By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-10-07 17:37:01 | Updated at 2026-10-07 19:16:10
2 hours ago
President Donald Trump speaks at Anduril Industries in Sparrow Point, Md., on Oct. 6, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times
President Donald Trump said on Oct. 6 that he could “very easily” send out $5,000 dividend payments if Republicans are able to keep both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the forthcoming midterm elections.
Trump made the proposal to send the payments during a Republican rally in Dallas last month. His administration has also sent out payments to people receiving Medicare and to consumers who he said were overcharged in Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges.
When asked on Tuesday by a reporter at the White House about the dividend proposal, the president said, “It'll work out very easily.”
“It’s going to work out very well, just like we got $1,776 for our military,” he said, referring to $1,776 “warrior dividend” payments that he authorized last year.
A reporter also asked the president: “How would you ensure that all that money would be spent domestically? How would you track all that?”
In response, Trump suggested that because Republicans generally support his tariffs, the payments would go out. “Democrats can’t do the dividend because they don’t do tariffs. Therefore, the country is gonna go bankrupt,” he said.
Other than earlier citing economic growth, Trump has not elaborated on how he might pay for those payments amid Democratic and some Republican criticism that they would cost too much, increasing the national deficit and causing more inflation.
Trump previously told CBS News that he believes he doesn’t need Congress to authorize the payments. However, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a September CNN interview that he assumed lawmakers would need to get involved.
Tuesday’s comments reiterate Trump’s mid-September pledge in a bid to shore up Republican House and Senate candidates with weeks to go before the midterms, which are slated for Nov. 3.
Republicans currently control the House, with 218 seats to Democrats’ 214 seats. Despite several GOP victories during recent state redistricting efforts, Democrats are widely forecast to reclaim the House.
At the same time, however, Republicans are expected to retain their majority in the Senate, where they hold 53 seats. GOP candidates have been slipping in the polls in Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas in recent days, polls have shown.
Recent surveys have suggested that the economy is among the top concerns for Americans ahead of the midterms, with Pew Research saying those issues have been the driving political force this cycle for 29 percent of Americans. The figure aligns with recent data from Gallup and other pollsters.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has moved to send out one-time $90 payments to 20 million seniors receiving Medicare. He also said last week that $500 rebate payments were sent out to nearly 1 million people across more than two dozen states who he said were overcharged under Biden administration-led healthcare exchanges.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last month said in an NBC interview that the $5,000 payments would not be derived from tax revenue or increasing the national debt, which was more than $40 trillion as of Sept. 28.
The Trump administration, Lutnick said, could “earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers.”
Joseph Lord and Nathan Worcester contributed to this report.
