Also last year, the Republican-controlled Congress let health care subsidies from the Affordable Care Act expire. Trump said he would support a bill that would redirect the funding to put $1,000 or $1,500 in health savings accounts, depending on a person’s age. The bill didn’t pass, and health insurance premiums rose.
Direct payments also became a controversy in late 2020. Congress passed coronavirus stimulus checks of $600, but Trump called them “a disgrace” and demanded payments of $2,000. Georgia Democrats in separate U.S. Senate runoffs, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, criticized the payments in the Republican-led package for being too low, leaving the GOP incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, stuck between defending their votes and crossing the president. Trump eventually signed the bill, and the Democrats won the races.
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