5 things to know about Trump’s $5K dividend pledge

President Trump pledged Wednesday to dole out $5,000 dividends to U.S. adults only if Republicans keep their control of Congress after the fall midterm elections, the latest financial promise he has made across his two presidencies.

The president announced the proposed “Trump dividends” while speaking at the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) midterm convention in Dallas. He said his administration can disburse these dividends to the country’s roughly 270 million adults “because we’ve done so well and because our country is making so much money.”

Few other details were initially released about the payments, similar to other pledges he has made to pay Americans that were vague on specific details.

Here are five things to know about Trump’s $5,000 promise:

Dividends would cost $1.2 trillion in total, though Trump did not specify how it would be funded. The amount compares to the $1.27 trillion spent on interest on the national debt, as well as the $1.36 trillion committed to this year’s defense spending.

It is not yet clear if Congress would have to approve the dividend. Last year, Trump gave U.S. service members $1,776 checks that were drawn from funds appropriated by Congress.

Lawmakers approved and Trump signed off on two rounds of $1,200 stimulus checks for Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, using $2.2 trillion allocated by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

This latest pledge follows several others during Trump’s second term that have not materialized.

Trump has proposed , since last year, checks of up to $2,000 from revenue generated by his administration’s tariffs. He suggested that the revenue generated by the import tax on foreign goods would pay down the country’s debt and put money in the pockets of “everyone” except “high-income people.”

Those checks have not become reality since the Supreme Court struck down the bulk of the president’s sweeping tariffs earlier this year.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk proposed $5,000 dividend checks early in Trump’s second term while operating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump backed Musk’s idea, which aimed to use the estimated $2 trillion DOGE sought to cut from federal spending to make up the dividends.

The Trump administration is also promising $500 rebate checks to around 1 million Affordable Care Act enrollees in 30 states. The White House claimed that the Biden administration “accumulated a significant surplus of funds that were not used” to help Americans paying high premiums.

Trump also proposed a 10-percent middle-class tax cut in October 2018, just before that year’s midterms. He said he would push for it after the midterms, but he repeated his pledge with his eye toward GOP control of Congress after the 2020 elections.

The pledge comes as Trump faces increasing pressure over the state of the economy, which could be the deciding factor in who controls Congress next year.

Polling has regularly shown that Americans are concerned about the high cost of living and affordability, though Trump has brushed these concerns aside, previously calling affordability a hoax perpetrated by Democrats.

Rising energy costs have also been driven by the Iran war, which has been consistently unpopular for more than six months. Trump has also dismissed concerns about high gas prices, suggesting that gas prices will “ drop precipitously ” after the conflict ends, which he does not expect will happen before the midterms.

The cost of some goods is also set to rise after Canada’s 50 percent retaliatory tariffs took effect earlier this week amid Trump’s trade war with the U.S.’s northern neighbor. The escalating trade war could pose a challenge to Republican candidates in battleground states that border Canada.

Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, warned that the dividends could add to inflation, which dropped slightly in July to 3.4 percent .

“I have to pull out our old inflation model, but I think it’s likely something like this would create an extra 1.5 points of inflationary pressure (some which would be canceled with higher interest rate rates) and boost output by a quarter point or so,” Goldwein wrote Wednesday on the social platform X .

He wrote in a separate post that the dividends would also result in “a huge spike in the deficit.” Goldwein pointed to the economic impact of the COVID-19-era stimulus checks under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, which some experts have argued may have greatly contributed to soaring inflation in the years after the pandemic.

The U.S. national debt crossed $40 trillion last month.

Congress will likely need to step in to make Trump’s pledge a reality. One GOP senator has said he will introduce such legislation.

“I will get a bill ready so that we can get the Trump Dividend passed immediately after the November 3rd election … because Republicans (and America) will win!” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) wrote Wednesday night on X .

But not all Republican lawmakers favored Trump’s pledge, with Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) writing on X that “dependency is evil & soul-sucking in all its forms.”

Trump’s past pledges to give checks to Americans have not materialized without legislation to accompany them and congressional approval. Stimulus checks for individual Americans and small businesses that were distributed during the COVID-19 pandemic won the support of Congress as part of the CARES Act.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has suggested that Congress would have to sign off on Trump’s tariff checks.