President Trump’s promise to pay a $5,000 dividend to Americans if Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections is being dismissed as a bribe and as unworkable, but mass payouts by the federal government have a long history.
The precedent dates back nearly a century. In 1936, Congress overrode President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s veto to disburse roughly $2 billion, or $580 per veteran, to World War I veterans. More recently, Mr. Trump and President Biden sent out rounds of stimulus checks to households during the COVID-19 pandemic, totaling several trillion dollars.
Still, Democrats and other Trump critics said the promised payments were blatant bribes for votes ahead of elections in which Republicans are in danger of losing control of the House and Senate, putting Mr. Trump’s presidency in peril.
Economists said the dividend checks would add to inflation, which was already a top concern of voters.
“If you implement this scheme, it would be a barnbuster. You are talking about going back to 9% or 10% inflation again, if not worse,” said Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow in business and economics at the Pacific Research Institute.
Mr. Trump made the dividend pledge Wednesday night in Dallas at the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention. He told the cheering crowd that he would issue a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen in the U.S. if Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate in the Nov. 3 elections. He said the dividends would be similar to those issued by a successful company to its shareholders.
The dividend is possible, he said, because of “our tremendous economic success,” but he did not specify how the payout would be funded. He said the money had to be spent only in the U.S., but that would be next to impossible to enforce.
He followed up the dividend plan with a Thursday announcement of $500 rebates to nearly 1 million Americans who faced higher premiums because of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, “user fees” that fund the federal insurance exchange.
In some ways, the president’s offer of an economic lifeline to struggling families mirrors the offers of free healthcare, daycare and other benefits from today’s Democrats — policies Republicans have denounced as socialist.
The dividend plan would be staggeringly expensive.
More than 245 million adults are U.S. citizens. Giving them $5,000 apiece would cost more than $1.2 trillion — what analysts say would be the largest single individual payout to taxpayers.
The impact on the $40 trillion U.S. debt is unknown, as there are no details on where the money would come from.
“This proposal is fiscally dangerous, economically backwards and fundamentally unserious,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. She said the plan would result in “exploding the deficit, ginning up inflation and further driving up the cost of borrowing throughout the economy.”
The White House brushed off such criticism. A White House official called the critics “doomers and naysayers” who “have consistently doubted President Trump.”
“President Trump has consistently proven his doubters wrong, drawing a clear contrast with the Democrats’ record of historic inflation, unfettered illegal immigration, skyrocketing crime and weakness on the world stage. With the continued support of the American people, President Trump will keep delivering real results,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Washington Times.
Vice President J.D. Vance said the dividend payment was not a “controversial idea.”
“What the president is talking about is a dividend for American workers,” he said on Fox News. He said the government could afford it because the U.S. was “taking on an extraordinary amount of revenue” by standing up to not only foreign companies but also to foreign countries.
Democrats accused Mr. Trump of offering a flat-out bribe to get votes for Republicans.
Others disagreed with that assessment.
The payout is not an illegal vote-buying scheme, New Mexico attorney John Day told Fortune, because the money would go to everyone regardless of how or whether they voted. Mr. Day said it was simply a campaign promise rather than an inducement.
Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics attorney for President George W. Bush, also said there was nothing unethical about the proposal as long as Congress approved the cash being doled out. He compared Mr. Trump’s promise to earlier pledges by presidential candidates to put money back into Americans’ pockets, including Mr. Bush’s 2000 tax rebate proposal and Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student debt.
“Sometimes stimulus checks are sent out to American voters. To put that into a campaign platform is legally OK,” Mr. Painter said.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan because he tried to implement it through an executive order. In a 6-3 decision, the court held that Mr. Biden needed Congress to enact it. If Mr. Trump tries to deliver his proposed payout through executive order, he may run afoul of the same statute Mr. Biden did.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, Ohio Republican, vowed on X that he was drafting a dividend bill so Congress could pass it “immediately” after the elections.
The last politician to explicitly promise an income distribution to Americans was George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, who lost in a landslide to President Nixon.
Mr. McGovern proposed giving $1,000 annually to every American, including children, which would be the equivalent of about $8,000 in today’s dollars, according to consumer price index calculations. He also pitched a minimum income of $4,000 for a family of four with no income, with progressively diminishing amounts to families with higher incomes.
“McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon because voters knew full well that if you are going to have the government print money and send everyone $1,000, inflation was going to be hitting you in 1973,” Mr. Painter said. “That’s the last candidate to promise a check in the mail because voters repudiated it as unstable.”
The cost of the dividends is also not unprecedented.
Direct individual assistance under Mr. Biden’s American Rescue Plan in 2021 — part of a broader $1.9 trillion stimulus package — topped $750 billion, including $413.6 billion in direct stimulus payments and $242.4 billion in expanded unemployment benefits, according to U.S. Treasury and congressional spending data.
The stimulus checks, or economic impact payments, provided $1,400 per eligible adult and $1,400 per qualifying dependent. A typical family of four (two adults and two dependents) could have received up to $5,600.
Mr. Trump’s dividend plan is not the first rebate check he has promised. In February 2025, he promised to use 20% of the savings from his Department of Government Efficiency to send checks to Americans. He also promised to send Americans $2,000 checks funded by tariff revenue.
Neither payout materialized, a fact Democrats hammered Thursday.
“Donald Trump is a known liar. This is the biggest liar to ever serve in government, period,” said Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “The dividend is not happening.”
In 2025, Mr. Trump ordered what he called the Warrior Dividend, a $1,776 payment to roughly 1.45 million military members. The payments were made in honor of the nation’s founding in 1776 and processed using funds provided through a housing supplement in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Previous rounds of federal cash payments have not always produced an inflation problem. The 1936 veterans’ bonus, a 1975 tax rebate issued by President Ford, a 2001 tax rebate by Mr. Bush, and the 2008 and 2009 stimulus packages by Mr. Bush and President Obama all boosted consumer demand. That put some upward pressure on prices, but they were delivered in economies with substantial unused capacity, and researchers found little evidence that they produced a significant inflation surge.
In some cases, those checks were smaller and distributed to fewer people.
However, the pandemic stimulus packages stand apart. Trillions of dollars in federal relief, including nearly $1 trillion in direct stimulus checks, flooded the economy. That collided with a short supply and an economy recovering faster than predicted, sending prices soaring.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concluded in 2023 that pandemic fiscal support contributed roughly 2.6 to 3 percentage points to the rise in inflation, though that figure covers the broader financial response rather than just the stimulus checks.
Mr. Winegarden said today’s financial strain on the deficit and the cost of the Iran war, coupled with the $1.2 trillion dividend payout, could be disastrous for the economy.
“We’re paying a trillion dollars for the Iran war. We didn’t get the tariff revenue we thought we would. Even in good times, we couldn’t afford this, but especially with what’s going on right now, it makes this especially dangerous,” he said.
• Tom Howell Jr. and Lindsey McPherson contributed to this report.
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